Quake II

The Good
Nice level design in most parts. Multiple pathways to an objective. Well-designed enemies with soome exceptions. Great Arsenal (Love the super shotgun). Brilliant pulsating music.

The Bad
Absolutely non-existent AI. Some levels are quite tedious and require endless backtracking thru very similar looking areas. Too dark in parts. Wussy boss encounters.

The Bottom Line
Good fun for the mindless shooting crowd.

The Good
An actual game? You mean with a halfway decent singleplayer and multiplayer portion designed BESIDES the techy wow-wow?? Surely you jest! Nope. Quake 2 is (get this) a real GAME!!!

I must admit that this caught me completely off-guard at the time, and when the game came out I planned to shrug it off and wait for the first real game that used the Q2 engine. Eventually I did get my hands on it, and though it's not the best game ever it's still a pretty good classic-styled shooter.

There is an actual attempt at a plot here, what with some alien threat and you being a space marine (hmm were have I heard that before?) shot into the Strogg's (bad aliens) planet to kick ass and take names. However everything goes to the crapper and you get separated from your team, thus your mission is to survive and make contact with HQ and eventually (once you find per standard shooter requirements that you are the last hope of all the universe) go for the Strogg leader.

Paper-thin? Sure, but it's something! They even threw in some pre-rendered cutscenes, and they incorporated the story in the gameplay to a certain extent, ie. you have mission objectives which often involve going back & forth between some levels, briefings, inventory, etc. and you also get a small modicum of immersion a la C&C Renegade, for instance: you see ships fighting around, explosions, heck, you'll even be rejoined with your marine buddies, now helpless and completely traumated p.o.w.s. Cool, huh? That last bit also points out another area were Q2 improves over the original: detail. You are now surrounded by more or less credible settings. You no longer have the rocket launcher floating in the middle of a hallway, instead you find it in a place that makes sense, like an armory or cabinet. Furthermore, the levels become much more alive than on Q1, with working machinery, decorating details (a console there, a dead body here, a bio-mechanical station there, a dismembering machine over there, etc.) and a much more cohesive gameworld (gone is the medieval/techno/chtulu mix of the original) and you instead get a more concentrated bio-mechanical world.

The weapons are both complete ripoffs, and sheer genius. You see, for the most part Id recycled everything, but this time they actually bothered to dress everything up as shiny and new, and even did some nice modifications. Your standard weapon is ranged (a wimpy laser pistol), then you have the standard and double-barreled shotguns but overworked to feel like the pulse rifles from the Alien films; then you have the nailgun and the slicer, now dubbed the machine gun and mini-gun, both well known but now with actual thought put into them (the machine gun has a mean recoil that makes it's use a complicated affair, and the mini-gun is pure rock-&roll-screen-shaking genius); then you have the grenade and rocket launcher (graphically reworked so as to be actually interesting, with pretty complex models were you see the ammo loading and all); a pulse-rifle like gun; Eraser's Rail-gun (stolen with the cool smoky trail and all); aaaaaand... THE BFG! Yes!! Completely stolen and unoriginal??? Yup. Absolutely cool?? That too!! The BFG charges up for an eternity, and then lets out with the first big texture lightning-heavy effect of any weapon in any fps. Kudos to id for updating a classic with full-polygon bliss.

Speaking of which, with 3D acceleration now a reality, Q2's graphics really shine. I remember firing this baby up after just installing my Diamond Monster 2 and just grinning while thinking "yeah, this is what I'm talking about" Hehehe.... The 3D graphics are much sharper and cleaner than those of Q1, and the use of colored lightning is a major plus. Furthermore, id really put some thought when it came to designing monsters, and the end result was a collection of greatly animated and superbly detailed baddies to shoot at (like the Iron Maiden, the Parasite, the all-mighty Tank, etc.). And this detail shows in the multiplayer area too. The player models have now a decided quota of variation and much more realism (gone is the steroid-ladden, blocky fella from Q1) Not to mention now standard features like right/left handedness, gender selection, skins, mods, etc...

The Bad
It took no new strides. Q2 merely attempted to deliver the same amount of braindead action Q1 did, while righting all of said game's faults. This gives us in essence what Quake REALLY should have been, however some time after Q2, the world would face Half-Life, and simple shooters like Q2 would become way too braindead for the uptight masses of "nü shooters". Q2 was the last of a now dying breed. And it's probably best that it died.

Other than that the only bad things you can point to Q2 are the usual "id palette disorder" and the fact that the engine, for as good as it was, didn't incorporate detail textures. Unreal beat it to that.

The Bottom Line
Quake done right! That is what this game really is. Of course, it's still Quake... But hey, that still spells braindead fun for me. Quake 2 is a real classic in the world of fps, a game good enough to be actually memorable as exactly that, and not a technical showcase like most other id games.

The Good
The problem with technical showcases like Quake is that people ditch them as soon as the next hot thing comes along. Id Software no doubt realised this and set to work on a game with a half-decent single-player mode. It's quite telling that even though the game was rushed like hell and shipped with lots of bugs/missing features, it still feels like more of a game then the first Quake was. It's hard to say why, they are both shooters with similar gameplay. Quake II just feels richer and more detailed. The first game made the graphics 3D. The second game made the gameplay 3D.

The game's conceit is that you're stranded on a hostile alien planet and you have to complete tasks assigned to you from earth. This alone is a small but compelling step forward, as instead of an arcady "get to the end of the level GO GO GO!!!" through-line we have a much more mature game where you have to complete objectives like a real soldier would.

Instead of progressing from level to level in a linear fashion, you visit a series of areas (such as mines, suburbs, etc) that have sub-areas divided by short load times. You can go back and forth between these areas and the result is a game that is, while certainly not entirely non-linear, gives the player more freedom, as well as the feeling that he's deciding the outcome of the game rather than riding a one-way train track to the final boss.

The game's masterstroke is in the details. No more empty rooms with monsters just standing around, now you visit realistically designed areas such as nuclear plants, weapon facilities, and underground mines. There are various props like computer terminals to enhance the realism. The weapons are just plain awesome, with my favorites being the chaingun and the BFG 2134124 or whatever it is. The weapon balance is also much better (the rocket launcher isn't as strong as in Quake, so expect to use other weapons occasionally), and everything is spiffed up to become more realistic (example: you can now see your marine's hands reloading the grenade launcher.)

...Now, don't get the impression that Quake 2 is a masterpiece of game design. It's a simple shooter. But it's far ahead of Quake and that's all I wanted.

I also give props for the monsters (there are no goofy three-headed whatevers in this game, they all look like real alien soldiers) and the soundtrack (which features a theme song by Rob Zombie). The graphics were top of the line for the day, and with 3D acceleration they hold up well with most 1999-2000 games.

The Bad
The game's quality is heavily front-loaded. The first few levels are brilliant, but as the game progresses things get increasingly lazy and rushed until eventually you're wandering through empty mazes, shooting randomly-placed enemies...awesome, it's Quake I again.

The game is also really easy. On hard difficulty I breezed through the game with about 10-20 reloads (mostly from unexpected traps). The monsters are really stupid and the pathfinding is even worse than Quake's (larger monsters tend to get stuck walking around corners), and along with the frequent health packs and overpowered weapons means you're not in any great risk of dying. Most of the challenge comes from finding your way around mazes, and that's not what I call fun.

And despite all of the nods to realistic Half-Life gameplay, they couldn't resist adding a bunch of stupid videogame shit like bonus levels, powerups, et cetera. It feels a bit out of place given the otherwise realistic setting.

The Bottom Line
A good single player mode complements this technologically forward-looking game. It's not a must own, but it is nevertheless a good game.