YMMV / Doom³

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Sergeant Kelly. Was his decision to call in a fleet from Earth simply him falling back on his military instincts? Or was he already being influenced by Hell/Betruger?
  • There's a theory that Elizabeth McNeil is actually evil and was working as Betruger's "failsafe" in case the original invasion failed, though it gets contradicted by her choosing to have the Engineer deliver the Artifact straight to Hell rathrer than simply hand it over to her.
  • Regarding the Engineer himself, there's a possibility that his repeated use of the Artifact and absorbing souls of innocent people (yes, dead people, but still) might have eventually turned him into a demon shortly after slaying Betruger; it may even tie in the "evil McNeil" theory above. And then John was a Zombie, much?
• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • The Cyberdemon is presented as an imposing demonic being that is Immune to Bullets... except that not only he is slower than usual, but the only way to defeat it is to use the Soulcube (the "I win" button) multiple times in a rather spacious arena filled with cannon fodder demons to charge the thing, not even the elites like Hell Knights or Vagarys.
  • The Sabaoth is a complete pushover if you have a Soul Cube charged prior to meeting him. Just hurl the Soul Cube at him, add five rockets, and he's done for. Without the charged Soul Cube to sap almost all of his health, however, the fight takes a lot longer and he has the chance to pull out his entire bag .
  • The final boss of the Lost Mission is the Guardian from the Hell level of original Doom 3 minus the weakness sphere and the seekers to guide it to the player location. To compensate for this, the developers made his entire body vulnerable to the player's weapons, downgrading him even further. And given that BFG Edition made the game easier, the boss himself is even more disappointing than the Cyberdemon.
  • The Berserk Hunter in Resurrection of Evil, while a solid enough boss on Veteran difficulty, becomes an absolute joke when playing on Nightmare. What's the difference? You have the Artifact upgraded to the maximum from the very start, berserk included. Using the Artifact to slow down time when he's in his vulnerable berserking phase, then giving his heart a few punches with your bare fists, is enough to kill him.
• Awesome Bosses:
  • The Guardian of Hell, capping off the Best Level Ever, so much that he appeared in the Lost Mission (albeit in a downgraded form).
  • Maledict, the commanding demonic dragon made of the evil spirit of Dr. Malcolm Betruger, in Resurrection of Evil. You start the battle by landing on a flowing platform in the bottomless space of Hell. You have the Artifact but it's only in limited use. Maledict demands that you hand the Artifact over to it, but the marine simply points his gun at it. The battle starts with Maledict randomly throwing fire and summoning the local cannon fodder at you. You just simply kill them, and then use the Artifact to slow time and fire whatever kind of guns right at Maledict's slow-flying ass. After a while, Maledict decides that it's gonna stop fooling around and starts throwing meteors at you. All you can do is avoid them and try not to fall over the platform, as well shoot the beast up. And you don't get any health-packs during the battle. That and everything else makes it one of the most adrenaline-pumping boss fights ever.
• Awesome Music: The main theme, which plays both in the main menu before starting a game and the credits.
• Awesome: Video Game Levels:
  • This game's rendition of Hell is a warped Fire and Brimstone Hell floating in an endless dark void and filled with nightmarish imagery. The art design is amazing. You're also robbed of all your equipment, including your damn flashlight, so there's no comfort from the darkness and the only light you will see is the red of infernal flames and your muzzle flashes. It's also a Nostalgia Level to the original games for those who found Doom 3's more Survival Horror stylings not so much to their liking; only the weapons that appeared in the original games can be found (no machine gun or grenades as well as the flashlight), your stamina is infinite, allowing you to sprint indefinitely to speed up combat considerably, and the level design itself is more of a straight-up blasting experience against larger hordes of enemies closer to the original games. Some have even called it the best interpretation of Hell in the entire franchise. It also culminates in one of the game's best bosses in the Guardian.
  • The Lost Mission has its own Hell level, and it is even more beautiful than the original game's version, featuring a completely unique collection of locations including perilous walkways above pits of fire, several wide-open environments with enemies come at you at all sides, a demonic Cathedral filled with traps and monsters, and concluding with a hellish gondola appearing to take you to the final level. While most of the game up until this point frequently reused settings from the base game, every environment in Hell is completely new.
