YMMV / Brutal Doom

• Annoying Video Game Helper: Although the friendly Marines are an awesome addition, they can fall prey to this sometimes. As of v20b, Marines with plasma rifles (and, though Dummied Out, rocket launchers) can wind up injuring and even killing Doomguy in the midst of combat due to the Splash Damage they have in this mod.
• Awesome Video Game Levels:
  • MAP19 from the "Hell on Earth" map pack is a huge War Sequence involving lots of friendly marines just beyond the hell gate against a bunch of demons guarding the demonic tower that will lead to the deepest areas of hell. The level following is a showdown against a much more powerful, red Cyberdemon with dual rocket launchers and a new arsenal before entering the gates to hell itself.
  • MAP10 (titled "Portal Testing Labs") has you leading a squad of marines in a desperate push towards the portal that will allow you to escape the demon-infested Mars base and return to Earth. There's no exploration or subtlety in this map; just a straight-up fight against hordes of demons, ending with a boss battle against two very tough monstrosities.
  • MAP17 (titled "Final Destination") is set in a detailed subway station with a battle in the train itself.
  • The secret levels take you through, respectively, a recreation of Duke Nukem 3D E1M1 and, as expected, a time-travelling romp to a Return to Castle Wolfenstein-style Nazi mansion.
• Broken Base: Does Brutal Doom ruin the balance and tone of vanilla Doom and draw in clueless outsiders who don't understand Doom's culture, or should it be judged by its own merits instead of its audience for modernizing and refreshing an old video game? Or do both sides of the debate overhype what is just a gameplay mod?
• Catharsis Factor: YES. If you're having a bad day, just load up Brutal Doom, start a game on one of the lower difficulty settings, and enjoy reducing demon hordes to Ludicrous Gibs as you paint the floors, walls, and ceilings red with all your crazy weaponry!
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: You'd be hard-pressed nowadays to find a populated server that does not use this mod — Brutal Doom is to cooperative servers as DWANGO5 is to deathmatch ones.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The grey-clad replacement for the blue-garbed Wolf3D Schutzstaffel could give the HECU Marines of Black Mesa a serious run for their money. Despite the spread of their MP40s, they are nevertheless reasonably accurate at the ranges in which enemies are usually fought in Doom — and up close, they will quickly reduce a target to a pile of gibs. What's worse is that the Nazis have lightning-fast reaction times and often start sending lead downrange the instant they see a target. These guys are true nightmares on Realism Mode—the only saving grace is that their AI is easily exploitable, but even if you set up an ambush around a corner they will likely land a few shots before dying.
  • Heavy weapon dudes were bad enough in vanilla Doom. With the Brutal Doom minigun having a far higher rate of fire, they can deplete your health even faster.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • The mod-making community of ZDoom forums (and Doomworld to a similar extent) is anti-Brutal Doom due to the behaviour of SgtMarkIV, versus the mainstream gaming community and professional reviewers which view Brutal Doom more positively. In fact, those who are looking for mods or joining the ZDoom and Doomworld community forums are quick to learn to not mention SgtMarkIV or Brutal Doom, or at least praise it.
  • Ironically, blatant edits or mods that incorporate enhancements from Brutal Doom can be spotted on the forums and hosted in it even though the aforementioned forums once accused SgtMark of stealing due to an incomplete credits list (which has since been fixed).
  • On top of this, quite a bit of strife ensues due to the fact that most mods that override the same content generally aren't compatible, a fact Brutal Doom fans are memetically infamous for not understanding. This, plus Brutal Doom's reputation among the rest of the Doom community, has led several modders to program their mods to actively mock the player if they try to run them alongside Brutal Doom.^note Generally, if the mod edits monsters it will not work right with Brutal Doom, Project Brutality, or any other mod that places monsters. Likewise, a player class or weapon set mod won't work with Brutal Doom either, but will USUALLY run with Ketchup or the monsters-only version. The author of the GZDoom mods High Noon Drifter and Demonsteele parodies Brutal Doom's over-the-top nature should players attempt to load them alongside his to easily identify when the game doesn't run right due to compatibility, as shown here and here.
