Attempts to wow you with graphics and scary moments but with no substance to back it up.
-Pros-
The characters look realistic, the environment looks realistic, the monsters look like something from a horror movie and will absolutely wow you.
-Cons-
It's WAY too dark and it ends up hiding most to all of the good details in each level. If your monitor has darkness issues there will be times where you swear to god you can't see the nose in front of your face.
Sound: Great
-Pros-
The sound of the game is more of an enemy than the actual monsters in the game. The moans and creeks and ghosts whispering in your ear is enough to get you shaking in your shoes!
-Cons-
The same sounds that make the game good get repetitive after a while and soon you'll be using them as cues for when you know one monster or the other has shown up and you'll react accordingly. The weapons sound very underpowered which if you think of it might have been a tactic by the developers to make you feel helpless since you feel like your shooting a pea shooter at the neighborhood bully. The only weapons that sound appropriate are the Chaingun, Plasma Gun and BFG. All other weapons are muffled.
Story: Ok
-Pros-
It tells the story through in game cut scenes and worker pda's you find scattered throughout the game. The cut scense are great and when you find a character in the game and he starts talking to you it does a good job of letting you know what's going on around you. *SPOILER, skip to next section if you don't want to know the story* Anyway, the basic story is that your a Marine assigned to the UAC facility on Mars. Hell breaks loose in a teleporter "accident" soon after your arrival. You fight your way through the hell spawn in the facility following your commanding officers commands. You find out that Petruger is responsible for what happened and that your commander is actually working for the hell spawn and is probably dead and your hearing a ghost voice or something. You go to shut down the portal, but are sucked into hell by Petruger. You find an alien artifact that was made by the last beings to have to deal with them and escape from hell. You learn that Petruger sent out a distress signal and is going to bring hell to earth using the ship that Earth sends. You find Swan and his Body Guard but they fail to stop Petruger and you have to close the portal to hell in the excavation site. You fight the cyber demon and use the alien artifact to beat it and shut the portal to hell closed. A team arrives soon after from earth and they pick you up. Not exactly the most thrilling story but it's better than what was in original doom at least.
-Cons-
Nobody wants to read this amount of text in an action shooter horror game. You just finished fighting through a room of imps and possessed marines, you pick up a pda and then you have to sit there and read it in order to know what's going on and to get locker codes. That's almost like watching Friday the 13th and then the teenage girl tells Jason to hold up a minute cause her buddy is text messaging her! I've done co-op with this game and it's just as boring looking at the person reading the pda as it is for you to read it.
Controls: Good
-Pros-
Just as good as any other good shooter.
-Cons-
None really.
Gameplay: HORRIBLE!
-pros-
....you shoot stuff and light platforming elements.
-cons-
It NEVER changes. The gameplay is the same in the first level as it is in the last level. It's one big 9-10 hour grind doing the same shooting action over and over and over again. The only thing the game does to try and keep it fresh is by introducing scary moments in the way of ghosts, new monster cut scenes, instances where you have to temporarily manage machinery in order to open the path and moments of paranoia (look in the restroom window after hell is released). Getting new weapons doesn't count cause they do that in every fps. Your stuck in closely confined dark hallways and at no time do you ever drive a vehicle, go outside for extended periods of time, really talk to anyone besides the few survivors that probably die the second you leave them alone in a room, or anything of the like. You'd also think that if your in this base with a bunch of other marines you'd be able to team up with them during the coarse of the game but that never happens. If you took this game and gave it the exact same graphics from original Doom and everyone played it, they'd all know how bad this game really is instead of believing all the hype. Just because it has a lot of graphics and it's scary doesn't make it a good game people!! Go play Quake 4, that's a better game!