I spend most of my time playing DoomRL these days playing Phobos Base Entry over and over and over, and consequently I've developed a real hatred for it. These complaints are specific to the high-difficulty version.
1. It's boring. There are about four or five different layouts, so once you've learned them all, it's the same thing every time.
2. It's random. There are some things you can do to mitigate the randomness, but there are huge factors that are outside your control that are massively swingy. The big ones are the hit and damage rolls of the initial formers, the movements of the first two sergeants, and your damage rolls and whether the sergeants get a chance to use up their medkits. This is worse for some challenges than others, Angel of Berserk is particularly bad.
3. It's important. You can easily come out of Phobos Base Entry with 50% health and no medkits or 80% health and two medkits while making no serious mistakes either time. More than half my games I just quit out of Phobos Base Entry because an initial roll went poorly, and I know the game isn't worth continuing.
I think the first problem is what makes this worse than other roguelikes with brutal early games, even though DoomRL's early game is the most brutal of any roguelike I've played.
