So. Let's say you've been convinced by @wordbending's excellent intro to Doom 1993, you've (re-)bought one of the first two Doom games for $5, you've downloaded a modern source port like GZDoom or Zandronum, and....now what? There are twenty-nine years of fan-made Doom mods and levels out there, and they are scattered across half a dozen websites, some of them distributed only via a forum thread and a filesharing link. The review sites are all a decade old or older, the Cacowards on Doomworld.com can be inscrutable to people who haven't already been playing for ages, the other lists of recommendations are arbitrary and endless, and maybe you don't have time to watch 20 minute video reviews on Mr. Icarus's delightful Doom Mod Madness channel on YouTube. Where do you even begin?
Maybe you could use some....unsolicited opinions.
All links below go to pages with screenshots, so you're not downloading files blind like it's actually 1993.
"I've never played Doom before."
YOU WANT: DOOM 2. More of an incremental revision than a true sequel, Doom 2's levels are generally agreed to be more interesting and atmospheric than Doom 1, and the expansions are absurdly difficult if you've never played either of the first two games. There are arcade and puzzle elements to Doom 2 that make it feel unique among first person shooters, even today--it's always been about a lot more than just shooting.
Many Doom starter guides also recommend THE PLUTONIA EXPERIMENT and TNT: EVILUTION, two officially sponsored Doom map packs that were sold at retail as FINAL DOOM. To be frank, I don't think either of these has aged well, and cannot recommend them to new players--they are infamous for inspiring decades of usermaps that play poorly to Doom's strengths, and have contributed tremendously to the perception that Doom is just about quick reflexes and mindlessly mowing down hordes of cannon fodder.
Different people like different things about Doom, but for me, if the maps are designed so that the monsters cannot shoot at each other and fight one another instead of you, the mapper has missed the point. (They might get a free pass if they are missing the point on purpose, and it works.)
"I played Doom once and it's not cute enough for me."
YOU WANT: THE JAPANESE COMMUNITY PROJECT. In 2016, a retrogaming Let's Player introduced a new generation of Japanese players to Doom, and a burgeoning Japanese scene collaborated to produce 32 of the most playful, adorable, irreverent custom maps ever. All of these maps are endearingly true to the spirit of the original game, despite taking the design in bold and distinctively non-Western new directions. If you've ever wondered how Japan would have invented the first person shooter, I guess this is as close to a canonical answer as you'll get.
"Oldschool Doom's strafe-and-shoot gunplay feels dated and underwhelming. I'm from the Call of Duty generation, and I want something more slick and tactical, with a heavy dose of the over-the-top spectacle I'm used to from more modern AAA shooters."
YOU WANT: BRUTAL DOOM. Because it changes the game so radically, this overhaul of Doom 2's weapons, enemies, mechanics, and graphics is one of the most controversial Doom mods in the community's three-decade history--and this is a community to which the Columbine school shooters once belonged!--but it is, bar none, the one mod more responsible for bringing more people back to Doom 1993 than any other. (Consequently, it is an enormous influence on the design of Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal.)
Brutal Doom is best known for its physics-defying, utterly over-the-top '90s splatterstick gore, but it adds a lot of other modern FPS features that drastically alter how the original Doom 2 maps play: handgrenades, headshots, reloadable clips, a variety of dual-wieldable bullet weapons (to compensate for the original games' overabundance of bullet ammunition), melee executions, drivable vehicles, and more. It's really exciting how these changes force a player to rethink these decades-old levels, even though I find the blood and guts to be tasteless even by Doom standards.
Brutal Doom is so tailored to the original Doom 2 maps that it doesn't really work with anything else, even usermaps made specifically for Brutal Doom. The breathtakingly overdone "Starter Pack" map pack that comes with it is, in the words of one Doomworld forum member, "as boring as it is ambitious." A running gag among the Doom modding community is asking of any new mod release, "But does it work with Brutal Doom?" (The answer is rarely yes, and even when it is, Brutal Doom ruins the pacing, item placement, and progression of user content designed for regular Doom.)
"As a kid, I always played Doom with cheats on, because it was too scary and too hard. I want that power fantasy again, but scaled up to my grownup expectations."