• Broken Base:
  • The BFG Edition on PC. Is it a faithful revamp to the original game and expansion pack while changing up the gameplay and adding a new set of "lost levels" to make it a fresh experience? Or was it ruined and "casualized" by adding too much extra supplies and removing the tension of switching between your flashlight and a weapon? Note that this doesn't apply to console versions as they're ports and don't have the original Doom 3 as an option outside of the original Xbox version. It says a lot that at one point Steam once had both the original game as well as the BFG Edition on its store, which would later become bundled together in one package and the original Doom 3 would later make its way onto GOG.com in 2023.
  • The complete removal of the handheld flashlight in the BFG Edition. Some players liked using it as a club and felt that giving players the option would have been nice. The Doom 3: BFA Edition and CstDoom3BFG source ports did however implement such a feature where players can choose between the original flashlight and the armor-mounted one (or use both mechanics).
  • The addition of the first two Doom games in BFG Edition, once again on PC at least, is also this. Are they a nice and nostalgic addition to the game or obsolete when compared to playing on source ports? Some prefer the "purist" route taken with the ports but others lament that the lack of quality-of-life features like "free-looking" (i.e. looking up and down) ruin them. Most end up foregoing them, completely. The 2019 Bethesda.net re-release of Doom 3 later removed them entirely to cut its price down, justified as the enhanced Unity ports of the first two classic Doom games — which eclipses the previous BFG Edition ports in terms of accuracy, features, and quality-of-life improvements by a substantial margin — are available independently and would later became bundled with the Steam and GOG.com releases of those games, making the BFG Edition's inclusion of the classic Doom games redundant at best and completely pointless by comparison at worse.
  • Is the game scary? Depending on who you ask, it's either a terrifying experience dripping with dread and atmosphere, or a cheap haunted house ride that has something jump out at you every five minutes.
  • Some of the monsters have their appearances radically changed (most notably the pinky, lost soul and hell knight) for no apparent reason. Some players welcomed the Darker and Edgier change while others thought it was just fixing what wasn't broken. Perhaps as a result of the controversy the 2016 reboot opted for demon designs a lot more faithful to the originals, although the Hell Knight retains its design from this game to differentiate it from the returning Baron of Hell.
  • Whether or not Doom 3 counts as a 'true' Doom game or not, thanks to the radical departure from the fast-paced action of the original games to a slower-paced Survival Horror game. While some people felt it worked, others felt it made the game too boring and bland with the monsters not feeling threatening enough considering how easy it was to mow down hordes of them in the original games. ^note Though some fanmade content includes levels with more intense battles against the demons due to their placement and sheer quantity, alleviating the problem slightly. The presence of 3 in the title didn't help the case because some people mistook the game as the actual third Doom installment and not a Continuity Reboot, whereas in truth the number's inclusion had a different reason behind it.
• Common Knowledge:
  • No, Wraiths are not capable of teleportation. Not only does their warp start-up process take some time for them to disappear, but you can also hear the sound of their footsteps when advancing towards you. Doors also detect when someone is approaching and they open automatically to let them in, Wraiths included. Therefore, it's more that they phase themselves in a state where they are intangible and invisible for a short period of time instead of actually teleporting.
  • One can assume that Lost Souls are human heads which tear out of bodies during the transformation, but upon slowing a closer inspection at the introduction cutscene, the Lost Soul can be seen coming out of Theresa Chasar's head rather than taking full control of it. Also, if you observe Chasar's body after the fight, her head will still be attached to her body, though it will be heavily mangled.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Ammo availability in Doom 3 is carefully balanced to avert this. Ammo for all weapons (other than the BFG and to a lesser degree the rocket launcher) is plentiful enough for you to use all weapons reasonably frequently, but limited enough that you will run out if you try to solely use any one particular weapon (other than the shotgun, which has very plentiful ammo but is balanced out by its extreme short range). Played straight in the BFG Edition, which significantly increases the ammo you receive from pickups and lets you use whatever weapon you want for the duration of the game.
• Complete Monster:
  • Dr. Malcolm Betruger, upon allying with the forces of Hell, allows demons to invade Mars while deliberately keeping the portal open, resulting in the most of UAC personnel on Mars getting either slaughtered or possessed. When the Marine, having survived the initial chaos, starts clearing his way out of the complex, Betruger attempts to trick him into sending out a distress signal to Earth, hoping that demons will massacre the rescue teams and then use their ships to get to Earth, where they will proceed to either butcher or dominate the human race. After the signal is sent, he transforms Sergeant Thomas Kelly into a monster and sics him upon the Marine when the latter obtains the Soul Cube, the artifact that can seal the hell hole and stop the apocalypse. After being thwarted, Betruger resurfaces in Resurrection of Evil as a powerful demon known as Maledict and ruthlessly pursues the Engineer in order to achieve his diabolical goals.
