It’s very easy to get frustrated with Quake 2 for what it isn’t rather than what it is. I’m not sure it’s a game I ever disliked, but it’s not a game I had much interest in for many reasons that a lot of people seem to outright dislike it for.

Quake 1 was a dimension hopping adventure that had a wide mix of fantasy influences with a unique dark and oppressive tone. Quake 2 is not that. It is a hard sci-fi shooter that takes place firmly in one dimension and one planet against one threat. While not wholly generic, especially for the time, it does feel somewhat monotone nowadays, and even feels like it’s retreading on a lot of thematic and aesthetic elements from the earlier Doom games, ironic for the sequel to the game that put an end to the term “Doom clone”.

Quake 1 and 3 are deeply minimalist games. Quake 2 is not. It is the most mechanically dense game of the franchise, and not all the pieces fit together as cleanly as the other two games of the original trilogy.

It’s a game that simultaneously feels like a serious deviation while also being a rather straightforward sequel that maybe adds too much bloat for its own good. I don’t really agree with the take that it’s “Not a true sequel to Quake” but it doesn’t take the shape that I generally like Quake games to be and therefore I didn’t play it that much.

My history with Quake 2 is that I played it many years after I played 1, 3, and even 4, when I wasn’t a kid anymore. So definitely take that into account when it comes to my biases here.

I typically would get to chapter 2, die at some place, get frustrated and stop playing. Intending to play it again, but I’d just forget about it. Then I’d come back to it to try again, and get bored around the same place. Rinse and repeat. It’s just a game that would refuse would stick in my mind.

Occasionally I’d check out the multiplayer which I felt was a much better experience. And while I haven’t played through Quake 2’s main campaign, I did play through Call of the Machine–  the MachineGames expansion that came with the remaster– with a friend back when that was released.

So here I am, I made a generally well received Quake 1 video, and I want to make more videos. But when it comes to the obvious follow up, I don’t feel very qualified to talk about Quake 2 since it’s the game I played the absolute least amount of. I know it has its fans, and I don’t want to be mean by talking about why the game doesn’t work for me personally without at the very least trying to meet it half way.

So my solution is this. I played all the way through Quake 2 for the very first time and I’ve collected my thoughts on it and I’m going to post them as both an article on my website and a reading on my YouTube channel for channel members. A little bonus treat for people who really want to hear what I have to say, that will be less seen than my main videos while my next big public video talks about Quake 3, the other Quake game I feel decently confident speaking on. I hope that’s fair enough. Because I actually did enjoy my time with this game, but I am going to somewhat critical.

With that being said, let’s talk about Quake 2.

First impressions are always very strong, the pre-rendered cutscene is pretty good for the time. It maybe hangs a bit too long on a POV shot of your ship floating around an empty 3D scene with hard to decipher radio chatter, but I do love the way the logo is introduced, and how intense the audio manages to make the situation feel. 

The opening level is also just really good. It’s one of the more non-linear opening levels in id Software’s history. You can go straight down the hallway the game seems to be leading you down or you can break the window and find some grenades, crouch under some rocks and find a room with some grunts and a shotgun which also leads to the main hall. It’s simple stuff but it makes the level so memorable.

The Sonic Mayhem soundtrack is so fucking good, especially the opening track to the first chapter. Despite the fact it’s only like 9 earwormy songs that repeat a lot throughout the game, they never got old or annoying for me. There’s a reason why Mick Gordon slipped Descent Into Ceberon into his Game Awards 2016 performance.

The action and violence is also immediately established to be extremely punchy and intense. I don’t actually typically care about gore in my Quake, probably because I grew up with Quake Live and because a lot of Quake 1 and 3 multiplayer configs I used disabled gibs for better visibility. But I can’t deny this is probably the best most impactful violence of the series. Quake 4 had more shocking and gruesome moments in cutscenes, but the actual gameplay here is the better showcase for how brutal Quake can feel. The way the enemy texture changes to show different levels of damage, and can be knocked into downed states where they fight for life and die much harder than Quake 1’s enemies. Desperately firing their guns and flailing around. It’s good stuff.

