ULTIMATE DooM

 Finished Episode 4: "Thy Flesh Consumed" today. It's a pretty popular episode to whine about, but I honestly didn't find it too bad. I'll be the the contrarian and say that I think the perennial favorite first episode, "Knee Deep In The Dead" is the worst. There's only so much you can do when you limit yourself to 2/3 of the arsenal and enemies, and mostly tight indoor industrial maps.

I think my final ranking would be more like 3>2>4>1. In the end, I think the main issue with TFC (with how much it bothers you directly influencing how you'll feel about it) is that it's really a set of 9 Doom II levels crammed into Doom 1. 

There's a certain aesthetic, pacing, etc. baked into Doom 1. It's generally slower than Doom 2. More about getting the right shot in tight quarters than zipping around and whittling down a cadre of tougher monsters. Gimmicks in levels tend to be rarer and less pronounced. The addition of the Super Shotgun, and filling out the ranks of the mid difficulty monsters (combined with generally bigger, more open, maps) really changes how Doom II plays. TFC feels like (and in at least one case is) someone took a bunch of Doom II levels, and then squished them into the constraints of the Doom 1 arsenal and Bestiary. In some cases, that's not bad. You get to telefrag Cyberdemons and get more choices in your path through some of the levels than you would in most of Doom 1. The secrets are generally less wonky (though that one level with 22 secrets, 19 of which are in one room and two of which are broken stands out...) On the other hand, it sometimes means you have to fight 12 Barons of Hell in one level (episodes 2 and 3 have a total of 18 each across all 9 maps). Map 2 would be a lot better if a few of those Barons could be replaced by a Revenant or Mancubus. 

The difficulty is something everyone harps on, particularly in the first two maps. Map one is hard, but it doesn't feel super unfair. It's just tight on the pickups. Map two does feel more like a late episode map (and the difficulty dips back down after it) but it's not as bad as people make it out to be. I beat it from a pistol start (map one is so rough you might be in worse than pistol start shape anyway) with a reasonable amount of retries. All in all it's not the best episode, but it's not unplayably bad like its sometimes made out to be. Definitely worth taking a stab at if you're blasting through the classic Dooms.