Considering how late i played this, and then checking the date, 18 years ago, i guess i shouldn't forget to frame it as-of engines & capacities at the time,
that said though, i have to wonder how it was planned, or soon into it, whether or not the directors/producers could've put their foot down on a few things which's inconsistencies with the original series in the 90s, were maybe a little TOO creative - such as the spider-demons' telekinetic spiky-seaweed-bulb things - massive mistake.
The atmosphere's mostly good, although some of the hell-flesh emerging into our dimension, is a bit simply done / more enclosing than it needed to be - one feature of the original games, which reminded you as you played, was the sky/background scrolling-vista - although the base engine has one too... you barely ever SEE it, compared to the insides of the mine - a better idea might've been something like a central-tower having to be returned to a few times, and perhaps a close-mountain, to have towering high-enough up that you could see it behind the surface-level over your head when looking out a window.
As well as the atmosphere, i loved the way the old textures were given a 2nd... errr ... 4th? 5th? 10th? Lease of life, and MIXED-with-new textures, although some of the wall ones had too-clean an edge, which compared to most ended-up looking especially prismatic - when you're trying to use grime / lots of shadow in the 3D dynamic lighting, it's best to have dark-corners in just-about everything, so you make the most of 3D shadows/lighting ability to add as little as possible in the corners, which when combining with textures on flat prism walls, means you barely-notice the lines if-at-all.
The adoption of many the textures from the original games, was actually quite encouraging, but when it came to things like monster-changes that heavily-imbalanced the game, i couldn't really find myself FEELing like i was playing a similar game - i felt like i was playing more of a quake-labyrinth with-excuses - meaning ;
1 Instead of some levels with a decent amount of SPACE, in which to run around a bit more, and to have to avoid damage more, and kill a lot in one go,
2 We were constantly in front of locked doors that just-shut behind us, constantly being ready to react to the remote/tracking summonings, when you need INconsistency so you start to relax, and then bam! You've relaxed and it happens again,
3 because of the lack of space able to both allow players a chance to dodge & kill a lot in one go, some weapon types were much better at defending-with against the remote summonings, while others were hopeless, and this meant that opportunity was missed, to make more of a variety of uses-of-ammo - if different players preferred different weapons in open spaces compared to tight spaces, they didn't really get much of a chance to use them. This meant little flexibility to suit the individual player's skills / preferred-play, and also meant that you didn't need to plan with your ammo either - one difficulty of the original series, that made them both a challenge and a lesson-to-be-learnt (rather than feared going to make brats unhappy re marketing-fears) , was that if you went too far into a chapter after-having collected the wrong types of ammo for the rest of the levels & boss at the end, you would face a much more serious challenge than you didn't in this one, with the soul-cube more than compensating - after getting it, i found all the rest of the bosses little more difficult than coming across a single hell knight - in terms of skill, the Guardian of hell was the most difficult from a lack of having the thing to heal-with.
Although that was meant to be a part of the plot/mystery, it imbalanced it TOO much, especially when getting a BFG early - if surprised by more than one higher-difficulty monster like an arch-vile or hell knight, one bfg round followed by a quick switch to a charged cube, could take one out in under 5s, and then you only had one left to-dodge.
Similarly, there was a distinct lack of things like machinegunners & revenants in little windows / holes in walls firing at you from far-away, to force you to decide-quickly & switch to attacking-quickly, in traps, which back in the old games, were arguably much more diffcult than the weapon-switching that one can do in this one, in anticipation of a few more difficult than usual enemies in tight spaces, especially after getting the rocket launcher or BFG.
Levels in the old games where choosing-to waste precious rocket ammo in tight spaces, was a massive-mistake unless you were fully-stocked and doing it for some other reason - building back up another type, or something, were ones where you really needed to get used to guerilla-cover tactics and making the most of your shotty ammo by letting monsters like imps get-close so you only needed one shot, etc.
In other words, there was not-enough room to get REWARD, if you'd already conserved your rockets, since you still risked shooting yourself with them point-blank, which left you with the BFG, and it didn't have frequent enough ammo to be a constant defence against those surprises where the designers forced you to think-quickly.
I like a challenge in close-combat games like that, but NARROWing the number of things a player can do in a REPETITIVE pattern, is the worst combination of choices of the two, IMO.
The old games let you make your own mistakes,
this one held-your-hand allllll the way through, which i found tiresome and quite boring after 10-15 maps or so. Only the puzzles, new-monsters, and boss fights remained interesting.
Also, a hallmark of the old games, were FEW locking doors, so that you couldn't go back to places you'd been before.
This game had LESS-monsters, and LESS space.
Doom needs more of BOTH.
For a frag-fest game? THE frag-fest game, the very source of the word? Agh! Nuh.
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