This is accentuated by how heavy duty all the weapons feel. Another thing Quake 2 accels at. The guns feel big and weighty. For once in the series the guns don’t feel like tools, they feel like guns. Helped by the fact they’re fully animated at all times. I think just from a gameplay standpoint I do prefer the way Quake 1 and 3’s guns are more simply and procedurally animated when it comes to things like being able to get a feel for firing rate and cooldown times. Like the railgun in Quake 2 just kinda shakes around a little until it falls back into place and then you can refire it, while in 3 it uses a clever mix of using lights on the gun and sound effects to tell you when it’s ready to go again. 

But I can’t deny the animation here gives these guns a certain presence they just don’t have in the other games. And I can see why this is a lot of people’s favorite Quake arsenal just by rule of cool.

As much praise as I heap on the Quake 3 shotgun for just feeling like the only shotgun that game needed, I can see why a lot of people feel it is a stark downgrade to the Super Shotgun in this game. Despite the fact it works essentially the same as Quake 3’s, and is nowhere near as devastating as Doom II’s, the heft in the design and animation and sound design makes it feel worthy of carrying the name. It’s a very nice upgrade from the 56 damage max double barrel from the first game.

The chaingun and railgun are also obvious highlights here, really powerful feeling weapons. The chaingun in particular is just so satisfying to whip out and mow down hordes of enemies with, and the railgun is fun for a lot of the reasons I’ve already talked about in my Quake 3 video. I’m surprised by how well it plays in PvE. I always felt it might feel a bit bad against enemies with a lot of health with how long you have to wait between shots, but no it’s still just as satisfying and powerful feeling somehow. I don’t know why I ever had any doubts.

Though in an arsenal this big there are some duds. I think Quake 2 probably has the worst starting weapon of the series. The blaster does not feel good. It’s goofy. It feels like it’s nerfed to keep the infinite ammo supply it has from being overpowered. I think the approach of previous and subsequent games works a lot better. A more powerful starting weapon with limited ammo, complemented by a melee option. Doom 2016 is further proof of how this infinite ammo pistol thing just doesn’t really work.

And while there are upgrades like with the super shotgun, it does feel like there’s some downgrades too. I said in the Quake 3 video that that game’s grenade launcher was worse than the Quake 1 and 2 grenade launcher. At that time I hadn’t spent a lot of time with the quake 2 grenade launcher.

It definitely looks and sounds the part and I like its design better than Quake 3’s. But no, this is the worst grenade launcher of the series. You can’t fire it straight down or up, and it also arcs upwards above your crosshair in a very weird way. It feels bad and limited.

There’s also just something a little off about the rocket launcher here. I can’t really place my finger on it. It’s got a strange kind of lag to it.

Another thing that makes the weapons feel kind of jank sometimes is they fire from your actual right arm unlike the other Quake games which calculate shots from your head, and like that sounds right. That sounds like the right way to do it. But what it means is sometimes you’ll be peeking around a corner and your crosshair is on the enemy, you think you have a shot, but then the wall just eats it. And with the rocket launcher you just blow yourself up.

The fact Quake 3 doesn’t do this is actually why in that game you will sometimes see railguns and lightning guns go through walls. It’s not actually calculating the firing line based on where the gun is to where the crosshair lays, just the cosmetic detail of the shot. I’ve seen some people say Quake 3’s collision is bad due to this, and it’s like no, everything is working as intended here.

I don’t actually hate the idea of more games aiming from your arm, mostly because I’ve played enough games in my life where snipers can just peek the tippy top of their heads over a ledge and annihilate you. I think it would be better if it depended on where their gun is rather than their itty bitty little head, but in that case I do think you need to have some kind of dynamic crosshair or at the very least some kind of visual indicator.

