It's easy to dismiss Final Doom as that expansion pack with The Plutonia Experiment, and all its chaingunners, hard difficulty and that maze with all the arch-viles. In reality, Final Doom is the expansion pack with The Plutonia Experiment, one of the most important work in Doom modding history, one that paved the way for the near entirety of the scene in general, made by Dario and Mario Casali who should have a more legendary status among video games than they have.

Also yes, it has that maze with all the arch-viles. But that map is one of the best, most creative one you'd see at the time! In fact, how Plutonia evolves this arch-vile monster from the pseudo-boss barely seen in the original Doom 2 into a monster to freely use normally, if one that is dangerous left to its own devices?

Also also there's something called Evilution as a bonus. Who cares, Plutonia is all that matters.

Final Doom is a bizarre release. Where Master Levels for Doom II elevated fan-created levels to expansion status, Final Doom acts to fully canonise fan content by compiling two lengthy fan campaigns into an official, mainline Doom release. The ethics are pretty weird, but a charitable take is that Final Doom preserves and legitimises the creativity of the Doom fandom through its release.

As for the campaigns themselves, I found both to be enjoyable, if a little bullshit-ridden at points. TNT Evilution (great name, btw) had a wonderful sense of pacing to it, progressing through environmental phases not unlike Doom II. Despite many finding this to be the "bullshit" one, it is actually the only Doom campaign, aside from those in the original, that I never got stuck in. Perhaps I just got lucky. The Plutonia Experiment I found a little more gruelling, not just for its difficulty but for its size, but was still an enjoyable experience.

Despite my overall enjoyment, the experience of going through these campaigns was one of exhaustion. After all, they are working within the Doom II framework; there are no new enemies, mechanics, weapons etc. Each features an iteration on the same final boss as Doom II, and the original Big Bads (i.e. Cyberdemon and Spider Mastermind) are pretty played out as threats by the end. It's damn good for what it is, but what it IS is more Doom II, and a LOT more of it at that. Doom 64, also not developed by iD, is a more bold and evolutionary continuation of the series.

Doom 2, lo mismo que el uno si lo vemos así por así, sin embargo este juego aunque parezca una expansión glorificada, ciertamente introdujo más elementos que serían una constante en consecuentes juegos, enemigos míticos como las putas elementales, archviles, DOOT, y el mancubus y otros. Pero no solo eso, si no que también cambio la forma en el diseño de niveles, si te das cuenta en Doom 2 los mapas son mucho más abiertos y con una barbaridad de enemigos en un sólo nivel, lo malo es que si ya de por sí algunos mapas en Doom 1 estaban chafas (Ejem, ejem, casi todo Inferno), en el 2 se (je) multiplica ese problema, ya que al ser mucho más abierto, te puedes desorientar más fácil y frustrarte, sin embargo eso no quiere decir que haya su buen par de excelentes niveles.

En cuanto a las expansiones:

Plutonia: Jodete Casali

TNT: ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

Master Levels: 👍

TNT: Evilution is boring as hell and I cannot believe I actually sat down and played all of it. But it does have its own soundtrack (with some good and bad tracks) and that's pretty cool. The Plutonia Experiment didn't get its own fan MIDI soundtrack for over 15 years, but it's actually much better than Evilution...but still not quite great thanks to some truly (arch-)vile enemy placement. In that regard, it tries a little too hard to be the ~difficult~ official set of Doom maps, and as a result I didn't finish it, though I did go back and play the amazing Go2It which was a landmark map for 1996.

If you look at this as its own game, it comes off as a regressive release considering it came out after Duke Nukem 3D and just before Quake. If you look it as what it really is, which is two officially sold Doom mods packaged together, it's a mixed bag in quality. Most of the TNT maps are boring and while there are a few pretty cool ones, they never come close to the quality of vanilla Doom 1 and 2. Plutonia is generally much better designed and has some classics like Go2It, but is also plagued with Chaingunner spam and, more egregiously, an abundance of Arch-viles. I don't recommend TNT outside of some of the soundtrack, but I do recommend The Plutonia Experiment if you're looking for a serious challenge. Overall though Final Doom is not essential, except maybe Go2It from Plutonia. Fun fucking level, that one is.

I won't get into the whole history behind this release, that has been documented already and it's easy to find on internet.

TNT Evilution is probably the most hated set of Doom Levels. I think such a harsh criticism its a little unfair. While i do agree that some of it's levels are extremely tedious (Mostly on the second half) i think the first half it's pretty much ok, with even a few maps that are just excelent and could easily be on a list of, let's say, the 30 best official Doom maps ever.

But what about The Plutonia Experiment? I think if it wasn't because of how revolutionary Doom 1 was, i think no one would doubt about Plutonia being the best set of levels of any official Doom release. Seriously, it's just perfect. I read somewhere that Plutonia is essentially what Doom 2 would have liked to be, and i couldn't agree more on that statement. It actually borrows a few concepts out of some flawed Doom 2 maps and it makes them so much better. The typical example would be how Odyssey Of Noises (MAP29 from Plutonia) takes it's inspiration on Downtown or Industrial Zone (both from Doom II) and it just ends up being not only the best city based map, but also one of the favourite maps by a large part of the Doom-fans community. And there are other examples too. But don't get me wrong: That's just a little of what Plutonia does, because most of the time is actually introducing many new concepts in level design (The Hunt, for example) instead of just paying a homage to previous maps.

If you like Doom and Doom II, play this one, specially for The Plutonia Experiment.