I've always been familiar with Quake, but only as a multiplayer game. I've played a lot of arena shooters (I'm more of an Unreal Tournament fan), but for whatever reason I never got around to playing the real Quake. I didn't really expect much considering how badly DOOM has aged, especially in terms of level design and general game feel, but I was really impressed.
Quake holds up on all fronts. The gunplay feels good, the movement feels great, the enemy variety is pretty good, and the level design is a night and day difference from DOOM and DOOM 2. It's hard to imagine that they came out only two years apart.
Despite being copied a million times, I feel like Quake holds its own against modern shooters. I would recommend it to anyone who likes movement shooters, and I probably should've played this ages ago.
P.S: I HATE SHAMBLERS I HATE SHAMBLERS I HATE SHAMBLERS
I unironically think Doom aged better than Quake, especially in the audiovisual department.
Doom had worse technology, but the sound and art direction is in a other league.
I think stuff like the limited color pallette may have been due to technical limitations where they would need to fit solid gradients of every color into a 256 color pallet to do the convincing dynamic lighting and the like.
Doom has a nice style to it but the level design is just masochistic. Most of the levels are just spamming powerful enemies and having you run in circles to whittle them down, that is if the level isn't intentionally claustrophobic and obtuse. I love GZDoom and all, but the official campaign isn't fun imo.
I feel like you're describing some fan made slaughter map, not any of the Doom episodes lol. The only thing I somewhat dislike about the level design is the labyrinthine nature of it, but you get used to it after a while thanks to the automap. If anything I wish the official Doom episodes had more enemies and used the strong ones more often, especially in the first game you mostly just fight imps for duration of it even on ultra-violence.