> the alien ship crawl waiting-for-doors bullet hell level from Durandal)

"If I Had A Rocket Launcher, I'd Make Someone Pay" [1]?

But yes - my impression was always that the Doom games mostly focused on having cool levels, with plot as an afterthought. Marathon gave more of a sense of the levels having been designed around a plot.

[1]: https://marathon.bungie.org/spoiler/m2/14.shtml