But I don’t ever really run into that problem in Quake, so sometimes, maybe less is more. And that’s kind of how I feel about Quake 2, it tries to go much BIGGER AND BADDER. But I just generally prefer my Quakes a little simpler and arcadey.

I think one of the most obvious and fascinating places where Quake 2 tries to go much bigger than the previous game that I don’t see a lot of people talk about is the inventory system. 

In basically every other Quake game even subsequent ones, the powerups are what I like to call “Pac-Man style”. They’re like power pellets. You pick them up, they activate, and you go. Usually they have some kind of timer before their effects wear off. It’s very arcadey and fun. 

Quake 2 on the other hand lets you store powerups for later use. It’s an interesting concept but the game doesn’t really do much interesting with it. Things like the silencer might be cool for stealthily taking out singular enemies in tough scenarios, but the level design doesn’t really facilitate it. Most enemies will see you as soon as you come across them.

I don’t think I was ever underwater long enough to justify using the rebreather. Biosuits usually are placed in proximity to what you are supposed to use them on, maybe there’s some super cool secrets hidden under acid pits somewhere in this game, but I dunno if that’s worth the fact  that this system also kind of takes away from some of the tightness of design of Quake 1, quad damages were placed usually in proximity to some kind of upcoming bloodbath for you to rush through. The levels could be designed wholly around when they knew you’d be using a powerup. The quads and invulns here just feel like they’re there to cheese bosses with. An immersive sim, this is not.

However, there is a place where I think the inventory system makes things interesting and maybe even better, and that’s in multiplayer. In Quake 2 multiplayer, items kind of work more Pac-Man-ish but you can also drop items and weapons for other players. This means in modes like CTF, you can have scouts seeking out quad damages for flagrunners, or defense upgrades for guards.

I have heard a lot of people say Quake 2 is the best teamplay game in the series and I believe it.

Team based modes have been done kinda dirty by Quake. Everyone thinks competitive Quake is solely the realm of duel and deathmatch when there’s just as storied a history of gaming clans tied to Quake.

There’s kind of a history of TDM and CTF players beefing with duellers which I find personally very funny. A lot of people were apparently pretty mad that Red Annihilation ended up being a duel tournament. Personally, I think we can coexist.

Quake 2 and Quake 3 also famously have beef. And while I do prefer Quake 3 overall, I do see why a lot of people have stuck with 2.

Quake 2 just has the most stuff going on in it. The most weapons. The most enemies. The most complex item system. The most everything. It is the BIGGEST AND BADDEST Quake game and that’s reflected in its heavy weaponry and aggressive bombastic tone. 

For people who really enjoy the resource management and strategy that comes with arena shooters, there is a lot to chew on here. Especially in Quake 2 Vanilla, there’s things like framerate specific movement tricks which take up their own set of binds for really hardcore players. Quake 2 might be the only Quake game to take up the entire keyboard in terms of controls at a high level. A real PC gamers PC game. I’m more a fan of minimalist arcadey Quake, but I have nothing but respect for the people who really dig into Quake 2, there’s an obvious appeal to this game that is unique amongst the series and classic shooters as a whole.

So the PvP is very good and pretty much universally beloved, the PvE on the other hand is something I see a lot of people take issues with, but I’m not sure if they entirely understand why it doesn’t fully come together. I don’t think I did either, until really collecting my thoughts on it. A lot of people say Quake 2 is too easy. Now, the remaster tried to make it harder with more enemy moves added, some nerfs to certain weapons, and slight buffs to enemies, yet I still find the enemy roster to be somewhat unmemorable and the combat to be less compelling than earlier games.

Which is weird because if you stop to check out the enemy corpses there’s inarguably a lot of really interesting things happening artistically. Just amazing body horror for one thing. Humans with horrific robotic implements turned into living weapons, or dogs, or tanks, there’s a lot of tankmen in this game, there’s living breathing drones. All of them with human anatomy shoved into these form factors, with faces stretched over them.

