Played it and finished it. I suppose the game had all the elements of the original, but the big difference, back then the jetpack, holoduke and I suppose the big one, the ability to jump (instead of running flat on the ground like Doom2 and other games at that time), was all "groundbreaking" stuff and it was fun... Probably because we didn't really have any better until the release of Quake / Unreal.
Well, this was my experience anyway.