You know how sometimes an acclaimed filmmaker makes a movie that doesn't quite succeed, but you can tell he was going for something special, and then a direct-to-video sequel comes out by some lesser-known B-movie filmmaker, that isn't bad, maybe even better in some aspects, but is much more standard and lacks what made the original so special? This is the case here.

On one hand they made the game much more action-oriented, which kinda works in its favor. This expansion was mostly designed by the people behind Return to Castle Wolfenstein, SiN, and mods and expansion packs for Quake II, Unreal, and Half-Life, so you can tell these guys knew what they were doing. The level design is definitely an improvement here, although there's only so much you can do when the tech forces you to keep things minimal lest you burn down players' computers. There is much more of a flow to these levels, compared to the original, where it was kinda slow-paced.

This is helped by new weapons. A double-barreled shotgun was added, which had been sorely missed in the first game. I like that they simply doubled the power without altering the spread much, which means it's still essentially a point-blank weapon, but now it's capable of taking down the toughest enemies in the game. This is compensated by the fact that it's slower. But being able to take out most enemies in a single shot creates this nice rhythm to the game, familiar from the first two Doom entries of the franchise.

Another weapon that was added is a gravity gun because Half-Life 2 had come out. It doesn't really have place in this game. Doom 3's physics engine is not as good as HL2's, so you can't really grab a lot of objects, and it's not very fun seeing them interact with the environment. You can grab enemy projectiles, which is probably why the new enemies are all projectile-based, but it kinda turns into a game of tennis. This is what makes the first and last bosses here kinda awful, because they force you to use the gravity gun. Another thing you can do is grab lost souls, but sadly they disappear after you throw them. What a missed opportunity to not let the player throw lost souls at other enemies. Anyway, bottom line is: it's a gimmick weapon. I advise you to forget it exists (except for when you're forced to use it).

The last weapon, or rather an "artifact", added here is this heart thing that stores up to three berserk bonuses and lets you use them whenever you want. And the berserk mode in this game has slow-mo, which I don't think it had in the original Doom 3. This is awesome and lets you cheese some of the more challenging areas of the game, especially as the level design gets more linear towards the end of the game. You can like run through corridors before enemies get to spawn in them.

Speaking of enemies, there's, I wanna say, three (?) new types. The one you're gonna notice the most is basically a new kind of imp. Looks different, works exactly the same. In fact you can kinda say that about all of them, which is why I'm not even certain if one of them is a new enemy.

Where this expansion kinda fails though is the atmosphere or rather lack thereof. That sense of desolation that the original game had throughout, but especially in the first third, is nearly completely non-existent here. The game begins kinda slow, and, without that powerful atmosphere of the original, it feels like a slog for about the first hour. And it's only like 3 hours long. I beat it in less than 3.5 hours.

The story is also kinda lacking, which makes the whole thing feel more like a mission pack instead of a coherent journey.

In conclusion, Doom 3: RoE is a mostly fun, but completely non-essential addition to the franchise.