  • In the novels Worlds on Fire & Maelstrom, by Matthew Costello, Dr. Malcolm Betruger is a high-ranking scientist in the UAC facility on Mars, who at one point discovered the teleportation device, the "Gates", as well as the Ancient Artifact, called Soul Cube, which allowed him to contact demonic alien creatures from another dimension. Promising to release them on Mars in exchange for power, Betruger started experimenting with teleportation, first with animals, which mutated them horribly or made them feral, and then with humans, leading to the first subject dying in agony, as part of his throat was cut out, while the second subject went insane. For the third attempt, Betruger succeeded in opening a portal to the demons and releasing them on Mars, leading to them killing and turning most of the population of the base and Mars City into zombies. When Dr. MacDonald tried to contact Earth, Betruger broke his legs and left him as a meal to the demons.
• Contested Sequel: Either its survival horror inspired take on the Doom mythos is interesting and refreshing, or the lack of in your face fighting the previous installments were known for makes it inferior to the others. The shift of tone in BFG Edition may have fixed this by making it more action-orientated than the original. All that said, it still was the most successful game in the series until Eternal, selling over 3.5 million copies.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • In higher difficulties, the basic Z-Sec mooks (listed farther below) turn into this as health is much more scarce and they can chunk you for surprisingly high damage when you can't afford to take many hits. Machinegun variants cause Interface Screw, pistol variants can hit you for ~25 damage with full armor while shotgun variants can potentially one-shot you.
  • The Commandos aren't to be forgotten either. Both variants are fairly difficult to deal with, and once you get back from Hell, they are the only type of former humans around — no more zombies or Z-Secs for you. Thankfully, the double-barreled shotgun in Resurrection of Evil makes short work of these bastards, and they are encountered only in one level of that expansion.
    • Tentacle Commandos immediately rush you with a large tentacle appendage and try to whip you with it. The initial attack can always be ducked, but if you're too close to them, you'll get hit anyway as they can kick you at close distance. If you can't drop them fast enough in the initial attack, prepare for a lot of pain as they'll follow up and hit you rapidly. Sometimes, they'll do a leaping attack that you basically have little to no chance of dodging except being out of arm's length, and unlike the Imps or other enemy types, they can come swinging on out of an ambush attack. And of course, late game they'll be populating corners and waiting to jump you a-swinging.
    • Chaingun Commandos are a different type of problem: they are essentially buffed versions of Z-Secs with a lot of health, a deadly chaingun which can shred through your health rather quickly and a preference for keeping distance and even crouching while firing. Any close ranged combat with them is a very risky affair. Thankfully, hand grenades can be used to flush them out, they always leave a chaingun for you to pick up, and if you're lucky, one well-placed rocket will send a Commando packing.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The Cherubs. Even the game's detractors consider them scary and unique with their insect/baby design and unsettling sounds, despite them appearing only three times in the main game.
  • The Sentry Bots, despite also being encountered rarely, got a fair share of fans due to their cute design and overall effectiveness during fights with enemies, as well as having a flashlight for the dark sections.
• Franchise Original Sin: Although they were certainly never emphasized to this extent before (the PS1 version of Doom and Doom 64 being exception with its mood lighting and ambient music), horror scenes and darkly-lit areas have been staple elements of the Doom series from the beginning, despite the classic games' run-and-gun, high-energy reputation that many felt 3 to be too big of a departure from. Though not so scary nowadays thanks to the dated graphics, the earlier games absolutely reveled in Jump Scare moments with monsters popping up from behind opened doors or teleporting in out of nowhere, and a number of levels in the original game, such as E1M6 "Central Processing", featured sequences where the player must navigate in extremely low-visibility areas with no way to easily see the monsters attacking you, precisely like 3.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Soul Cube is pretty damn broken. It homes in on the enemy with the most HP and heals you as it slices, dices and makes julienne demon slaw. On the Nightmare difficulty, you get to have it from the very start and have to use it as the most reliable way to heal yourself - essentially taking a monster out of equation each time regardless of how tough it is.
