The first Quake can be essentially considered a tech demo for the idTech 2 engine. It had many trappings from its predecessor series, Doom; some of these fit poorly with the new features provided by the idTech 2 engine, and thus would have felt like lost opportunities to some players who have observed all of its qualities.
Now, Quake 2 has rectified a lot of its predecessor's shortfalls.
(It is also worth noting here that Quake 2's designs are free from any influence by John Romero, who had left id Software and was purportedly a difficult colleague to work with.)
Due to copyright issues, Quake 2 cannot be called anything else, in order to divest itself from association with its predecessor. However, the game's designers have implemented designs that are so different from Quake that Quake 2 can be considered a successor only from the technical perspective; any spiritual association can hardly be found in the supposed sequel, much less any narrative continuation.
The story no longer concerns an otherworldly invasion of the homes of Humankind. Instead, the plot is the reversed-opposite; humanity's soldiers are counter-invading the invaders instead.
To elaborate, the humans are undertaking a retaliatory invasion of Stroggos, which is the homeworld of the Stroggs who had earlier conducted a largely failed invasion of Earth. After being convinced that the Stroggs are impossible to negotiate with and saw Earth like a predator sees prey, the decision was made to launch a punitive assault on their homeworld to end their threat to Earth.
As slightly more sophisticated the story is and as awesome as the introductory CG cutscene was at the time, the overall plot of the single-player mode is really only an excuse for the player to take control of a typical shooter protagonist and shoot the heck out of inhuman enemies that deserve annihilation.
(As a side-note, the protagonist was later officially given the name "Bitterman", according to information obtained from the disclosure of Quake II's development.)
However, some semblance of a cohesive story would be appreciated by some, if not most, shooter fans, who may be tired of obviously wafer-thin storylines with little reason for the player to feel like he/she has a stake in the outcome of the story.
As is usually the case with shooter games made by id Software, the player character is the only one left to offer any resistance against the enemy after the counter-invasion failed (not least due to bad intelligence on Stroggos' defenses).
Regardless of whether the player started playing the game's single-player or multiplayer mode first, the controls are the first gameplay element that would be encountered.
The first improvement that the player will notice is that the controls are now more appropriately designed for the full 3D environments afforded by idTech 2. Gone are the awkward keyboard buttons used to look up or down, which have been completely replaced by full mouse control.
It also means that any aim-assisting feature has been removed (though it can still be implemented through user mods or third-party coding). Therefore, being accurate is now a matter of skill instead of reliance on crutches. (As a consequence too, any aim-assist implemented by users is considered cheating.)
Of course, having aiming being completely controlled by a mouse meant that some visual aid is needed to provide the player with an idea of where the player character is pointing his/her gun at. A cursor is on-screen as visual representation of this. It is worth noting here that the graphics for the cursor is retrieved from a library of icons, which can have custom-made extras added in by the user.
For moving around, the keyboard is still mainly used. The player character can run, jump and strafe pretty much like the other protagonists of games and mods that had been made using the idTech 2 engine. However, a lot of the physics glitches that allowed the player character to gain far more momentum than is normally possible in the first Quake game are gone, which would be a relief to players of the first game that despised strafe-jumping and bunny-hopping.
(Yet, both exploits can still be performed, but the windows of opportunity are much tighter now. It also appears that the jumping techniques/exploits are not as able to preserve momentum as much as before.)
The player character also appears to be slightly slower than the one in Quake 1, so running and gunning is not the go-to tactic anymore. (This also affects speed-runs for Quake II.)
The next set of changes that the player would notice is the much leaner heads-up display; the counters for primary hitpoints ("health"), secondary hitpoints ("armor") and ammunition count appear as mere numbers and icons attached on-screen. There is no segmentation of the screen for these counters, which is a departure from id's earlier shooters.
Furthermore, the player character's gun is no longer jutting out of the middle of the screen. Instead, they are off to the right, complete with the player character's hands (and also suggesting that the player character is right-handed).
