While I prefer Brutal Doom to the vanilla Doom 1, I can't say I prefer Brutal Doom 64 to the N64 original. I appreciate that there is a bigger bestiary this time around (including a scrapped two-headed hound) and how some window dressings have been enhanced to bring out the atmosphere even more, but it fumbles a bit on the balance towards the end. No Escape in particular becomes a slog due to the revenant and spider mastermind spam on top of two cyberdemons that will no doubt empty out your BFG/Unmaker ammo. It also seems that the Demon Keys are entirely useless here since I got to the end with them and still had to deal with incessantly spawning fodder (as it would be if you don't pick them up in the original).

It's interesting and does do its part in enhancing the atmosphere, but Brutal Doom 64 is by no means the definitive way to play.

Doom 64 is a mostly praised game, though there are quite a few detractors, and a lot of those detractors say that Brutal Doom 64 fixes a lot of the issues they have with the game by adding in more enemies, "improving" the animations and making the game more difficult. Now, if we're not counting Plutonia, Doom 64 is my favourite Doom game, so this is coming from a place of bias, but I don't believe any of the additions this mod brings improve Doom 64 at all.

Also, no, I will not be talking about SgtMark in this review.

To begin with, the changes SgtMark made to the weapons are meh overall. He adds new sounds and effects which are nice in theory, but a lot of them sound flaccid as compared to the original; while it is more high quality, it doesn't have the kick that the original sounds have. He makes the pistol and the shotgun slightly better, which is nice, but he adds this strange delay to the Super Shotgun's firing animation, on top of not making it automatic, as now you have to press the fire button again after the reload animation is finished. While these changes are small, they become very irritating as the game continues on. The rest of the weapons are handled decently by the standards of this mod, aside from probably the biggest sin of this mod, which is how it turns the Unmaker into the most boring weapon in possibly the entire Doom franchise. Not the worst, but easily the most boring. Instead of being the overpowered, high rate of fire weapon that it was, it becomes this incredibly slow, railgun-like weapon and it sucks. It sounds like shit, feels like shit and is balanced like shit, now there's no reason to use this weapon over the BFG.

Something that also really, really bothers me about the guns in this mod is that they all have recoil, and you can't turn it off. I'm a no vertical mouselook enthusiast, which I won't get into here, but while I can understand wanting vertical mouselook since it's what literally every other fps fan outside of the Doom engine games is familiar with, having it be a necessity is where I draw the line. Doom, and by extension Doom 64, wasn't designed with vertical mouselook or recoil in mind. Recoil adds nothing to the game. Sure, the rocket launcher does have push-back in the original game but that serves to balance this weapon since it's quite powerful, fuck, I wouldn't mind that as an alternative to recoil on some of the other weapons. But having recoil on ALL the weapons makes playing this mod insufferable.

Then there's the added monsters. Doom 64 was never designed with the monsters that SgtMark re-implemented into the game. While not having the complete Doom 2 roster sucks and I would've preferred it if Midway had implemented them in the first place, adding them back in without changing the level design nor properly balancing them around the levels is infinitely worse. The revenants specifically really piss me off since their projectile speed is tied to the same projectiles the Mother Demon uses and they are WAY too slow for these tight corridors. I also don't like how, even though he didn't add the Archvile, he felt the need to rip the Hellhound straight from Blood? I know that it's a scrapped enemy concept for Doom 64 but ripping it straight from Blood? C'mon, Mark. I love Blood, but the Hellhound does not belong in Doom 64.

I also really dislike the effects on the Spectres and Nightmare Imps. Now, the Nightmare Imps aren't exactly the greatest enemies in the world, they're basically just Shotgunners for Imps, but now they're an absolute pain to fight.

While Brutal Doom 64 is far more faithful to the original game than Brutal Doom is to Doom 1 & 2, pretty much all of the changes it adds are either unnecessary or outright make the game worse. I genuinely do not understand what people see in this mod; is it the gore? The "better" sound effects for the guns? It just feels like superficial fluff, there's barely anything this mod has that the original doesn't. I'll take worse sound effects and being less gory over worse balance, worse feeling weapons and more visual clutter any day.