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Quake II: 100% COMPLETION REVIEW



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Quake II. Now in rare form. The Hex Engine's brains. ID's guts. Your soul. Simply put, this is as raw as it gets.

Am I supposed to be killing enemies, or headbanging to the absolute FIRE that is the soundtrack? It goes through Heavy Metal, all the way to Groove Metal, to Industrial, to Alternative, with riffs that Metal bands wish they came up with earlier, like the main riff from "Quad Machine", or the one from "Kill Ratio". "Rage" sounds like a KoRn song. "Descent into Cerberon" sounds like a leftover from DOOM Eternal. Huge kudos to Sonic Mayhem, for doing one of the best game soundtracks of all time! As a Metal connoisseur who listens to this music genre exclusively, I totally approve of this. It sounds like a true Metal album, and one that you could listen to at anytime outside of the game. Hell, I'm definitely going to listen to "March of the Stroggs" next time I lift weights at the gym!

Quake II feels ahead of its time, which sounds funny when said in a review written in 2024, but here we are. The Lovecraftian medieval gothic horror theme was ditched for a sci-fi, techno-cyber industrial aesthetic in this entry, which surprisingly still feels like Quake, despite bringing a whole different vibe. This remaster is a great package, since it contains Quake II, the two official mission packs, the entire game content of Quake II 64, an all-new expansion, development related notes and goodies, cut content seamlessly restored, and a fully working multiplayer component with just enough players to be enjoyable. All of it, while perfectly preserving the good old original title, despite the QoL and technical improvements. One can have fun for several hours here! Now THIS is the standard that should be set for remasters. Take notes, modern developers.

The new piece of content, Call of the Machine, is reminiscent of the first game's remaster expansion, Dimension of the Machine, where one needs to complete six levels while occasionally coming back to a hub area. It was made by the same developers, MachineGames. In terms of quality, it's pretty decent. It expects the player to master the movement, and raises the skill requirement, which in theory would be a good thing, since the original game is sadly too easy to complete. At the end of the day however, it's an artificial difficulty raise. An overwhelming amount of enemies is NOT how you raise difficulty. It's also a gaming sin to recycle boss enemies. Well, if it's not made by ID, it shows. Despite my undiagnosed herpetophobia, I appreciated the section where we are forced to swim through sewer pipes with those sharks coming at us in tight places, which made me physically recoil from the screen. Running out of shotgun shells right then and there was horrifying to say the least, since it's the weapon that one shots these little phobia inducing bastards. This was as far as Quake II went about being a horror game. It's an alright expansion otherwise, despite these weird difficulty spikes.

The Reckoning and Ground Zero are the official mission packs. They're almost as long as Quake II itself, and there's good variety of new weapons, scenery and heart pumping action. Also not made by ID, but made by very talented people as well back in 1998. These expansions are also much harder, but the great level design has higher influence in making cool encounters, varying between long corridors where one has to dodge incoming projectiles with finesse, and large open areas that require target priority. There's also Quake II 64, which is easy to complete and a bit short, but understandably so, since it's originally a Nintendo 64 game. I personally completed it in one sitting, during one full morning, starting at 8:30 AM after a nice breakfast with my grandparents. Well fed, awoken, ready to kick some Strogg ass.

Achievement completion is simple in this game, since all that's required is to complete each campaign at least once, in any difficulty, so there won't be any guides linked here. It's advised to play in Nightmare difficulty from the get go, just for a small boost in challenge, otherwise the original game could become dull. Nightmare simply spawns more enemies in the level, and requires one not to be reckless, and instead mindful of what weapon to use against whom: not overwhelmingly difficult to play. The direction ID Software went with in Quake II was to make it feel like a power fantasy, like DOOM, rather than the hopelessness and level design cruelty of the first Quake. It's funny how our secondary objectives are always some sort of turning off machinery, disabling security or destroying Strogg this and Strogg that, reinforcing how badass our characters are. It never feels repetitive though, and the game is much better than that sounds, so it's meant as a compliment.

The advertising for Quake II back in the day was exquisite to say the least: meat related puns, "Quake is everywhere!", late 90's crazy wording, "10 reasons why you died in Quake", etc. Quake II oozes 90's: how freaking cool is that?! We can "sink our teeth" and "get a taste" of it on ID Vault > Development, in the main menu.

Before playing, don't forget to disable texture smoothing for the old school experience!