It would seem that having the gun off to the side would present some issues, such as the gun model obscuring the right side of the screen a bit, but the visual obscurity is quite negligible. (This is a fact that is repeated in shooters after Quake II.) It may also suggest that the drawing of the polygons and particle effects for weapons would have problems too, but these are cleverly generated slightly ahead of the model for the player character, with muzzle flashes (or similar effects) giving the illusion that the gun model in the player character's hands is firing something.
Shooters of Quake II's time are often defined by and remembered for their weapons, and Quake II's armory would be a pleasant surprise for veterans of the shooter genre (at the time, of course), except for a few insufficiently designed ones.
The largely impractical default weapons that protagonists of id Software's games often have are absent in this game. There is no melee weapon for player characters in this game, and no ranged default weapon that is a weak gun and a waste of ammunition (that it shares with bigger guns).
Instead, the player character starts with the Blaster, a sci-fi pistol with unlimited energy-based shots. It is not a powerful weapon, but a player can resort to spamming shots without end if there is no other weapon to use.
The Shotgun makes a return, though this version is still very much like the other Shotguns in id's previous games; it is merely there to be known as the "little brother" of a bigger weapon that also uses shotgun shells.
The Super Shotgun, the aforementioned "big brother" of the shotgun duo, simply outclasses its sibling. (In fact, the manual acknowledges this design.) Of course, it uses two shells every time that it is fired, but having almost the same firing rate and more damage potential makes the Super Shotgun the more efficient of the two.
The regular Shotgun does have a tighter cone of pellet spread to make it more useful at ranges other than point blank, but there are other much more suitable weapons. Overall, the Shotgun's designs are a disappointment.
One of the earlier weapons that the player would come across in the single-player campaign is the Machinegun, which uses bullet ammunition. It comes across as an experimentation of sorts by id Software in implementing weapon recoil, in addition to apparently being a reworking of the pistol.
The Machinegun has a prodigious rate of fire if compared to id Software's once-traditional sidearm for the protagonists of its shooters. It is also a hit-scan weapon, with little spread. Therefore, theoretically, it could have been quite useful, if it was not for its terrible recoil scripts.
Firing the gun alters the view perspective of the player, e.g. shakes the screen; the alteration is permanent, as the perspective will not return to how it was before the gun is fired. Even short bursts alter the view, and long, uncontrolled fire would eventually have the player character looking up at the sky. In other words, the player will be practically struggling with the mouse when using this weapon.
Considering the fuss, both in-game and real-life, using the gun is just not worth the trouble. It is a poorly designed weapon.
A gun that makes better use of bullet ammunition is the Chaingun, which returns in Quake to spew lots of bullets. The Chaingun has a higher rate of fire than the Machinegun, has more damage, has little to no spread and is hit-scan. It should be apparent to any shooter veteran that the Chaingun, once obtained, renders the smaller gun obsolete.
Better use of idTech 2's capability at animating 3D models allowed the game designers to include on-screen animations of the player character's arms whenever he handles weapons. One of the results of this implementation is the Hand Grenade.
After having the player character twisting a Grenade to arm it, the player may choose to "cook" it instead of having it thrown right away. Of course, holding a Grenade with a fuse that is running out is not without risk, but the tactical option to lob a well-primed Grenade over obstacles and have it explode just above the heads of enemies is lucrative. To assist the player, there are audio cues, e.g. ticking noises, for the countdown to the Grenade's detonation.
Like Quake 1's Grenades, the Hand Grenade bounces around a lot during the countdown. It also explodes upon contact with enemies, regardless of how many times it has bounced.
The Grenade Launcher lacks the Hand Grenade's "cooking" option, but it can lob grenades at a faster rate and the Grenades that it launches still have the same properties as Hand Grenades. In fact, it functions a lot like the Grenade Launcher in the first Quake game, except it has a model with a higher polygon count.
