I played
Return to Castle Wolfenstein years after its release and never really understood its popularity. The Nazi occult theme is nice and certain sections do have somewhat interesting, tense combat (the undead in the crypts, the special units), but overall the game felt bland. The kind of semi-realism that games like these seemed to introduce in the early 2000s, with many hitscan enemies, less abstract level design, and fewer ‘gamey’ design elements, didn't amount to much of interest in most cases.
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault was mentioned, but that one also felt interesting mostly for the atmosphere and a few elaborately-scripted missions rather than the base gameplay. Perhaps the later levels in
Return with more powerful enemies were better. I wasn't good at shooters when I played through it so perhaps I shouldn't speak about the later parts of the game, but I recently replayed it up to the mission with the friendly tank and it just wasn't fun. This isn't that surprising either considering Gray Matter Interactive's earlier games:
Redneck Rampage or
Kingpin—they had interesting concepts but the execution was weak (the first hub in the latter was very good, though).
To my surprise, I enjoyed
Wolfenstein from 2009 in spite of its bearing some typical signs of a standard triple-A, designed-by-committee, multiplatform shooter. The combat and weapon upgrades were unexpectedly quite good, even if the setting and atmosphere lacked what
Return had.
As for
Doom 3, it's reasonably fun for what it is, but it's still a disappointment. It failed to live up to the greatness of the originals, but the switch to small-scale, close-quarters encounters in dark areas with emphasis on horror was interesting. The early parts, while you felt more isolated, defenceless, and didn't know what to expect had something of a survival horror feel to them. However, as I got used to the jump-scares and darkness and the action picked up the pace, the game didn't develop into anything interesting. There was some tension to the encounters, but larger battles didn't flow that well given the player movement and weapon mechanics.
Regarding both these games, it's interesting to note how the ‘realistic’ style of shooters (not simulations, just games going for that kind of feeling and setting) had come into the vogue well before
Half-Life 2, which usually gets blamed for steering things in that direction. To me, while
Half-Life 2 lacked in difficulty, it was one of the few shooters in that category (realistic style, heavy scripting, linearity) which were actually good (others such would be
Far Cry or
Fear). It wasn't until the next generation of consoles that things got really bad, with heavy-handed cinematic style, gameplay adjusted for console controllers, regenerating health, often meaningless weapon upgrades, very restricted interactivity and movement, quick-time events, and what-not.
No, for real though? I just bought Doom 3 off of the PlayStation Store for $9.99. Waiting for it to download now, hope it’s good.
Is it the BFG Edition? The gameplay in that version was changed pretty heavily by allowing the player to use the torch while holding other weapons and increasing the brightness in many areas. This hasn't changed the game for the better and instead ripped out what was pretty much its main feature.