Cool ideas, but what I said right there, that’s about it, most of the enemies are variants on the same 4 ideas of robot man, tank, dog, and drone, half the time I really need to get up close and personal to even tell what’s going on with these creatures. From a distance there’s a general sense of what they are. But most enemies kind of blend together. They all have a very similar color palette of white, red, and grey. Flesh, blood, and metal. Most enemies fall either into the humanoid or tank variety. It doesn’t help that this kind of fusion has been explored plentifully in previous id games, but alongside other monsters. Here, it’s the entire core of the enemy roster.

It’s useful to bring up the game’s influences here. Quake 2 is very inspired by World War 2 fiction, the Strogg are essentially alien Nazis. In a way Quake 2 really has a little bit of all id Software’s big franchises in it. It looks and sounds like Doom, plays like Quake, and goose steps like Wolfenstein.

I always love abstracting the horrors of war because I think it can tell us a lot more about war than traditional war media can, and in that sense I really love the Strogg. They are an ugly grotesque representation of the kind of things that happen when you try to shove all of humanity through this narrow tube of militarism and subordinance.

It’s nothing too deep. I’m not about to sit here and tell you that Quake 2 is a brilliant commentary on fascism. But as a concept for villains, the Strogg are really interesting. 

But the Strogg’s concept is also where some issues start to crop up for the combat.

What this World War 2 imagery means is we are fighting soldiers, not warriors. There is a difference, warriors are meant to be more singular and glorious, while soldiers are meant to be expendable, and in a metaphorical sense, programmed like machines. This explains the monotony somewhat. But the thing is in World War 2 games, when you fight soldiers, they typically go down pretty easily. We’re all still human after all and as humans we are very susceptible to lead poisoning. 

Quake 2’s soldiers however are built like… Quake enemies. They can take a lot of punishment and in many cases in this game are literal tanks.

One thing I’m struck by playing Doom and Quake 1 in comparison to this game is how few enemies have guns. Usually the lower tier enemies that go down in one shot from just about anything. Doom in particular makes this a lot of fun. You have to take out the weaker enemies first while dodging the stronger ones because the weaker ones are glass cannons that can do unavoidable and devastating hitscan damage.

Coming across a chaingunner in Doom 2 puts you into panic mode. You need to kill that thing. NOW. Because if you don’t it’s going to shred you.

In Quake 2 there are like 5 enemies that have the chaingun. Many of which take many more shots to kill than the Doom 2 chaingunner. Most of the enemies are carrying two or three weapons. Like one on their arm, and one or two on their shoulders.

So the problem should be that Quake 2 is actually too hard, right? That you’re wading into No Man’s Land against a race of hyper strong heavily armed aliens… Well… No.

Because, all the enemies do feel extremely weak despite how brutally powerful they theoretically should be. They can take punishment, but they have trouble dishing it out. Getting hit by a chaingun in Quake 2 PvP is brutal, in PvE it’s a minor annoyance. The bullets do pitiful amounts of damage, and this is a problem across the whole roster of enemies.

They have to be designed like death machines, so they fire a flurry of attacks at you which makes them difficult to dodge compared to previous games where most enemies had a single attack that usually amounted to a single projectile at a time. Quake 2’s enemies have to be nerfed down to make it so it doesn’t completely devastate the player. So a lot of Quake 2 really just ends up feeling like you’re being pelted with rocks– no– pebbles.

I have to admit that I made this problem worse on myself though because I played on nightmare which means no enemies ever stun. So every fight just ends up feeling like that part of Wolfenstein : The Old Blood where you and the guy just stab each other till one guy goes down. But he has to hit you like 10 times to kill you, and you only have to hit him like 3 times, even though he’s in armor and you’re not, and this is made blatantly obvious by the fact he gets a head start, and the whole thing just seems kind of goofy.

