Every time I try to play Doom and Doom clones, the secrets ruin my enjoyment. And I can't ignore them, because there's a big number at the end of each level telling me that I basically missed more than half of its content.
Don't get me wrong. I love secret areas in games and discovering little nooks and crannies, but as long as they complement the general game design. For example, secrets complement metroidvanias. They complement RPGs with big maps. They complement survival horrors in which you need every single bullet you can get. They DO NOT complement a high adrenaline rampage simulator.
Every time I'm killing enemies running around, I'm having fun. Every time I'm dry humping every wall on the level to find the God damned secrets, I'm NOT having fun. What sucks is that most of the time, you don't even need what's inside these secret areas. The level itself gives you enough resources and the resources in secret areas are overkill. The irony is that they COULD be useful for newbs, who are never going to find the secrets. They reward experts who know the game like the back of their hand with resources they probably can't even pick up because they're armed to the teeth. And some of these secret areas are so obscure, there's no way to find them unless you look them up, which kills the flow even more.
So this is pretty much my experience playing Doom and Doom clones:
5 minutes of absolute joy, being in a state of orgasmic flow, blasting every moving creature to oblivion while skateboarding around
10 minutes of depressing, discouraging wall-humping until one of them opens up by chance and lead me to a mostly underwhelming resource depot.
Doom is a fast game. Whatever crap they wanted to come up with to add to its playtime had to complement this fast high-adrenaline gameplay. Secrets, as they are designed, don't do that.
And the sad thing is all these Doom clones and boomer shooters keep repeating the same mistake, as if they don't have the mental capacity to just pick what works and discard what doesn't.
