Where is it?

User Rating: 8.1 | Quake II PC
By differentiation | Review Date:
Quake II is a game more for the fans of the series rather than for casual FPS gamers. It is an improvement over the 1st game, and lays down some revolutionary stuff for future FPS back in the day. Some of the noteable things is the level design and enemy AI. Enemies don't run straight at you, they zig zag and dodge your projectiles. This may not seem like much to the gamer in 2005, but in its day, this was groundbreaking. Gibbing enemies was fun, it adds a new feel when your corpse can get desecrated. It was also the first FPS to have a actual storyline, however loose and uneventful. Each level gives you an objective so there's a sense of purpose, but it's still basically kill them all mentality. ID has gone back to its Quake II roots with Quake IV, which was to have a single player mode rather than Quake III, which was all multiplayer in the multiplayer hype. If you ask me, a single player game, if made spectacular (like Half-Life), is worth more than any multiplayer game. If you think about it, Quake IV is really the follow up to Quake II.

But back to my 1st point, I didn't really feel hyped up about the whole Quake thing. The whole hype was overblown. I didn't like myself in the basement to play this and I didn't run about imagining gibbing folks in public, which the hype had people wanting to do. Quake to me is just another game like Doom, where given a weak story, you just kill whatever you see. The Strogg wasn't hellspawn and the Marines getting killed, I've seen worse. I remember reading a PCGamer magazine in the '90s that said playing Quake II in the dark and hearing the Marines wail gave him goosebumps. The Marines didn't wail, they just moved around and made incoherent noises. Them getting squashed isn't scary. The Strogg wasn't scary, the environments wasn't frightening. However one can tell why ID games since Quake II has been so dark. This game was so gamma challenged, I literally can only play this at night with the lights off. This was very annoying and doesn't add to the scare factor like Doom 3 does. The innovative stuff this game came out with in its day still has me wondering where all the hype came from, I just don't see it. I didn't get this game in the '90s either when it first came out, because games like Warcraft and C&C blew it out of the water. That being said, the bottom-line is that it's a classic much like Doom, but don't believe the hype you've heard about in the '90s.

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