The Rocket Launcher returns in Quake II, but gone are its prodigious firing rate and the speed of its projectiles. It is a much more balanced weapon than it was in the first Quake, while it retains the option to give player characters an explosive (and painful) boost in making very high/far jumps.
The Hyperblaster is a new weapon that appears to be id's experiment on creating a gun that can produce a continuous stream of particle effects when fired. Surprisingly, the gun's graphical effects are successfully executed in-game without any severe drops in frame rates. The energy stream only travels as fast as a Blaster's shots, despite being described as an "energy Chaingun" in the manual.
Yet, while it is not a hit-scan weapon and does not fire as quickly, it does more damage per "shot" than the Chaingun and can ruin the target in mere moments, assuming that the player can keep the energy stream on it. Overall, it is a very pleasant new weapon to use.
However, few new weapons in the game could be as fun as the next two. One of them is the Railgun, which is id's answer to the question of whether there is a sci-fi sniper rifle or not. It is essentially a hit-scan weapon that does tremendous damage per shot, but leaves behind a trail of very obvious particle effects and has a very slow firing rate.
It is a high-risk, high-reward weapon that would be very devastating in the hands of a player with "l33t twitch" skills. Its power is exceptionally apparent in multiplayer, where unsuspecting players often meet an untimely doom when running across spaces with little cover. However, its slow rate of fire is often the doom of players who refuse to use anything else.
In single-player, however, most players would find that its designs are not so handy, as there are many enemies in the game that can take more than one round and there are few situations where the player character can make use of the reach of the Railgun to pick off enemies.
Perhaps the most pleasantly surprising weapon in the game is the BFG 10K, which was touted as a successor to the BFG 9K in Doom, which had peculiar programming for its damage calculation.
BFG 10K returns with the same sight-dependent damage application, e.g. the player character has to be looking at what he/she wants to become dead when the munitions of the weapon explode. However, unlike the weapon in Doom, it always begins its onslaught with an energy ball launched from the gun; the projectile then floats forward slowly, while irradiating any enemy that is near it with deadly beams of radiation. The sight-dependent damage scripts only trigger when the ball collides with something and explodes.
In single-player, it is a devastating weapon that retains the room-clearing reputation of its fore-bearer. In multiplayer, experienced players are not likely to stay around when the ball comes, partly because of its tell-tale droning sound effects and the knowledge that it annihilates almost any player character outright; even its beams kill in mere few seconds.
The weapon's devastating potential is balanced by its very slow rate of fire; this in turn limits its utility to area-denial at most times, a fight-ending device in occasions where opposing players are not aware of its coming, e.g. the player has the element of surprise.
To summarize the designs of weapons in this game, one can say that id Software gives a lot more thought to weapon-balancing this time, giving almost every weapon its niche. However, there are of course a few disappointments, as mentioned earlier.
Perhaps more successful overall is the design of the sound effects for these weapons. Each of them has its own unique sound effect, more so than in the previous Quake (in which there is little to differentiate weapons like the Nail Gun and its Chain variant from each other). All of them sound thematically appropriate too.
An id Software game won't be much without collectibles for the player to retrieve. Quake II has the usual health and armor pickups, including the return of small-boost items like the Armor Shard and the Stimpak (which retains the ability to boost the player's health permanently over 100 units) from Quake. Medikits also return (with more polygons now) to do the usual pick-up-and-go healing.
However, one major difference that Quake II's single-player mode has compared to the first Quake's is that players can choose to keep certain power-ups for later use, which will be described later.
There are, for a shooter game, a staggering four types of armor that a player character can have, though only three of these are in multiplayer for purposes of expedience. These three have differing damage absorption (and deflection) properties.
The default Jacket Armor is the weakest of the three, and is the first that the player would encounter in the single-player mode. In multiplayer, Jacket Armor respawns the fastest and is the most common (in official maps), to the convenience of players that are not picky with their choice of protection.
The next armor is Combat Armor, which is substantially more effective. The third is Body Armor, which can absorb/deflect a tremendous 80% of incoming damage, making the player character very difficult to kill. In multiplayer, these two types of armor can be quite imbalanced, especially if a player gets the opportunity to hog them.
