Initially I planned to just write “What the hell am I supposed to say about Quake? It's a Quake, goddammit!” and call it the day. But then I was struck with realization: this is exactly the reason why I should write something more. Because time passes. Quake was released to the world in 1996 — next year will turn 30. Thirty! There are entire generations of people who were born, raised, finished school, got a job, got married and have kids after this game. Sometimes it's hard to understand that years fly by and we are no longer in a timeline where games are puny, niche entertainment, but a monolithic, big-ass industry slowly but surely dominating the entire free time segment of our lives. Soon on Earth there will be more people who play games than people who don't know what the hell FPS are. And a big chunk of today's gaming looks like this thanks to this one particular game. Majority of people cannot even understand how influential this Quake was. So, what did we get thanks to this little piece of code? How about a real 3D environment, without 2.5 D hacks from Doom? And I mean, fast paced, optimized 3D gameplay with decent frame rate albeit without smooth animation, where everything — literally EVERYTHING had three dimensions, monsters, weapons, even fire or light sources? 3D where you can create a vertical level with rooms built upon rooms? Now it's laughable, but back then, that was a real revolution, opening endless possibilities, limited only by imagination. And how about real multiplayer? That simple thing led to the creation of the entire E-Sport — and the first real tournament, with real money (Some dude named Dennis "Thresh" Fong even won a Carmack Ferrari) was made specifically for Quake. What more? Modding — yup, the first mods were created for Quake. From simple Doom’s map conversion to engine to entire map packs like Arcane Dimension, and even more — the infamous grappling hook mechanic, implemented later in many different games, start as mod for Quake. You know Games Done Quick? It was inspired by Quake Done Quick — yeah, speedrunning was invented with Quake. Wants even more? Engine was bought by multiple other companies and converted into different games. One of said companies was Valve, and they used it to create a little game called Half-life. Later, the same engine was used as the foundation for their Source engine for HL2. And with HL2 Steam was created. Yes, today's shape of PC gaming is possible thanks to the Quake engine. Another company called Infinity Ward bought the Quake 3 engine license in 2003 and created Call of Duty. And yet another look on what Quake can achieve and said “we can create something better”. And then Unreal Engine was born. Yes, Epic advertised Unreal as “Quake killer”. And rest is history. But this is only scratching a surface. Because Quake showed us, showed the entire world, that games can be something more than pixelated, cartoonish graphics and silly, childish premises. Then games can — and are — a serious medium, atleast at the same level as movies, books or music. That they are THE entertainment. My point is — Doom is the grandfather of FPS, but Quake is something much, much more than being just another step in genre evolution, especially for PC gaming. But what about the game itself? Comparing it to today's standards it is redundant and stupid, because technology evolved so much that now you can do nothing more but laugh at Quake. But again, it's like comparing the Ford T to the newest Ferrari — yes, the former looks weak, because back then there were no today's advancements and everything was undiscovered territory. Yes, it still has this great, lovecraftian-like atmosphere, but mostly thanks to consistent art direction rather than technical aspects. So instead, useless criticizing, I will tell you, dear zoomers, what you can expect when booting this game. First of all — JANK. Don’t get delusional, this is a very janky, clunky game, and you will experience it every second. Go, start the game, press WSAD, try to move. Your character moves like on ice — even when you stop pushing buttons, he will do those little extra 1 and half steps in every direction. Now imagine fighting or traveling on narrow edges, or jumping from platform to platform. You will feel like moving too much and start correcting mid walking, and therefore probably fall. I did it multiple times. Veterans will laugh at this, but hey, I can laugh also looking at a person playing only one game for 30 years. Another big thing are enemies hitboxes. They are gigantic and enormous. You can easily fire on some Ogre or Skag around the corner without even seeing a monster. But before you start cheering this, just remember — your character has the same problem. You can clearly see something like lasers passing around you and get hit anyway, because hitboxes of bullets and your character connect. It always pissed me off, no matter how many times I played Quake. Also — just look how many times enemies can block themself on the door frames or ledges, not being able to reach you. Yeah, I'm talking mostly about you, Fiends, with your stupid leap attacks. Thirdly — weapons. For me, the weapons of the Quake were always weak. Yeah, we have the legendary Rocket Launcher, an iconic weapon popular to this day, but looking beyond that you can clearly see a little cheating of some sort. Shotgun and Super Shotgun running on the same ammo, same with Nail Gun and Super Nail gun, Grenade launcher and RL. So we don’t have 6 weapons (plus Thunderbolt as 7), we only have 3 weapons with different damage output and ammo consumption — oh yeah, and weird grenades angles when firing. God, I love weapons that can kill me instead of the enemy. I also really don’t like SSG in this game — too weak, no reload animation, too wide spread. Lastly, levels — at some point, at least in vanilla games — they are all like this one big blurred image: all the same, without noticeable differences. They all are brown, grey, purple castles, dungeons and mazes, albeit not so much labyrinthian. Also with small numbers of enemies — aside from the dimension of the machine addon, you will witness no levels with more than a hundred monsters. You know, because back in 1996 that level of complexity would fry even more powerful PCs. You can easily end every level under 15 minutes, which is good, because always around 3 episodes I become a little bored with single player, mostly because at this point the game showed all of the tricks it can pull out from its sleeve. One more word about enemies — Fuck Vores. And Spawns. Fuck them, FUCK THEM TO THE CORE. They should be deleted from existence. Even Shamblers are better, especially in this port, because they finally fixed their attack animation on nightmare difficulty, so now it's alignment better with actual lighting projectiles. Ogres are cute, with their chainsaw (probably stolen by some time travel portal shenanigans from Doom 3) and grenade launchers, which in majority of cases damage enemies around them more than my actions. As for the rest — this more than standard menagerie from FPS games with strong emphasis on melee oriented enemies — fiend, knights, death knights, you know the drill; they run towards you swinging their claws and swords, but since you are faster, the only real threat is how small room where you fight are. Game also lack real boss fights — even ones from expansions are boring or annoying. Yeah, Im looking at you, you fucking dragon, the biggest difficulty when fighting you is adjusting to all those quakes and lava. <rest review in comment section>
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