izigame.me

I condemned Quake II 25 years ago and didn't expect to enjoy it so much today. It's not just the graphical enhancements, I was wrong all along! But I was just a boy riding my first hype train after Quake I blew my little brains out. The corpses that didn't turn to me when I walked around, top dynamic lighting, and the true 3D were revolutionary. While Quake II wasn't what I envisioned it as. Not as innovative, the setting was different, and the pacing was slower. Not to mention the confusing level structure with abysmal loading times. Nonsense! In reality, I hated it for denying me the unattainable feeling left by its predecessor. Yeah, I was full of sh#t, but I had a dramatic change of heart.
For starters, Nightdive has injected some vividness into the game, which used to bathe in yellowish brown. Now, it looks crispy and colourful. As always, you're free to tweak your remaster. I don't like to smoothen textures, but I dig rounded particles and glowing explosions. Yet, it's not all on Nightdive. Quake II was put together with maniacal consideration from the beginning. Smooth animation, polygon to polygon, light sources creating impressive long shadows. Precisely arranged, the presentation reflects Carmack's compulsions. It's in every pore of the industrial hellscapes of cyclopean architecture. It's in the furious music, the hissing rockets, the bonking grenades, and the indignant exclamations of your enemy.
Strogg
Sure, the gothic setting can't be beaten, but don't tell me you never wanted to see System Shock Warhammered. The story is unambiguous. We're at war with the Strogg, an alien race that bombs Earth and uses humans as building material for their abominable cyborgs. You were a part of an army dispatched to take over their home planet cutely named Stroggos. Guess what happened to everyone else. It's up to you alone to punish their contempt for the natural order. Stroggs are worse than Borgs or Shodan, even worse than crooks who don't pick up their dogs' crap. Their designs look painful and unsanitary to underline how they treat biological life, hastily cooking up asset flips out of people.
You'll witness their victims in grim conditions, mad and hurting. They are all lost, not only the dead. Eviscerated, castrated, degraded, showing signs of performed vivisections. Bleating and crawling, the luckiest of these lambs were brought down to near-vegetative states. You should be happy to end their existence. There's an ocean of suffering behind every half-living creature you meet. War is Hell, but you know what's worse? To painfully transform someone and then just make them WORK at some bloody factory! This can't stand. There's no selective morality involved. Rip them apart and render these parts unsalvageable! Overkill is a virtue around here.
Exploration
Quake II sports the old reliable trap-ridden design. You enter a room, cross an invisible line, push a button - and all hell breaks loose. Doors shut behind you and hidden alcoves begin disgorging Stroggs. It gets noisy with chaingun rattling and sizzling innards, and you love every second of it. When things go quiet after being shredded, you don't idle, actively searching for stashes, loopholes, hidden buttons, panels, and secret levels. To then repeat the cycle ad astra. There are many things to find, starting with classic power-ups like the Quad Damage or... a silencer? What. And you don't have to use the stuff on the spot since Quake II has an inventory system to which the remaster added an item wheel for comfort.
Back in the day, my brain used to be smoother, so I often misunderstood my goals and kept running around in circles. The compass, a new addition, would've solved most of my problems with the local non-linearity, alas! This time, I navigated just fine, which allowed me to appreciate the sprawling labyrinthian constructions that make one feel like a mouse lost in the bowels of a grandfather clock. The surreal set design gives birth to a very particular kind of atmosphere where tombs and temples merge into giant factories full of evil machinery like emulsifying flesh presses and bio-compressors that produce lakes of meat, exuding explosions from their chimneys. With a mega-gun piercing the skies in the background. Very 40k.
Guns
I always loved how enemies get riddled with gaping holes and bloodied when damaged. These aren't real wounds in the right places, just changing textures, but they improve the feedback. And boy, is it visceral! Your actions cause heaps of exploding gore, bursting geysers of blood, whole volcanoes of surging bacon! The giblets are varied in shape and size, I can swear I saw bare bones sticking out of limbs and just thick clots of intestines mixed in huge wet clusters of organs. The cause of it, Quake's gunplay, is deliberate and methodical, with every shot's impact reverberating through your body, and accelerated body chunks slapping across your face like it's a stereoscopic seance.
The guns look battered and heavy, discharging anything from flechettes to dark matter. Each one works in any situation, but they still have strong and weak sides, which made me swap often. The machine gun works almost excessively well for one of the starting weapons. The minigun, its older brother, eats too much ammo to be used frequently but nukes whole crowds in seconds. The super-shotty and the railgun are dominant workhorses for every occasion. There are 18 weapons in the package! I can't just talk about all of them. Although, I gotta mention the BFG that ties hordes into knots. Admittedly, the new 10k model seems less effective than the 9k but has a handlebar. Swanky.
Hostiles
You'll fight platoons of beefcakes and those keep getting bigger. There's an armada of robochickens, so I'll only highlight a few selectively. You get your chaingunners who walk like they own the place, literal and figurative tanks, flying barrels, jetpack dwarves, and melee guys that run around waving their metal fists in the air and screaming "trespasser!" akin to angry neighbours chasing kids off their lawn. Their ground slam regularly threw me into lava pits. Gunners are the closest thing to Ogres from the original. These universalists went all the way, jumping, ducking, spraying lead, and striking cool poses. When they're in doubt, they carpet-bomb. Then we have dogs, pigs, spiders, all made out of people! Putting Stroggs' tendency for humiliation on display.
Turning your nemesis into masses of tangled limbs is a blast, but don't disrespect it. Enemies are highly mobile and don't hesitate to pursue you when possible. They shoot while running, while falling, while jumping, and shoot after you shoot their heads off. Most smaller guys can evade projectiles, making launching the ordinarily overpowered explosives a trick shot in many cases. Even the early enemies are designed in a way that makes them dangerous throughout. Some mere basic soldiers have several dramatic death animations, some of which can and will hurt you. Your nemesis is formidable and its war machine is efficient. You'll have to learn every trick up their sleeve, as well as your own, to liquidate the Strogg army with confidence.
Closure
And with the same confidence, I say that not one minute of these 24 hours was wasted. The whole package is crazy good and even includes the N64 version, which is its own mini-campaign. Not to mention a whole new expansion Call of the Machine, easily my favourite part. All in all, the remaster is perfect for veterans and newcomers alike, making Quake II seem like a modern boomer shooter. I love this game with a burning passion, especially Call of the Machine. Its map design is on another level and enemy hordes are so massive they almost rival classic Doom, which is such a bliss! Thus, I'm fully satiated and my redemption arc is complete.
My curator Big Bad Mutuh