These three types of armor were actually in the first Quake. However, unlike in the first game, picking up armor types that are different from the one that the player character has will not replace the latter, if the latter is of a more powerful version. This convenient design also extends to multiplayer, which further adds to aforementioned potential imbalance.
The fourth armor type is only available in the single-player mode. This armor can be stored in the player character's inventory, to be activated when convenient. When activated, it depletes energy cell ammo, in return for increased protection from energy-based weapons, of which there are quite a lot in enemies' hands. It is disappointing that there is no multiplayer version, however, as getting close to players who have the more powerful energy weapons can be a dangerous act.
Megahealth returns from Quake, and like the first version, gives the player character a health boost of 100 units above whatever level that he/she has at the time. Similarly, any health that goes over 100 unit is bled away eventually, encouraging players to play much more aggressively when they have ample health.
The Ammo Pack returns, from Doom, in Quake II. Its main effect is still the same: an increase in ammunition capacity for the player character. There is also a lesser version of the Ammo Pack in the form of the Bandolier.
Unfortunately, these items are much more useful in single-player than in multiplayer, due to the small amounts of ammo that they supply. Considering that player characters lose their ammo capacity increases when they die, the utility of these items are severely reduced.
The new Super-Adrenaline power-up can be perhaps described as the health equivalent of the Ammo Pack/Bandolier, as in it increases the player character's health permanently by one unit, while completely healing the player character. Its permanent health upgrade is useless in multiplayer, where death can come quickly and unexpectedly, but its full health replenishment makes it useful to grab when the need arises.
The Enviro-Suit and Rebreathers are items exclusive to single-player mode and can be stored in the inventory for later use, which is a useful convenience especially when compared to those in Doom or the first Quake. As their names suggest, they are meant to help the player navigate through the more hazardous of locations in the single-player mode.
The popular and iconic Quad Damage unsurprisingly makes a comeback, and perhaps an unexpectedly spectacular one too. It still offers the same temporary quadruple-level boost to damage output, but it is made so much more effective due to the designs of weapons in this game, especially those for the new ones which are rendered exceptionally deadly when empowered with Quad Damage. Conveniently, the single-player mode lets the player character store one for situational use, namely against bosses.
One would not be much wrong when criticizing the Quad Damage as being an overpowered buff in both single-player and multiplayer.
The returning Invulnerability power-up does not have a comeback that is as contentious, fortunately. Its effects, both actual and consequential, remain very much the same like those of its forebearers.
A handful of the power-ups are either exclusive to single-player mode or next-to-useless in multiplayer. The Silencer is an opposite-exception. When used, the Silencer renders weapons completely silent (i.e. disabling their sound effects) temporarily. In single-player mode, this benefit is pointless because AI-controlled enemies, like in so many other id Software shooters, know exactly where the player character is in the level once they are aware of his presence. In multiplayer mode, this weapon can be one of the most entertaining - and aggravating - power-ups, because there are many weapons that are much deadlier once silenced.
id Software always has the tradition of crafting peculiar and disturbing inhuman creatures or outright monsters for the single-player modes of its games. Quake II is no different, though the themes of its menagerie are much more certain than those for monsters in earlier id games. Of course, they have sci-fi cybernetic themes, as befitting the canon that id crafted for the Stroggs.
In typical id tradition, the single-player mode throws the weakest enemies at the player first. They start with the Guards, which are essentially converted humans, not unlike the Former Humans from Doom. They come in three variants, but all are essentially cannon fodder that is most dangerous in groups (and even so these can be swept away with explosives quite quickly).
It is odd that id did not put much effort into differentiating them visually, however. In fact, they resemble each other and can be hard to pick out for selective elimination in the heat of battle, despite having different-looking guns and different texture colours.
Then, the game introduces tougher but otherwise straight-forward enemies like the Berserker and Enforcer (the latter of which has a melee attack in addition to ranged attacks).