  • The Artifact from Resurrection of Evil. You start the game with it and, although it doesn't do anything until after you beat the first boss, once you do it immediately becomes a game-breaker. Then after you beat the second and third bosses it turns From Bad to Worse. By the time you can slow time to a crawl, run through a storm of fireballs without receiving a scratch and splatter enemies across the landscape with your FISTS, the hordes of Hell becomes less intimidating by a substantial margin and your ordinary firearms take a backseat for the duration of the Artifact. Have we mentioned that on Nightmare difficulty, you get to wield all three powers right from the start, without the need to beat the Helltime Hunters in question?
  • If you're not using the game-breaking powers above and you're playing Resurrection of Evil or the BFG Edition-exclusive Lost Mission, you're probably going to cherish your double-barreled shotgun. While the reload can be troubling, it lacks the danger of the rocket launcher and yet packs about as much power in its point-blank range — and is stronger than its classic counterpart. The result is that this thing can one-shot Revenants outright, and two-shot Hell Knights with enough pellets to their skull. Best of all, you can use it in-tandem with the Artifact in RoE, resulting in the slow motion covering for the reloads as you obliterate everything in your path with a multitude of hot lead.
  • From the same expansions we have the Grabber, which can grab various things and send them right at the enemies. The damage from these props alone is so low such tactic only useful against zombies and Z-Secs, but it's all more than redeemed with the ability to catch monster projectiles and kill them that way. Plus, you can outright kill lesser enemies by simply using the gun on them and letting them go, it consumes no ammo, it's found in the very first level and has a lot of use during speedruns.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Z-Sec are more annoying than the demonic enemies, as they fire more rapidly, have hitscan weaponry and are harder to dodge because of that. Plus, most demonic projectiles can be disrupted by shooting them, which doesn't apply to Z-Sec. Thankfully most of them are fairly weak and they "only" come in pistol, shotgun, machine gun and rare riot shield + pistol variations; plasma gun or rocket wielders would be worse.
  • The Forgotten Ones are simply annoying, but the ones summoned during the boss fight against the Maledict in Resurrection of Evil are even worse. As soon as your Artifact's invincibility lets up, they're ready to chomp you, often doing more collective damage than the Maledict itself, and there is no way to replenish your health during that fight. In the BFG Edition, the Maledict doesn't summon them.
• Hilarious in Hindsight
  • One of the chief complaints about Doom 3 was the inability to use your flashlight at the same time as a weapon, which resulted in one of the first mods being a Duct Tape mod attaching it to your guns. Only a few years later, Quake 4 would come out using an upgraded version of the same engine and lighting system, and two of the weapons innately have flashlight functions attached, turning the idea of a fan mod into a genuine gameplay innovation. BFG Edition would later come out for Doom 3, and also "fix" the flashlight by essentially mimicking Half-Life's flashlight system, a series whose second installment was technically a direct competitor back in the game's heyday.
  • In early 2021, a team of dedicated fans were able to convert the game into a fully playable VR version, playable on the Oculus Quest via sideloading^note  The team had also previously done VR conversions of the original Doom, Quake, and Half-Life.. Less than two months later, it was revealed to be getting an official VR version for PlayStation VR.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!:
  • One complaint about the BFG Edition was that they added extra health, armor and supplies throughout the campaigns while bumping up how much ammo pick-ups distributes. The result is that a player doesn't even have to rely on the locker and supply caches throughout the games since you get so much from things lying around already. One can make the argument that this was done to keep the pacing of the game to a more action-oriented stint, but with no option to disable these extra supplies, it meant that the BFG Edition may be easier for newcomers but too easy for experienced FPS players or Doom 3 veterans.
  • The difficulty options are typically considered underwhelming, as not only are there only four (as opposed to the usual five), there is also much less of a difference between them compared to other Doom games: where the originals' "Ultra-Violence" alters item placement, reduces the number of health and ammo pickups, and adds additional enemies as well as replacing some weaker monsters with stronger ones, Doom 3's "Veteran" merely increases the amount of damage the protagonist takes from hits, meaning a skilled player could end up having a completely identical experience to "Marine".
