Descent 3

"And then there’s the robots. Outrage threw in 30+ robots to deal with this time, and most every one of them exhibit a distinct personality that they can call their own. Some robots will outright charge you, lasers blasting, while others tend to keep their distance and fire. Sometimes a robot will realize it’s severely outgunned, and will run for backup. Other times it will run when damaged, only to get a surge of courage (when it’s behind you, of course) and attack. It is these personality traits that make blasting each and every robot a different, yet fun, experience. We haven’t seen AI this interesting since Half-Life."

"It brings to the table an impressive graphical engine with native 3D support, 3D audio support, blistering gameplay, brand new mission types, and a fully functional and mostly bug free multiplayer module. "

"The new “levels” are huge and have a logical architecture as opposed to the twistingly wild illogical maps from D1 and 2, and if you get lost the 3-d map that was so useful in is back and better than ever. I used the map a bit but maybe it is too much Quake 2 and their ilk, I just did not find that I needed it. Still it is refreshing to see a REAL map in a game, much less a fully 3-d game."

"Lovely, just lovely. Everything is well-rendered and offered in multiple video modes, with support for all the cards you can think of. My Voodoo2 caused a few crashes, but my TNT card gave me a perfect experience all the way through the game. D3 has all the lighting effects you could want, plus fire effects and some cool weaponry. One gripe you could levy is that while your fire can mark the walls, not much is destructible or interactive in the levels: shooting neon signs, for instance, causes nothing to happen at all. Fortunately, the game's hyperkinetic pace precludes your firing at everything just to see if it'll explode, so you likely won't notice this deficiency."

"Using the brand spanking new Fusion engine Descent 3 finally offers the player the ability to go outdoors. This is used in quite a few of the levels and although it's more than a gimmick, to me it seems pretty pointless. After all, the sheer claustrophobia and mind-bending difficulty of navigating your way through the tunnels was one of the greatest strengths of the first two games, and to take the action outdoors pretty much does away with what are, essentially, the two main points of the game. There's also an annoying tendency for the terrain textures to 'pop' as you're travelling along, but as if to balance this out you get weather effects. Although meteorological shenanigans are becoming pretty common these days, D3 takes thing one further. It's only a small touch, but when it's raining, for instance, if you start moving forward, the drops actually appear to stretch towards you, giving a real sense of movement."