There are games that happen to become revolutionary, spawn entire genres and become household names throughout the industry. There are games that, on the contrary, took all the best from the existing industry: mechanics, approach to game design and technology, and, combining ready-made elements, produced standard works of their time, which may not have amazed the imagination with their innovation, but produced high quality using existing material. And this is not to mention the less ambitious projects that tried to sit on the ground doing purely craft work. But some games managed to fall between heaven and earth, simultaneously existing in different time paradigms, when partly the game, it would seem, still fully complies with all the parameters of the outgoing era, and on the other hand, it strives with all its might to new times. But at the same time, the game manages to lose something necessary on each of its sides, I’m torn apart between the past and the future. And this is exactly the kind of game that fell on the knife’s edge for me Quake II .
It would seem that by the time the second Quackie was released, the studio id was at the pinnacle of success, firing hits over and over again at direct fire from success to success. However, just to the exit Quake II the studio was in a deep crisis associated with the departure of a number of key employees, and was no longer the same company as three or four years ago. However, the general public did not care too much about all these issues. Moreover, it was released at the very end of 1997 Quake II turned out to be a real hit, selling like hot cakes on a hungry day. So the press and audience still applauded the Idovites and the genius of John Carmack. True, it was after this game that the studio first went into the purely online component of the third Quake, and then began creating single-player games for years, releasing a teaspoon per hour.
Personally, I first became acquainted with the game after playing much newer games of the genre like the same Half-Life Blue Shift , Red Faction , Delta Force Land Warrior or Project I. G. I. I still remember how after the pool I went to visit my cousins and in my free minutes played games installed on their computer. They were there, and the first in the series for me Need for Speed Porsche Unleashed , and all sorts of simple quests, and an office chicken shooter, and in addition to all these games, this classic shooter was installed there. At that time, the game seemed to me like some wildly outdated piece of the past, with primitive shooting, stupid enemies, repetitive and boring gameplay and some kind of atmosphere of oppressive boredom, when only shots and screams of enemies broke the gaping silence. And even though I didn’t particularly like the game in those years, the implicit itch of an unfinished playthrough in childhood haunted me at times. And therefore, when I once again had the chance to choose an old game to play through, my choice fell on Quake II .
So what did I see. Quake https://elabetcasino.co.uk/bonus/ II this is a classic shooter, working according to all the patterns of a joker from the 90s, not much different in terms of the core gameplay from the same first one Doom . We also walk through moderately confusing levels in search of key items and buttons in order to open the way to the next levels, simultaneously destroying hordes of enemies eager to get to your tender carcass, and at the very end we kill the big boss. As in the studio’s previous games, the entire plot fits into a couple of paragraphs of a txt file, providing some general information so that an interested player can at least find out what is happening in the game and who is fighting with whom. However, at the same time, the game is a classic military shooter from the early 00s in a sci-fi setting and the gameplay is hardly distinguishable from the same Medal of Honor Allied Assault . As in later games, we start with a big epic cutscene showing us the beginning of a large military operation. Then we find ourselves behind enemy lines and, having contacted the headquarters, begin to carry out a series of sabotage, destroying the enemy’s military infrastructure. Moreover, the levels themselves are large and can consist of several maps, on which it is often necessary to complete a number of sequential tasks without disdaining backtracking and using already familiar places. At the same time, the tasks themselves are quite sane and logical, there will be no search for keys of all the colors of the rainbow, and if from time to time you read the list of current tasks, you will even be able to understand some of the internal plot of the game. Although, of course, a couple of times during the game I happened to get pretty lost like that, but I suspect that the same final palace or prison was created so that the player would spend some time trying to figure out where to go.
The plot is a loose rehash of “The Guns of Navarone Island” in a science fiction setting. In the future, Earth is attacked by alien cyborg invaders called Stroggs. Humanity, don’t be a fool, repelled the attack of the incoming invaders and prepared a retaliatory strike on the home planet of the insurgents, Stroggos. But the pretentious landing operation immediately did not go according to plan – most of the landing capsules were shot down, and the paratroopers themselves were killed or captured, where they were subjected to terrible torment and torture. But our main character Bitterman was not a mistake – although he fell far from the landing zone, he is still under the control of the player, which means everything will be fine for him. He will destroy all the “big guns” of the enemy, go through fire and water and toxic waste, and at the very end he will even defeat the acting leader of the Strogg Macron.
If we focus on the graphical side of the game, it should be noted that the game became outdated quite quickly. So much so that already 2-3 years after its release it began to seem like an artifact of bygone times. At the same time, at the time of its release, it pleased and surprised with its graphics, but in those years, the progress of the visual component in games with three-dimensional graphics went by leaps and bounds, and therefore some projects already at release could look like aliens from the corridors of time. But from the heights of past years, it can be noted that the game has quite nice stylized graphics, where simple models of enemies do not stand out very much against the background of the environment. At least the game doesn’t have any really jerky animations or overly shameful textures. The picture manages to maintain the stylistic and unity of workmanship and technology capabilities, and this, in my opinion, is the main thing for graphic art.