Later, the game sends more powerful and up-gunned versions of earlier enemies. Examples include the Gunner, which is a more elite version of the Enforcer with an additional Grenade Launcher and the Iron Maiden, which is a more dangerous version of the Berserker albeit female and armed with a Rocket Launcher too. These have the same general AI scripts as the earlier enemies, but having different weapons and thus requiring a different approach.
The game does send enemies that appear to make better use of the idTech 2 engine, specifically its physics scripting for enemies floating through the air. These include the Flyers, which are tiny, (horizontally) narrow critters with pairs of Blasters and also fly in to slice the player character with their sharp wings. There are also the Icari, which appear to be larger versions of Flyers with more powerful weapons and larger models (but minus any melee attack).
id also included an aerial meat-shield of sorts in the form of the Technician, which appears to be canonically the "egg-head" member of Strogg society (if there is one).
(The first Quake does have flying enemies, but these appear to be suspended in the air instead of flowing around more believably like those in Quake II.)
Then, the game sends the "brute" archetypes. The Gladiator is the first enemy with a large model and a Railgun, as well as a mean melee weapon that would punish any player character that gets close to take advantage of its inertia. Next, there are the Tank and Tank Commander, both of which are tall bruisers with a lot of heavy weapons; the latter has a lot more hitpoints, as it appears late in the single-player mode when the player character has more powerful weapons.
In an effort to reintroduce an enemy that plays a role similar to that of the Arch-Vile in the Doom games, id introduces the oddly named Medic. This enemy does not exactly heal any enemy that is wounded, but instead raises them back from the state of death if the latter still have intact corpses, and at a quick pace too. This enemy would change the behavior of the player entirely; he/she is likely to mulch any fallen enemy that he/she comes across.
This, of course, gives the player more than enough opportunities to appreciate the new "giblet" polygons that id has made for Quake 2. (However, all corpses still appear to have the same giblets, regardless of which creatures that these corpses were made from.)
There are also some enemies that appear to have been included for thematic emphasis, but most of them are otherwise bland and easy to defeat. One of them is the Mutant, which is an update of the Fiend from the first Quake. Like its fore-bearer, it is easily defeated by making use of higher platforms or locations where its limited path-finding prowess cannot reach.
One other is the disappointingly stupid Barracuda Shark, which is a danger if the player character is underwater but can otherwise be defeated by simply luring it out of the water onto ramps or slopes (that ironically lead the player character into the water in the first place).
Next, there is the Brain, which appears to be included just to show that the Stroggs have supervisors for their diabolical factories. Yet, it is a pathetically slow enemy that can only attack in melee.
The only exception is the Parasite, which appears to have a special attack that involves launching a tube at the player character and sucking out HP from the latter. Its design is an experiment by id that is quite successful in portraying a Strogg creature that attempts to drain its prey dry instead of killing them brutally outright.
Enemies that appear to use ranged weapons that fire munitions will always drop ammunition, which is a departure from many of id's previous games where enemies tend to just leave behind mangled corpses. This helps much in reducing worries about having to conserve ammunition, though it still won't compensate for the consequences of going wildly trigger-happy.
In single-player mode, the player character essentially goes from one end of the current level to another. However, the exit is often not some door or portal labeled "EXIT", or uses the same model over and over. Instead, the exit is often something from level to level, like a lift, a transitional chamber of sorts or even a fall down a chute. (These are incidentally level-transition techniques that will be used in later games.) Also, exit-ways are not available until the player completes the objective in the level, which effectively becomes a more sophisticated "key" to "unlock" the exit.
There are, of course, typical key-searching tasks, but the scripted triggers for unlocking the exits of levels reward the player with scripted animations of the consequences of the player character's achievement of his objectives. Some of them can be quite a joy to look at, especially the ones involving lots of explosions and drastic changes in models.