• Game-Breaking Bug: No matter how many times it's been confronted and attempted to be fixed, one infamous bug still has a habit of reappearing at random. When the player kills enemies up close, they're technically hit by the blood particles the enemy releases to fake blood splashing on the camera and be able to create the effect of red on one's vision, and any health lost is immediately restored. For some reason, rarely this glitches out so the buckets of gore from your enemies can hurt you due to not restoring health properly, to the point of death by blood. Which can be a problem with close-range combat. There's also the invulnerable shotgunner bug present in v20 in rare cases. These bugs aren't in the latest version of Project Brutality or its derivatives, however.
• Goddamn Bats: The guard dogs in "Wolfenstein" have small health pools, but make up for it by being tiny in size and moving very fast, which can make fighting them a pain.
• Good Bad Bugs: The invisible tracer spawned by the Offend command (used for "hit" detection when attempting to piss off demons) is, for all intents and purposes, treated the same as firing a bullet - one that's slow to fire and deals next to no damage, but still enough that it can trigger linedefs that are meant to be triggered by attacking them. This means it's possible to open certain impact-activated doors and switches by telling them to go fuck themselves, to say nothing of what it can do to enemies (from stopping a charging Lost Soul in its tracks by swearing at it to even killing enemies with low-enough health by flipping them off). You can even flip off explosive barrels, if you're feeling especially foolish.
• Heartwarming Moments: Believe it or not, yes. The final splash screen of Extermination Day (the v20 starter pack WAD) is Doomguy, bloody and exhausted after his battle with the Icon of Sin, being helped along with his arms around a pair of his fellow Marines. He's also smiling happily. It gets better when you realize that it's the opposite of the ending screen for the original Doom. The Doom screen starts with a shot of a rabbit in a peaceful field before panning to a burning city with the rabbit's head on a pike. The Extermination Day screen starts with a burning city and pans to Doomguy and his comrades celebrating.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The Brutal Doom version of the Icon of Sin has a full body instead of being just a giant face on a wall. In Doom Eternal, the Icon of Sin returns-and sure enough, he has a full body.
  • Brutal Doom 64 ends with Doomguy's actions causing him to become a legendary bogeyman to the demons, known to them as "Doom Slayer". Doom Eternal confirms Doom Slayer is indeed Doomguy after the events of Doom 64.
• It's Popular, Now It Sucks!: With the incredible amount of coverage and spread this mod has gotten, from simple gameplay videos by various YouTube users (including the likes of Markiplier and the late TotalBiscuit), to online publications such as PC Gamer, winning Cacoawards on Doomworld, and featured in an article on Playboy of all places, there are those that consider it as a blight to the Doom community that overshadows other great mods out there. This, of course, has attracted complaints about those complaints and opinions that such views are of those who are envious of its success and popularity, like anything else that gets such a high amount of praise.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • Brutal Doom adds to the Doom repertoire of wonderful sounds with the splatter of enemies as you paint the walls with their blood and guts, weapon pick-ups for specific weapons, and the shotgun blast sounds meatier than ever.
  • In versions prior to v19, the laugh Doomguy belts out after doing a finisher on an Archvile.
• Nintendo Hard: Pretty much every enemy in the game has taken a level in badass and gained new abilities to balance out the upgraded arsenal Doomguy has. There are also three new difficulty levels that are tougher than Ultra-Violence.
  • However, ballistic weaponry is no longer hitscan like in vanilla, which makes battles in wide open spaces more manageable.
  • The greatly heightened threat of the enemies can play Hell with the intended difficulty level of certain third-party maps. Brutal is intended to turn the original Doom levels from somewhat hard to fairly hard, but if a map pack is tuned to be very hard in the original game it can become almost impossible to beat it in Brutal—and occasionally downright so; see Unwinnable example below.