The sound in the game normally performs all the necessary functions: one barrel is easy to distinguish from another by the sound of shooting, and it is not difficult to distinguish opponents blindly. However, in my opinion, the best part of the whole game, the element that saves the gameplay and pulls the second Kwaka into personal shooter tops, was the local soundtrack. Music by author Sonic Mayhem manages to rock the entire gameplay and seem to be directing shootouts, when during the next collision with enemies you shoot, as if to the beat of the melodies. The tracks themselves are filled with an industrial electronic sound and filled with some kind of primitive energy, but at the same time fit perfectly with the sci-fi environment. In my opinion, there was no soundtrack like this in shooters until the last works of Mick Gordon. At the same time, despite the nominally not so long duration of the tracks, the game manages to arrange them correctly in levels, as a result of which the compositions not only do not get boring, but on the contrary, having heard already familiar motives, you yourself begin to rejoice like a child and speed up the gameplay, taking increasingly risky steps and aggressive movements. But remembering this game in pirated versions without music, it really was quite sad. This is what the power of music can do. So play in Quake II without music you are depriving yourself of almost two-thirds of the pleasure you get from the game.
The weapon set is still an Idov classic, presented back in the Duma. Pistol, shotgun/double-barreled gun, machine gun, rocket launcher, plasma thrower/BFGha, perhaps from the first Quake borrowed a grenade launcher that fires grenades along a ballistic trajectory. Of the full-fledged new products, we can only note the rather useless ability to throw grenades with handles, as well as an assault rifle, which turns out to be a slightly weakened version of a machine gun that is not so voracious for ammunition and, finally, the local “rail”, aka a railgun, aka just an elephant-killer. And the gameplay itself is significantly influenced only by the rail, because the very ability to fire an accurate and powerful shot at the longest distances has never been seen in games before id. And here, not only that: if you try and gather enemies in a group or catch a crowd of them in a narrow corridor, then the railgun will be able to cut out opponents with amazing efficiency.
Local opponents are distinguished by their enviable thick skin and focus only on bringing as much harm to the player as possible. No cunning maneuvers or sidesteps, only direct and undisguised violence coupled with blunt persistence. Personally, for my taste, the local bestiary turned out to be rather faceless and inexpressive, at least after the monsters from the same Doom , where almost every second enemy has become an iconic image, local enemies are not at all etched in memory. The only exception was a pair of heavy Strogg security forces: one with some kind of crowbars instead of hands, trying to throw you into the air, and the other with a machine gun and grenade launcher, capable of trashing almost half the map with his grenades. Moreover, from some point on, it is this sweet couple that becomes almost your main opponents in the game, while the most ordinary soldiers and bullies, flying off from a couple of charges, begin to throw pellets only on major holidays. Well, flying plasma throwers with jetpacks can be quite annoying enemies at times. All the rest of your enemies are various cybermechs of one thick skin or another, which are more boring to pick for half a minute than to get the joy of exterminating them. Yes, occasionally encountered exotics such as the remains of aquatic life of Stroggos, some mutants or repair bots with power shields, found in homeopathic volumes.
As an innovation, it can be noted that local bonuses such as quadruple damage, invulnerability or breathing masks and RCBZ suits are no longer activated instantly upon selection as in previous games of the studio, but are sent to the inventory to be used at the most necessary moment. Of course, there is nothing fundamentally new here for the genre, because bonuses in the inventory were present not only in the innovative System Shock , but also in a crazy joke Heretic . Is it possible that the Idovites have relieved themselves of the concern of staging the gameplay, as was the case in previous games, where they tried to place bonuses in the right places in order to diversify and facilitate the gameplay. Now the bonuses are collecting dust in your backpack and are activated most often because you cannot pick up another similar power-up. Moreover, I went through the entire game and could not understand why almost half of all the collected rubbish was needed.
So what do we see as a result?? Personally, I got the feeling that the creators of the game were already getting creative, but the overall level of skill was at such a high level that the game turned out to be developed purely “in class”. Apparently only John Carmack himself was truly passionate about the game, who wrote a very beautiful and technologically advanced engine of his time, and Sonic Mayhem the game composer, who produced one of the best musical works in his genre. Otherwise, the game is designed to a high degree of competence, but rather soullessly and, with some exceptions, as if on autopilot. Again, it’s nice to play it, because the mechanics of shooting and movement themselves are, in my opinion, better designed than in the later Doom 3 , but the game itself is somehow not memorable and quickly flies out of my head. And in general, the authors could not decide what they were creating: a military corridor shooter with staging, plots and a claim to some realism, or an old-fashioned shooter, where an army of one man exterminates hordes of enemies in confusing levels. Well, the visual execution still hovered on the edge of conventions, not even reaching the attempts at realism in the same first Halfa. In short, if you are a fan of classic jokesters and cool soundtrack, then you most likely played this game anyway, but I can’t recommend this game to anyone else. Well, at least I closed the old gestalt for myself. Such things.