Outside of such levels, the single-player mode features boss fights against enemies that are much more powerful and heavily armed than the regular ones. Most of them can be quite difficult to defeat if not for conveniently located pieces of cover that the player character can hide behind. Most of these battles require a lot of patience from the player, but eventually rewards persistence with spectacular death animations for these powerhouses.
In addition to the sound effects for their weapons (which appear lifted from those for the weapons), these enemies have the usual voice-overs that can be expected from inhuman monsters: grunts, growls, howls, groans and other guttural noises. There is, however, an electronic/mechanical quality to their voice-overs, as befitting their cybernetic nature.
Most importantly, they have actual, spoken voice-overs now, or at least those that id Software wants to suggest were formerly human. They can be a bit difficult to listen to and appreciate though, as the player is likely to just shoot away at them as soon as he/she realizes their presence.
The single-player mode can best be summarized as most fun if the player is only interested in killing things that deserve destruction.
However, (somewhat) new enemies and new/redesigned weapons are not the only things worth encountering in Quake II. id Software has always been known to have dedicated and/or talented map designers, and they do not disappoint much in Quake II.
The single-player maps benefit from the stronger thematic focus in Quake II. The maps serve to show the cruel, heavily industrialized world of Stroggos, giving the player an opportunity to take a macabre tour of the facilities that support the existence of Strogg civilization and their war efforts. All of them have the sci-fi look, but also enough inhuman appearance to more than suggest to the player that they are a monstrous race.
Otherwise, all of them essentially play like maps in previous id games; the player has to get from one end of the level to another, but doing things along the way to clear the path.
True to id tradition, all maps in the single-player mode have secrets that reward curious exploration (or a glance at guides and FAQs). The map designers also attempted to extend this tradition to some multiplayer maps, but the consequences were unfortunately negative. As locations of secrets stay exactly the same regardless of how many times the map is played, this unwittingly gives experienced players a big edge over more rookie ones in the official maps that have them.
Official multiplayer maps (and the better designed of third-party maps) often place very potent power-ups at very hotly contested and often wide-open locations. These maps can be hectic and fun to play, thanks to the risk-versus-reward factor worked into the map.
The multiplayer mode plays much like those for earlier id games; players set up servers of their own and join them for matches that can be played in settings of Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch or Co-op mode through the story campaign. A new variant is Capture-The-Flag, which had been made popular by a certain mod for the first Quake game.
Multiplayer is mostly free from the issues in the first game, namely the (relatively more) easily performed physics exploits and awkward controls that do not fit the full 3D environments well. The more balanced weapons - though not completely so - make for less frustrating matches where players hogging the more powerful guns and ammo for them would dominate.
The option to swap out the default models for use in multiplayer return in Quake II, but with Quake II's much more powerful version of the idTech 2 engine, the models can be a lot more varied than ever. In the first few months after the launch of the game, there were models which resemble famous cartoon and comic characters, with (more-or-less) appropriately shaped polygons.
However, the multiplayer mode is not entirely flawless. There are the aforementioned useless and perceptibly over-powered power-ups in official maps; crafty/unscrupulous players would eventually learn to make circuits around the map to hog these pick-ups as much as possible, effectively turning them into a revolving clockwork of doom if other players let them collect items unchecked. This problem is made worse if there are "secret" locations in the maps that hide powerful items.
Accompanying all the fun (and a bit of frustration) of the the gameplay designs and sound effects mentioned above are a cluster of soundtracks written and performed by Sonic Mayhem. This is a departure from previous id games, which were mostly played to the tunes of Nine Inch Nails. The soundtracks are very forceful with an aggro-industrial beat, an occurrence that is not likely a coincidence due to the thematic and canonical designs of the Stroggs.
In conclusion, Quake II has a lot of improvements over Quake I, though many of these were inspired by mods and games that used the early versions of the idTech 2 engine as middleware, or are returning good ideas from the Doom games that were missing in Quake I. Quake II is what Quake I should have been, but it does not have the same genre ground-breaking factor that the first Quake had (and almost squandered with its many setbacks).