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Many detractors accuse the BFG Edition's The Lost Mission campaign as just a tacked on copy-paste of various sections of the base game to pass it off as a new expansion. Not many of them are aware, however, there's a reason why this campaign is called The "Lost" Mission: its levels consist of areas that where initially planned for the original game at one point but were eventually scrapped and redesigned, then brought back for the expansion. The presence of weapons and enemies from Resurrection of Evil is a bit harder to explain, though.
• Magnificent Bastard: Councilor Elliot Swann is one the highest ranking members of the Union Aerospace Corporation who came to Mars to investigate and deal with the recent troubles caused by Dr. Malcolm Betruger. Alongside his bodyguard Jack Campbell, Swann instantly deduces Betruger is the mastermind behind the demonic invasion and seeks to prevent the forces of Hell from reaching Earth no matter the cost. Swann has Campbell destroy all outside communication preventing the UAC Fleet from arriving and being ambushed by the demons, all the while condemning any survivors to certain death. When the Marine comes to manually send out a signal, Swann reveals his motives to turn the Marine to his side and orders him to destroy the man made portal in Delta Labs. Ultimately mortally wounded, Swann has the Marine take up his mission to destroy the main portal to Hell and succeed in driving back the demonic threat.
• Memetic Loser: The Shotgun in Doom 3 has certainly become one of the most ridiculed weapons in the game and perhaps the franchise as whole, to the point that praising it will be likely met with scorn from other players. It gained a lot of infamy for its horrible damage RNG and ridiculous spread which makes it ridiculously effective within spitting distance — if every pellet hits, it deals as much damage as a rocket — but staggeringly ineffective at more than a couple inches beyond that. ^note While it wasn't as noticeable in the original version where the game's lack of lighting meant that the player would often find themselves tangling with demons in close quarters, the BFG Edition's brightened map ambience and the inclusion of a shoulder-mounted flashlight meant that players could finally engage targets at greater distances with less hassle; unfortunately, this change also brought the shotgun's greatest weakness — an incredibly wide pellet spread of 22 degrees across — to the forefront.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "THERE IS NO DUCT TAPE ON MARS", which refers to the inability to use the flashlight and weapons at the same time in the original release.
  • Jokes about the general darkness and poor lighting in this game resulted in a running joke about extremely dark screenshots, pictures of the insides of lens caps, and other such low-lighting images being mockingly identified as being from Doom 3. Similarly, the game was also called a "flashlight simulator".
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • When the Soul Cube is charged: "Use us!"
  • The sound that plays when you pick up a med kit.
  • The Plasma Gun's reloading sound has been favorably received by many players.
• Narm:
  • The creepy whisper when monsters teleport in sounds a lot like "Mustachias" which is completely ridiculous.
  • Depending what version the game is, it is possible for corpses to be Stripped to the Bone by getting smacked with a melee attack. This is most likely to happen with the flashlight, creating the potentially amusing scene of a flashlight vaporizing flesh with a light tap.
  • One of the bathrooms has a Jump Scare when you look into the mirror. All it does is zoom into your character's expressionless face with a red filter over it, making it much more absurd than scary.
• Older Than They Think: The idea of a Bravo Team survivor being the main protagonist in The Lost Mission is not entirely new and has already been used in an iOS Rail Shooter named Doom Resurrection which shares Doom 3 setting and even some of the plot as well (a marine helps a surviving scientist to accomplish an impressive goal).
• Polished Port:
  • The original Xbox port of the game pushed the hardware to its limits, which requires the levels to be broken up into smaller maps. Nevertheless, it managed to include an exclusive co-op mode as well as copies of the first two games as a bonus.
  • Although based on the BFG Edition, the 2019 ports of Doom 3 by Panic Button for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch are comparable to playing the game on a very high-end PC with the highest graphical settings, all while offering a consistent 60 FPS experience at 1080p on base PlayStation 4 and Xbox One systems and 4K on the PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One/Series X with 4K downsampling support for 1080p displays without needing to enable the console's own downsampling. The Switch version, however, does exhibit some performance issues, although it can be somewhat mitigated by disabling the flashlight shadows and lowering the FOV. These ports also have improved the game's loading times and restored the environmental lighting to be comparable to the original Doom 3 over the brighter environments of BFG Edition from the previous console generation. The 2019 version of Doom 3 is also available on PC through Bethesda.net (up until its closure), Epic Games Store, and Microsoft Store app for Windows 10/11 that made a few minor improvements, however, it also stripped out the multiplayer features (similarly to the GOG.com release of BFG Edition) and is missing the developer console entirely.
