You know a mod is something special when you have the following credits:

Modeler: "Assmaster" Art From: Deviant Art Voice Actor: Rott King Testing: Agent Spork

A team of legends!

I feel like this is closer to what Id had intended for Doom 3, what we got instead was still interesting and fun, but this fan made expansion pack is filled to the brim with creativity and passion. Love to see it. This does have some elements of Bioshock as well. In terms of it's narrative focus and atmosphere. The Doom 3 base game had plenty of atmosphere in its own rights, but the Phobos Mod takes it to another level.

I will say the pacing can feel a bit off, mostly due to the fact that Phobos is still an ongoing project. It's a really small team that has been working on this project since 2018, which is kind of wild to think about. I never followed this project, but had decided to finally beat Doom 3 for the spooky season and stumbled on this mod after beating Doom 3. Glad I did! Only 3 episodes so far, but it's honestly better, albeit in a small and condensed chunk, than Doom 3 and the expansion Resurrection of Evil (RoE). The combat has been reworked significantly. Making it faster paced, more similar to Doom 1 and 2 (still slower by comparison, but the tweak enough parameters to make it feel more action). The best change is with the Shotgun. It's actually good now instead of the shit blaster it was in Doom 3 base game. RoE fixed the shit shotgun issue by adding the super shotgun, which felt great and should have honestly just been the shotgun from the Doom 3 base, but I digress. Combat feels good. It's challenging.

Now to circle back to pacing: the prologue and episode 1 of Phobos has zero combat. This isn't a bad thing in my book. But that could affect the sense of pacing for people, especially since the overall package will take you 2-3 hours to complete. So having roughly a third of that be a walking simulator could definitely rub people the wrong way. Not me, but still worth mentioning. Also in a similar vein, there are very few story beats in Episode 2 and 3. It is almost entirely focused on combat, which is kind of a pity. I get this is an unfunded passion project, but I did really like what they did with the prologue and episode 1 in terms of narrative and gameplay.

Overall, for a free mod that has been a passion project since 2018 this is an easy recommend. GoG makes it easy to install as long as you own Doom 3. Give it a shot! No idea when the game will actually finish. Given the release of previous chapters, probably not for another 7 years... in the meantime, what's there is flawed, but good. The writing and voice acting are certainly inconsistent, but that's a reasonable compromise giving that this is clearly something done for the passion.