YOU WANT: RUSSIAN OVERKILL. Dozens of the most silly, comically overpowered weapons ever to grace an FPS, including a gun that shoots fighter jets that shoot more fighter jets, make this mod as much a satire of toxic masculinity as it is a power fantasy. Even on the hardest usermaps, these weapons will obliterate any semblance of challenge, but there are so many stupid guns and they are so ridiculous that you'll be too busy laughing to care.
"I liked Doom mods in the nineties, I played through Doom 2 and its expansions a million times, and there's just no challenge in it anymore."
YOU WANT: SUNLUST. Architecturally magnificent yet changing none of the original game's mechanics, this 32-map campaign will slowly and forcefully teach (and test) every nuance of vanilla Doom 2's movement physics, weapons, and enemy behavior, in beautiful and compelling ways even id Software was unaware. If you weren't a Doom master before playing this 32-level campaign on Ultra-Violence difficulty, you will be by the time you finish. It's not quite the Kaizo Mario of Doom--that honor would probably have to go to NEWGOTHIC MOVEMENT 2--but it is still all about cleverly surmounting challenges that the original games would lead you to believe are impossible.
Sunlust’s notorious difficulty only applies to its Ultra-Violence difficulty setting. The only reason this map pack belongs on an entry level list is because its much more forgiving Hurt Me Plenty difficulty provides a decent set of training wheels--a neat post-vanilla crash course in how Doom is actually played, not how id Software thought Doom would be played. Also it's really pretty.
You could theoretically play Sunlust with weapon mods like Brutal Doom, but you'd be entirely missing the point.
"I like modern FPSes, but I could never get into Doom because it's all septic red and brown and I get lost in its ugly abstract fractal levels. The world of Doom is just not fun to explore."
YOU WANT: ANCIENT ALIENS. This silly, trippy, glowy neon map pack, inspired by the stonerbait History Channel show, is all about wandering outdoors through the desert, getting high on peyote, exploring tiny buildings and deliberately getting abducted by shimmering UFOs so you can clear them out XCOM-style.
YOU MIGHT ALSO WANT: DISJUNCTION. A treat for players who like big, nonlinear layouts, this moody, nightclub-at-industrial-scale map pack takes advantage of modern source ports' absurd draw distances to have you snipe monsters from several stories down or half a mile away. My favorite map in the pack is the Homestuck-inspired “Felt”, an opulent underground library decked out in green carpet like a pool table, which feels small and cramped at first but gradually opens up as you discover the map’s many hidden rooms and secret passages. Unconstrained by the hardware limitations of 1990s computing, Disjunction makes astonishingly good use of space in three dimensions--it is a masterclass in thinking beyond the flat, labyrinthine layouts that generations of mappers have associated with Doom.
Disjunction works better with weapon mods that offer you a scoped sniper rifle, such as the Deus Ex-alike LITHIUM, since the vanilla Doom weapons are not terribly accurate at long range.
"I don't know, I was always more of a Duke Nukem 3D fan. Doom was just way too abstract and not immersive enough for me. I really like modern sandbox games that have me wandering through a clever, familiar urban setting, discovering surprises and set pieces. Also, I really like the movie Die Hard."
YOU WANT: GOING DOWN. One of my favorite map packs, Going Down has you start at the rooftop of a demon-overrun corporate office building and fight your way down into the basement (and through the basement into hell itself), with each level beginning and ending at the elevator. Made by a young Cyriak Harris, who would be Internet famous later in life for his surreal fractal Flash animations, the levels employ default Doom textures in astonishing and creative ways--a playful yet almost plausibly realistic take on a 1990s corporate office tower. Almost every level has a clever gimmick to it, and you'll spend hours surging through them just to see what comes next--whether it's a time machine that has you moving stuff around in the past to give you access to areas in the future, or a huge rampaging Cyberdemon set loose in a tiny crowded laboratory, or a tense game of hide-and-seek with archviles popping out of crates in a dark basement, this map pack is just clever delight after clever delight. The deranged, deliberately discordant circus accordion soundtrack is a nice touch too.
"I was always more of a Halo or Quake fan than a Doom fan. I want ice blue and gunmetal grey, splashy boss fights, and big sprawling environments."