Still I don’t think stuns would’ve really helped what I feel are fundamental issues with the enemy’s attack patterns.

What you’re left with is a game that feels chaotic, with combat arenas that are hard to really grasp. Full of samey enemies carrying entire arsenals on their backs that are hard to differentiate. A lot of them are going to hit you before you hit them, and you just kind of feel like the game is letting you win when you get out unscathed anyways. And this is what people mean when they say Quake 2 is “too easy”. It’s not a fundamental issue but a symptom. And fixing it is not just a matter of buffing enemies. I like Nightdive’s remaster, but I don’t think this is something that can be fixed by giving the enemies more attacks either, that just compounds the problem. 

They add a healing move to an enemy to make it more like the Archvile, which is annoying. But the Archvile wasn’t just annoying, he was fucking scary and brutalized the player if they fucked up. Here it shoots out a tongue, and pulls you towards it and barely does any damage. So it just kinda feels like you’re being jerked around.

It’s an unenviable position to be in. Because you have to give players the same power fantasy they expect from the game, but if you actually buffed the Strogg to how they reasonably should feel against the player, it would turn Quake 2 into something more akin to Blood, which might not be the worst thing, but it would be much more fundamental a change that longtime fans might not be happy with.

The Strogg might be more effective in a horror game, where you’re disempowered. They’re built like Terminators, and the best Terminator movies are the ones where they feel like an actual threat. I do want to believe this combat could work better. I think it could. But I also think what needs to happen is future games and mods need to fully embrace what the Strogg are as a concept.

There’s also the fact that this was my first playthrough and I might just be bad and can’t dodge the attacks YET. In Doom and every other Quake the player can also take a lot of punishment. The difference is I feel like it’s easier to read the combat and not be in a situation where I have to abuse the player’s roided out strength to get by. And the enemy’s single fire attacks means higher tier enemy attacks can be more devastating. Getting your health slowly chipped away at just doesn’t give the same panic response as seeing my screen turn bright red in Doom after getting hit by a Revenant or Archvile. It doesn’t make me hiss through my teeth in the way I do when I know I’m about to be hit by a Shambler due to bad decision making. I’m not sure if there’s really an equivalent to that in this game where everything is volley based.

The most obvious instance of brutality in the game might be the dog’s tongue but that saps your health. And I don’t think I came in contact with a boss’s BFG once. Making either of these harder to dodge might be going too far, in fact the dog has been made much more dodgeable. The balancing act here is just so razor thin and I don’t blame id or Nightdive for not getting it exactly right.

What I will say is a lot of the time it is a very fun clusterfuck to blast through. I’m just not thinking in a particularly strategic or engaged way in the same way as previous games while I’m doing it.

I’m definitely going to have to check out Call of the Void at some point, the Quake 1 and 2 crossover project, because some of Quake 1’s variety might be exactly what this game needs. More variance in creatures and attack types to let the gunner enemies breathe and maybe allow them to be more threatening when they do appear, and MachineGame’s Call of the Machine shows the pieces are kind of in place for the Strogg to go and take over this hodgepodge of monsters that we already defeated in Quake 1, kind of like how the Combine in Half-Life 2 take over Xen from Half-Life 1 after you’re done with it. 

People say they want a return to Quake 1’s world. But I think they mean tone because Quake 1 has an extremely definitive ending. Telefragging the fucking deity who literally gave birth to all these creatures is about as definitive as you can get. How do you bring them back? Somehow the shamblers returned? Maybe the Strogg is the key to all of this. Ok, I’ll stop.

I know it’s ironic to imply that the space Nazi enemies require a diversity quota to be more threatening but I think it could work. There are like two enemies that feel like they’re a part of different alien races, so the Strogg seem like they’re more a representation of the militaristic side of fascism than the racist side.

Speaking of variety, maybe one of the biggest issues I have with Quake 2 is the way levels or chapters just… are. I admit that I am very biased here. Because I really like Quake 1’s smaller scale and more experimental levels.