  • As of v20b and the Starter Pack, the difficulty levels received a revamp. In place of Last Man on Earth, there is now Realism Mode. In this mode, Doomguy takes dramatically more damage—for example, at 100 health and no armour, a single Imp's fireball is a One-Hit Kill, and their pounce attack is also immediately lethal even if you've picked up a fresh piece of Heavy (Blue) Armor. Stepping into slime or other damaging floors is almost immediately lethal if your health and armour aren't well above 200. This causes some problems, as certain levels (even those in Extermination Day!) require taking a fairly extended dip in the stuff—often without a Radsuit. And even with a radsuit, you might still die if the suit leaks. On the flip side, there are fewer enemies compared to the easier modes. They're also much easier to kill; Former Humans, Imps, and Nazis die immediately to a headshot from the Assault Rifle, and most of the tougher enemies can't survive more than two direct hits from a rocket.
    • In v21, Realism Mode's speed nerf was removed—instead, players can now opt to use a sprinting mechanic regardless of difficulty level.
  • For those who still think this is too easy, there's the Maps of Chaos mod, which expands existing Doom and Doom II levels and adds a lot of enemies.
  • Still not satisfied? Maps of Chaos has an overkill version that massively increases enemy spawning and makes the difficulty downright grotesque. The smallest room invariably has a dozen enemies at least, every significant item is guaranteed to open trap walls with swarms of demons, and there are teleport triggers every which where so just stepping into your average corridor can spring a flood of enemies into a part of a level you thought you'd cleared, and many maps start you off with crowds of monsters already targeting you. Oh, and later in the game high-level enemies like Hell Knights get the same spawn rates as medium enemies earlier on - and there are several instances where you fight more than one super-enhanced Cyberdemon at the same time. Good luck.
• Overshadowed by Controversy:
  • The creator of the mod, SgtMark, is rather infamous in the Doom community due to incidents involving volatile behaviour (ranging from telling a suicidal, depressed user to kill themselves, racist slurs hidden in coding, getting angry about Doom (2016) taking inspiration from his mod, planning on using actual pictures of dead people as sprites, and attacking naysayers when he won a ModDB award), which has resulted in him being banned from several modding communities.
  • Despite the popularity of Brutal Doom among the broad audience and casual gamers, hardcore Doom fans, vanilla purists, and modders are divided at best about it; some weapons mods have even taken to intentionally breaking compatibility with Brutal Doom by doing weird things that make it impossible to play (like spawning a swarm of tiny invincible golden Revenants in the case of Demon Steele), not specifically out of dislike for Brutal Doom but simply because a disproportionate amount of bugs that get reported in their mods ends up being caused by a player trying to run it together with Brutal Doom.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The mod encourages players to brutalize suffering enemies, but in v0.19, some enemies like the Former Sergeants and Imps have a tendency to explode and damage you severely for no apparent reason if you kick them while they're in agony. While this issue has since been fixed, there is a less severe version of this bug that occurs with Pinky Demons, particularly in Realism Mode. In their case, even their corpses can cause noticeable hurt if you gib them further.
  • Early versions of Extermination Day were self-contained, allowing one to use other weapon-replacement mods to go through the new levels. After a point, coding, objects and textures from Extermination Day were instead held within Brutal Doom's main .pk3, meaning to get the best experience you can only play later versions with Brutal Doom. Fortunately, others have made "vanilla" versions of later releases to experience them with whatever weapons you please.
• Spiritual Adaptation: The manliest and most brutal adaptation of the Doom comic in video game form that anyone has ever made!
• That One Boss:
  • Instead of two Barons of Hell at the end of the first episode, you fight two Belphagors, centaur-like demons who fling green explosive BFG-like blasts at you in a very small area. The Mancubus Flame Cannon's flamethrower primary fire, however, turns them into a non-issue... assuming the player knows how to get the flame cannons in the first place, or has any ammo for it remaining when they get to the Belphagors.
  • The two German tanks in the courtyard of the castle in "Wolfenstein" have a ton of health, and a direct hit from a tank shell is an instant kill unless your health and armor are both in the quadruple digits.
  • The Guardian of the portal between the city and Hell rains fire on you from above with little to no cover. And this is after the remake of the infamous "Gotcha!" map set in a shopping mall.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Extermination Day almost entirely features realistic style levels, with the Earth episode featuring an entire industrial/city/town block, complete with a day/night transition between levels.

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