YOU WANT: WINTER'S FURY. One of the most post-Doom-feeling, intensely atmospheric map packs for GZDoom, this campaign features a gorgeous snowy mountain setting, immersive lighting, wide open spaces, epic boss fights, dramatic cutscenes, a detailed backstory brought to life through chat logs and environmental storytelling, and lots of other breathtaking technical marvels that really make Doom feel more like a shooter from the late naughts than a shooter from the early nineties. It also has you fighting a floaty ghost Cyberdemon to the theme from the movie Final Destination 4, which is, as kids used to say in my day, baller as fuck.
"The fuck is with all these groups of five or six monsters jumping out of closets? Knee-Deep in the Dead my ass! I thought Doom was all about fighting hundreds and hundreds of monsters at once."
YOU WANT: MAPS OF CHAOS OVERKILL EDITION. Lots of mediocre early user maps gave Doom an undeserved reputation for being a mindless meat grinding simulator, but Maps of Chaos is a case study in how just throwing more monsters at the player can actually be fun. Each of the titular Maps of Chaos is an expanded remix of a map in Doom 2, with lots of new rooms, dozens of extra monsters, and hundreds of expectations-trolling little surprises for players intimately familiar with the originals.
Maps of Chaos was originally conceived as an expansion of the original Doom 2 levels balanced for co-op multiplayer. But you can also have a blast playing it as a horde-mode single player challenge, expertly baiting hundreds of demons into shooting each other as they come pouring out of the walls. Or you can play it with a power-fantasy weapon mod, like DOOMRL ARSENAL, to even the odds with an appropriate amount of firepower. Or you can combine it with COLORFUL HELL (which, among other things, randomly upgrades monsters to bosses) and LEGENDOOM (bosses drop Borderlands-style dynamically generated weapons) to turn Doom into a FPS/RPG dungeon crawl, since this map produces enough monsters for the randomness in those mods to pay off.
In any case, the better you know the original Doom 2 maps, the more you'll love these.
"That's way too sweaty for me. I just want to turn off my brain and shoot things."
YOU WANT: REELISM 2. Just big globs of enemies, randomized sets of deliberately outlandish weapons (freezethrowers! big-ass hammers! footballs! a gender reveal IED!), and the silliest imaginable mechanics modifiers, wrapped up with some impressively excessive boss fights. You'll die in the dumbest ways, and laugh your ass off doing it.
"I want to be a ninja. Specifically, I want to be a 1990s fanfiction cyborg anime girl ninja OC do not steal."
YOU WANT: DEMONSTEELE. You'd think gameplay built around high speed melee combat and The Matrix-style bullet dodging wouldn’t work in a FPS where you have no depth perception, but somehow, it totally does. Ferocious super moves and a giddily frenetic blend of swordfighting and gunplay leave me half convinced that the Shadow Warrior remake got its design concept from this mod.
Works best in usermaps that give you enough open space to dodge--I found the mod awkward with the original Doom 2 levels.
"I want to be a cowboy."
YOU WANT: HIGH NOON DRIFTER. Nothing about this spaghetti-western weapon mod by the creator of Demonsteele looks or sounds particularly compelling in summary. But there's an obsessively meticulous level of attention to how all the weapons feel, evident in every moment of play, that wrings an astonishing amount of depth out of the weapons you'll use most. Every weapon has subtleties that reward clever, improvisational gunplay, including the ten-gallon hat with a brim so big it blocks the top edge of your screen.
"You know, this was a mistake. I don't really want to play Doom at all. I want to play something more like a lo-fi Bethesda-era Fallout, crossed with Metro 2033."
YOU WANT: ASHES 2063 and ASHES AFTERGLOW. An extraordinarily ambitious, hyper-detailed, pair of immersive apocalyptic open world FPS RPGs, Ashes ship-of-Theseuses every last scrap of Doom until no semblance of the original game remains. The gunfeel is flawless, the synthwave soundtrack is bangin', the realistic low-res environments are a blast to explore, the crafting system (there's a crafting system!) is tantalizingly sparse, the NPC dialogue is solidly written, the environmental storytelling is as hilarious as it is grim. It's a phenomenal, complete game in its own right, and psst--in the most subtle of ways, perceptible only to someone who's played the original a lot, it's still Doom under the hood.
"I want to fuck the demons."
YOU WANT: therapy. Look, you didn't hear about HDOOM from me.