That’s the main thing. Having much larger chapters I think leads to a lot more monotony. Quake 1’s episodes were generally centered around a single theme, but the level based structure allowed for more variety within them. Underwater castles, trap filled dungeons, catacombs, pyramids surrounded by low gravity for some reason, all places you explore in just the first episode of that game. Now you have entire chapters dedicated to exploring a jail, or a castle. Episode 1 of Quake 1 had 3 unique castles, and one of them, I have to reiterate, was underwater.

It’s not that you can’t do big Quake levels, I think the community has thoroughly proved that you can. 

But in Quake 2, these themes just don’t feel like they’re explored enough to justify it. A lot of the rooms and hallways look the same. To the point where I feel like it contributed to me getting lost, a lot. In a way that I haven’t since I first played Doom 1. After I got better at Doom, I felt I also got pretty good at navigating the notoriously labyrinthine classic FPS level design. I never felt lost in Doom 2 outside of the city levels. I never felt lost in Quake 1. Or Duke Nukem or Blood or any of those games. Or any of the various custom Doom and Quake levels though that may just be because people have learned how to design levels better over time.

The Immortal Lock is a single map that takes an expert player as long to beat as a blind player takes to beat the entirety of Quake 1. And there’s typically more personality in a single room than there is in the entirety of the average Quake 2 chapter, which made it really easy to navigate despite it’s large non-linear design. But that is with the benefit of over 25 years of hindsight, and hardware upgrades, and software optimizations.

I still sometimes struggle revisiting the really esoteric classic Doom levels like Slough of Despair or Gate to Limbo, but that’s because they were esoteric. Quake 2 feels like it’s generally in the shape of a well designed classic FPS level, just blown up past the point where such simplistic level design can really hold.

Once again, I might just be bad, and I was talking while playing which really tends to split my focus and lead to me playing worse. I have heard people say Quake 2 practically plays itself and in watching my gameplay I definitely completely missed some extremely obvious things that lead to me getting stuck for much longer than I could’ve. But there were just as many moments where it seems like the repetitive hallways and rooms full of generic computers and elevators tripped me up as well. Maybe Quake 2’s level design is brilliant and perfect and I’m just an idiot. But then why did Nightdive feel the need to add the compass? I can’t have been the only idiot who got lost in this game.

There was a point that stood out to me where I only found the way forward because I got distracted by a prisoner NPC that was crawling on the floor far outside his jail cell, and I stopped moving for long enough to notice a hole in one of the many dozen cells that I know I would not have checked for a long time otherwise.

Also worth noting is a lot of these issues also do seem to vary from chapter to chapter. I came away from the Bunker and Jail chapters feeling kind of sour but I really loved the Mines and the Factory. Which makes me believe it can’t just be me.

This level structure I feel also sort of takes away from the speedrunning side of Quake. Where you could do full chapter or game runs, but the community mainly focuses on running singular maps. You can’t do that in Quake 2. And I think it’s telling that Speed Demos Archive, the main hub for Quake speedrunning, only has a single page dedicated to Quake 2 that I couldn’t even find by just browsing the site regularly. I had to google it to see if it was a thing.

Not to say that runs of Quake 2 aren’t also seriously impressive and it’s not an experience you would have fun doing. It’s just that the game doesn’t really facilitate it as much and at times feels like it’s actively working against it with things like invisible walls. 

Overall, I still think I prefer my Quakes odd to even. 

Despite the fact I had my issues with it, I think I can confidently say I like Quake 2 now, and think it has its place in the series. I do hope to see the Strogg again but better going forward, the fact that Ranger and Bitterman exist in the same multiverse was confirmed long ago. I think the Strogg might be interesting at the very least as a player on the board going forward.

It’s also a game I definitely want to play again sometime on hard or check out the various modding projects done for it. So maybe that’ll happen and I’ll write an actual full video around it.