Well, it's up to you, but it seems kind of silly to complain it's too easy and refuse to turn the difficulty up. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'd argue that it does change the experience, because, it's, well, harder. You have to play better and more strategically if you want to win.
But to be honest thank fuck NuDoom isn't like Doom 3. D3 had, as much as I hate the term, artificial difficulty with being able to hold the light or a gun. It was awkward and stupid, and the entire game was just kind of dull, with constant monster closets and unsatisfying weapons.
Yeah, the new Doom plays a lot smoother and faster. That's kind of the point, really. Doom has always been about being a lone badass ripping and tearing his way through the legions of hell.
If a game requires me to up the difficulty so I don't feel like I'm being pandered to, that's generally a problem for me. Some games, like Skyrim, get away with it because difficulty doesn't cut to the core of the game, there's so much more going on than just how hard it is to fight guys. NuDOOM doesn't have a real exploration, quests, an explorable story, gear or any of that crap. Difficulty is essentially all it has. And if the difficulty isn't satisfying without dialing it up (I'm not the kind of gamer that typically starts games on Hard Mode), where else do you turn to in the game for satisfaction? The exploration is decent but only because they're being extra sneaky with the collectibles, which the automap does a fine job of making sure you can't miss. The visuals are there, except all the daemons look like shit IMO, going from D3's bleeding edge, "realism" textures to these rather low-fi cartoony looking demons that sometimes look cell shaded. Seriously, WTF are the Possessed supposed to be? Because it looks like Thin Man with bubblegum colored skin and an anus for a face.
To me, Doom has never been "Be a huge bad ass sprinting through the levels at warp speed to heavy metal." That came about after D2 was thoroughly modded and people no longer explored Doom levels as they did tore them to shreds.
For me, Doom was always about being outnumbered, outgunned and without a friend to turn to in a world that's going to hell. That's what made your victories special. That and the levels of D2 actually felt like hell was creeping in. D3 almost got this right (there were some incredibly nice visual effects at play), there was just too much obsession with tech and jump scares based on pitch blackness that the illusion didn't hold up. NuDOOM, on the other hand, misinterprets the original Doom experience going the other direction, by trying to make the game so killy and your character such an over the top badass that it's more of a parody of Doom than anything else. Yeah yeah I get it, Doom Marine is the Anti-Hero's Anti-Hero. That's smile inducing at the most, it doesn't really make the game for me like I know it has for some people.
I'll give the game a few more levels before I decide whether I need it harder. But I spent a few hours last night taking apart the first few levels and just felt....like the game is trying too hard to make me feel speshul. In D2 I remember always feeling like I needed a better gun half the game, even with the Shotgun and Minigun. In the first few hours of D3 I'm getting guns I don't even feel compelled to use because I can literally sit back and snipe with the starting pistol while side strafing pretty much everything to my heart's content. And if I need to actually kill something quickly, why I have infinite grenades and an explosive shotgun grenade launcher with ammo in every single room, and execution ammo drops to boot, to rely on before I even need to pull out the assault rifle or plasma rifle.
I dunno. I can see why people praised NuDOOM for being different, I'm just not sure it was the right kind of different. More like "what's a very surface level approach we can take with Doom to get it "back to basics" after D3."
The darkness doesn't make the game tense, and it doesn't make it scary. It just slows the game down into tedium. Either you juggle a worthless weapon around to perform basic FPS functions, or you blindly grope the game to get what you need.
I used to feel this way about D3. But in subsequent playthroughs, with the flashlight mod, I found the game to be a much better experience once my expectations were aligned with it being a slow, atmospheric horror shooter than that "Doom."
The only thing that continually wrecked D3 for me was the entirely predictable enemy spawn patterns. Nothing nothing nothing for room after room, then BAM, jump scare, 3 teleporting imps, one always directly behind you and maybe some other BS, maybe not. Original Doom had levels full of pre-plotted guys already in existence. You heard them, they spooked you, you edged in to an area, tripped a switch, and then 5x as many guys as the placed spawns showed up, from behind walls or teleported in or W/E. D3, there was next to none of that. Levels felt empty until you actually stepped in to a spawn area and THEN all hell breaks loose.