Glory kills are not at all necessary (thank god). They're very good for casual players who are just going to play through the game once on a relatively low difficulty (i.e. Ultra Violence or below, since that's all that's unlocked on a first playthrough). They give some easy visceral thrill and encourage aggressive play, which is crucial to enjoying DOOM. However, on repeat playthroughs, glory kills, as fast as they commendably are, become tedious. Thankfully, by that point is also becomes apparent how unnecessary glory kills actually are because you learn the enemies so you can avoid taking damage (no hitscan means all attacks are avoidable), you learn the levels and secrets (so you realize how packed every level is with health and armor powerups), and you optimize your suit upgrades to get efficient free refills of health/armor. It also happens that on higher difficulties, glory kills will kill you as often as save you during a dangerous fight, since enemies can still launch attacks during your glory kill animation i-frames, and if an enemy attack is about to hit you as your control-free i-frames run out, you'll take unavoidable damage (often more than cancelling out whatever bit of extra health the glory kill just got you).
I finished the game 8 times, including once on Ultra Nightmare, and I rarely used glory kills after my first playthrough. I primarily avoided glory kills because it was more fun to shoot enemies while retaining full control than to keep watching the same control-free animations I'd already seen a million times. Playing fast (with a mouse and keyboard) and using the right gun for the job, you can kill enemies far more quickly with guns than with glory kills. Additionally, using glory kills would have also made the game harder on the highest difficulty settings by causing unavoidable deaths, which are not tolerable in a perma-death mode like Ultra Nightmare.
Actually, you can play all difficulty settings from the get-go, you just can't select it from the options menu; you have to select it when you start a new game. The font is red instead of white. Also, there is no new game plus, and you can't play through the game on the one file again, only go back through the same stages with all your equipment (so, yeah, kind of new game plus, but not really).
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