• Popularity Polynomial: While the game received universal critical acclaim and was far from horrible, quite a few players were let down, and over time it garnered a reputation for being overhyped and a disappointment. However, the game has been looked back on more fondly by more players over time, aided by the release of the BFG Edition, which addressed some players' problems by removing the controversial flashlight mechanic (in favor for an armor-mounted one that can be used with any weapon) and giving more ammo, making for more of an action-oriented (but still ominous and scary) feel more reminiscent of the classic games. The fact that the BFG Edition itself came with a few unwelcome changes made a lot of fans appreciate the original game more. Furthermore the success of the 2016 game and Eternal reassured fans that 3 would not mark a permanent change in direction for the series (aside from a few Easter eggs and inspiration for its Hell Knight redesign, the game has been excluded out of continuity altogether), making people more open to appreciating the game on its own terms as a standalone product with its own unique features and gameplay.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The light-to-weapon swap mechanic. Combined with how dark the games are, it's one reason why the game garnered so much flak early on. It was so hated, the "Duct Tape" mod was the first mod made precisely because of the aggravation it caused. The BFG Edition did away with it entirely by putting the light on the player's armor as well as increasing the game's general brightness of light sources.
  • Player armor only reduces about 30% of all damage and doesn't even have multiple tiers of it like the classic games, but Doom 3 more than other id titles makes it incredibly apparent that armor is almost a joke; the damage other enemies deal will tear through your health far, far faster than you are likely to run out of armor, which on the higher difficulties means that the Demonic Spiders like Z-Sec troops will mince your health in seconds while your armor's disproportionately high. Any damage reduction is good, but it isn't quite good enough. Bizarrely, armor fares much better in multiplayer where it absorbs 60% of the damage instead of meager 30%.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • The shotgun is not very popular to say the least, especially compared to its counterpart from the classic games. Short-Range Shotgun almost taken to the extreme, its ludicrous 22° spread means that it can't reliably one-shot so much as a lowly zombie or imp unless you're poking them in the chest with the barrel, and even then some of the buckshot might still miss and leave you open to a melee attack from the unfazed demon standing an inch away from you. It's hard to list a weapon mod pack that doesn't alter the spread angle to something more reasonable. Even more bizarre, the shotguns which are used by the enemy Z-Secs do have much better spread angle, but even if you pick one up off a dead Z-Sec, it'll suddenly have that ridiculous 22° cone of buckshot. Despite all this, the Marine's shown carrying the shotgun in almost every cutscene of the game after he finds it — his decision to make such a horrible gun his "go-to" weapon is baffling to say the least.
  • The explosive weapons, the hand grenade in particular, are almost never used, as 90% of combat takes place in tightly-packed areas and you'll end up blowing yourself up most of the time. At best, grenades are Difficult, but Awesome if you can space yourself and anticipate enemy spawns, as they're usually one-hit kills, but in tight quarters you're better off using any other weapon.
  • The flashlight has a number of problems: as a weapon, it's slow to swing, has even worse range than the fists and only emits a dull and unsatisfying "thump" on impact. As a light source, its beam is horrendously off-center down and to the right of the crosshair, so you're forced to face in a lopsided direction to look at things you want to see in the light. And thanks to the lighting design, you're forced to switch to and from it constantly.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: The game's intro sequence begins with a cutscene explaining the UAC's backstory, followed by an action-free opening segment where the Marine wanders through Mars City interacting with NPCs. It's a good 20 minutes before the invasion from Hell actually begins and the first bits of combat appear, and it takes even longer than that for more difficult enemies and larger groups of them to begin showing up. It's not unusually long by most games' standards, but if a player is coming in directly from the earlier Doom games, which didn't even have opening cutscenes and began with action from the moment you pressed Start, it's a jarring shift.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • Mirrors sort of work. They show the player's third-person model, whose actions aren't entirely synchronized with the first-person perspective. The reloading animations, for example, are noticeably different.
  • The "armor-mounted flashlight's" model in BFG Edition is literally the handheld flashlight model tacked on to the player's character model. You can even see the back of the flashlight sticking out of the player's back if you look in a mirror.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The main theme sounds quite a bit like "Lateralus" by tool.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: There are some changes made in BFG Edition that irritated the hell out of some fans of the original Doom 3.
