Quake II Review

9.7

Format PC

Developer id Software

Publisher Activision

Genre First Person Shooter

This review needs no introduction. So says David McCandless.

This is not going to be a review in the traditional sense. You can gen up on the plot when you buy the game. You can see that Quake II looks marvellous, wondrous and realistic from the screenshots, and if you've played the Q2Test, you already know what Quake II feels like to play. It feels scary. It feels like it really is you versus hordes of 'them'. One false move and you will die, be you pale-faced newbie or designer-stubbled veteran.

There are some beautiful animations. For example, among the squadrons of aliens you face, there are the lowly grunts. When you gun them down they may collapse immediately, struggle to get up, but then manage to get a few shots off before they die - all with appropriate pain-filled sound effects. The bitmapped explosions of the demo have gone, replaced by vector-graphic mushroom clouds. There's coloured lighting, an extraordinary feature which makes Quake II actually look, er - obviously we strapping men are reluctant to use this word but, well - 'beautiful'.

The gameplay is fairly basic. Instead of episodes, we now have eight units: small to large sections made of interconnected levels, often united by a distinct goal (turn off security systems, turn on the reactor etc). The monsters are very definitely clever. They run in zig-zags, get all panicky, and circle you. They also react better to sound, although not always.



Spooge overdrive?

There's too much to say really. And most of it is positive. You want some bad points? Okay, here are the only three we could come up with. They're very specialised:

1) Keeping Quad damage in deathmatch. Part of the weakness of Quad is the 30 second time limit from the moment you pick it up. How many times have you grabbed it and scoured the level trying to find people - and not found a sole? With the Quake II inventory, you can carry it with you for as long as possible and then activate it when you need it. Result: depressing nightmare. Most people learn to lurk around the Quad damage room, wait for people, turn on the power-up, slaughter everyone and then repeat ad nauseam. Also the distinctive 'uh-oh, here he comes' glow has gone. You can, of course, turn off various options, but you can bet most on-line servers will keep this option ticked for months.

2) Weapons available. Undoubtedly the most annoying feature of all, it seems to be impossible (unless we're missing something really obvious) to know what weapons you're carrying around without pressing F1 to bring up your personal computer, which takes up about a third of the screen. In the heat of deathmatch, you do not have the time, space, or inclination to do this. And in the same acrid humidity of death and squalor and screams, you have even less inclination to take notice of what huge chunk of humming metal you're picking up. Result: irritation and no small amount of over-estimation.

3) RAM requirements. Okay, the Quake II engine has taken gaming technology to the cliched 'next level', but not everyone on our tired little continent packs a Pentium II 300MHz with 128Mb of RAM and a 16Mb GL card. Quake II runs like a dog on a Pentium 133 with 16Mb of RAM and a GL card. It might be something to do with sound caching. It might be just a raw processing thing. But you get jerks and slowdowns and delays. Our advice: upgrade. Now.

These three meagre little criticisms, we're afraid, are all we can come up with. There are some other minor niggles: there are no dedicated deathmatch levels (but then iD promise to rectify this with an official patch within a month of release). And the single-player game has CD copy protection, so playing your own musak during play is a no-no.

Other than that, Quake II is pretty much perfect. And it's got open architecture which means, in a few months, brainy Internet people will start improving it. How do you improve a perfect game? Who knows? Just check out the score.



Deathmatch

I have to admit I had my misgivings. And so will you. The press doesn't sound encouraging. iD have repeatedly er, repeated the fact that they were working on a single-player game, first and foremost. And we all know that Doom and Quake were meant as network games from inception.

Your first taste of networked Quake II will be disappointing. The rockets move too slowly. The players run too fast. You can't tell what weapons you have. The armour shards are distracting. Crouching is a bit useless. Rocket jumping isn't quite as powerful as it used to be. And there are no good deathmatch-only levels (although 'Security' is a good starter). After a good half an hour, and after you've turned respawning power-ups off, you'll start to get into it.

Like the single-player game, Quake II deathmatch is hard. The expansive three-dimensionality of the architecture makes tracking down and dealing death blows to your opponents harder. The hi-res workspace and the tighter, true hit-locating bounding boxes increase your margin for error - I mean, you have to aim extremely accurately to score a juicy hit. Unfortunately this makes the Uzi and the chaingun the almighty weapons in the game. For a while. Then you realise the railgun can kill with one well-aimed shot. And that the super shotgun is now as mighty as it once was in Doom (one direct shot will kill anyone).

Despite the configurable aspects of the characters (sex, head, colour), it's still hard to tell who's who, but it really doesn't matter. You're playing on a quicker cycle. You die and respawn almost as quickly in four-player Quake II as you do in 16-player Quake on DM4. It's definitely more of a sniper's game as well. Picking out disorientated newbies has never been so much fun.

There are some more configurable aspects. You can turn off falling damage, for some cool manoeuvres. You can switch between deathmatch one (weapons stay when you pick them up) and two (weapons disappear and then respawn after 30 seconds). You can also toggle random spawning or farthest spawning to avoid frustrating respawn deaths.

After a good 24 hours playing it, I conclude that the weapons are a little imbalanced. The BFG 100K takes too few energy cells to fire. You can get a good three or four shots out of it - devastating in an open space. The rapid-fire machine guns are still too powerful, despite the Uzi's recoil and the Gatling gun's spin-down time. The hand grenades are useless and would be much better as proximity or timed devices. And yes, the rocket does move too slowly, but it can be an awesome weapon when used correctly.

All in all, no particular bells and whistles, but a welcome return to the emphasis on skill, mouse co-ordination and reflexes that Doom so perfectly honed. Network Quake was, at best, a three-weapon game. Quake II is definitely eight to nine. This is not the death-knell for network Quake. The sequel and the predecessor (especially with all the TCs) will continue side by side for quite some time.