Quake II Review (AdorableSergal)
On the cusp of the release of the remaster, hello new and old players!
Many reviews will talk about the campaign. Fair enough. I want to talk about the vibe. I want to talk about the astounding burst of Cambrian-style creativity from the community that surpassed the limited toolset that was available to fans of the previous Quake.
You gotta understand that when Q2 dropped, the space marine thing wasn't played out, railguns hadn't quite hit the public consciousness yet (sorry Shadow Warrior fans), nerds argued passionately about which game engine was better, and 3D accelerators were just showing up on the scene, within the reach of mere mortals. If you lived through it, the satire of the Starship Troopers movie probably went over your head, and you thought it was just about the most awesome thing you'd ever seen in cinema, in which case this game was right up your alley.
It was enough to be a space marine gremlin wrecking alien factories. All you needed a gun and a target-rich environment to have a good time. Many of you were still making the transition from keyboard-only play to the familiar WASD+Mouse that is the gold standard of FPS interaction (though you can still very much do a KB-only run in Q2). It was still a good challenge. It was fun to explore new environments. It was still Quake, though the entire vibe was different.
Multiplayer was where Q2 really shone. The community poured out a steady stream of new maps (some of which have a competitive heritage that continues to this day), new player models, new mods, even a refinement of the clumsy "Quake movie" with the release of a tool called Keygrip 2, which allowed creatives to "recam" in-game demos to create sick frag videos or proper short films. My family and I still watch "The Night Before Quakemas" every Christmas.
Something often overlooked in reviews for the game is the fact that Quake 2 let you choose your gender. Pretty much any other shooter at the time cast you immutably as a gun-toting male BAMF, but Q2 was the first shooter I ran across that let me play as a woman. That may not seem like a big deal to you, but to my girlfriends and I, it was a big deal. It made us feel at least a little bit more seen in an area of gaming that was exclusively considered a "guy thing."
So if you pick this up fresh, or you're returning to it after all these years, do yourself a favour, and take advantage of everything this game had to offer. Go out and get some custom maps. Overload your directories with custom player models and play as a crate or a lemming or Optimus Prime. Watch some Quake 2 movies at https://www.gamers.org/pub/idgames2/planetquake/cineplex/. You'll be glad you did.