  • One of the changes of BFG Edition many criticized was the complete removal of the flashlight in favor of an armor-mounted one along with increased ammo and brighter environments, making the game less scary and too easy. Several setpiece sequences in the game were clearly designed with the flashlight in mind and lose much of their effect with the armor-mounted light. The BFA Edition and CstDoom3BFG source ports includes an option to restore the game's original flashlight behavior to the original Doom 3's mechanics, but requires starting a new game for the changes to take effect, while the latter port has the option to restore the original ammo count natively (the former can use a third-party mod however).
  • In the original Resurrection of Evil's fifth Erebus level, players needed to wear a special hazmat helmet to navigate through a waste-filled sewer tunnel and pick up energy tanks for the helmet to provide oxygen through the wastes. BFG Edition, however, removes this mechanic entirely and detractors were quick to harp on this change. BFG Edition also replaced all of the mini-games that were originally in Resurrection of Evil with the Super Turbo Turkey Puncher 3 mini-game from Doom 3 for no apparent reason. CstDoom3BFG does at least give players the option to restore the original mechanics from the fifth Erebus level among some other missing and cut features.
  • The Nightmare difficulty in the included classic Doom games is broken and no longer makes enemies fast like before, which led many to decry that the developers were "dumbing down the game for casuals". Some also complain about the censorship of the classic Doom games that carried over from the Xbox 360 version for removing the Wolfenstein 3-D references in Doom II and the red medical crosses on stimpacks and medikits due to the International Red Cross Committee banning the use of red crosses in video games.
  • The lack of modding support was one of the biggest things that got BFG Edition a lot of flak when it initially released on PC. Removing the original Doom 3 and its expansion from Steam in favor of the former did not help. After many complaints, the originals were brought back on Steam, and eventually a source port called RBDoom3BFG was released that has allowed limited mod compatibility.
  • The ability to skip cutscenes was stripped out for no apparent reason, meaning players who are looking to replay the game on a higher difficulty or attempt speedrunning the game are forced to sit through minutes of unskippable dialogue (especially in the opening levels of the game) that pads out the game's length compared to the original Doom 3, which can be especially frustrating if a player dies after sitting through a series of cutscenes already and forgot to save afterwards. The BFA Edition and CstDoom3BFG source ports thankfully restores the ability to skip them like in the original.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: In Resurrection of Evil, the invasion starts because of the main protagonist's morbid curiosity rather than Betruger or any other demon forcing its way through the hellgate. This, in accordance with the Engineer's more unscrupulous personality, would make him being accused at starting the invasion an interesting plot point, with addition of human enemies and a possible third side to the conflict. Unfortunately, the Engineer being the accidental culprit of the outbreak is forgotten immediately afterwards, with neither him nor Elizabeth McNeil (who was in charge of the expedition in the first place and who serves as Mission Control) getting called out by other survivors, nor do they mind the former carrying the strangely-looking Artifact in his hands.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • The Berserk powerup from the classic games returns, now massively buffed (granting you invulnerability and super-speed in addition to the increased punching power, the only downside being it now has a time limit) and with a cool horror makeover, where the screen fills with eerie red mist as a terrifying scream rings in your ears while it's active. It appears exactly twice, once in Communication Transfer and once in Hell, and only in the latter case does it really make for much of a powerup, as the former locks you into one small room when you grab it, with nothing but zombies to kill until it wears off. The developers took notice of the issue and greatly mitigated it in Resurrection of Evil where you get a permanent Berserk upgrade to the Artifact halfway through the game, allowing you to use it anytime you wish as long as you have souls to charge the thing beforehand.
  • The Grabber from Resurrection of Evil is essential only for the first couple of levels, before the focus shifts back on firearms and doubles down on the Artifact usage mechanic. It does not fare much better in The Lost Mission, either.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The character models have not aged very well. Special mention must be made of the hands: only the thumb and forefinger are distinct appendages, the other fingers are just one mass with finger "textures". This makes it look like all the characters are wearing some very strangely designed mittens.
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • The graphics, especially the lighting and shadow effects, were groundbreaking in 2004. And while the character models and some textures are showing their age, the game⁺especially its lighting rendering and sound engines is still nothing to sneeze at all these years later.
  • One of the effects that has aged especially well is how computer screens are rendered in crisp detail. The first cutscene is a perfect demonstration: the sequence of the inbound transport ship is displayed on an actual monitor that the camera is zoomed into.

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