When I received the notification that Quake 2 was being re-released in honor of this year’s Quakecon, I about fell out of my chair. As a young N64 owner, Quake 2 was a staple of my middle school years and a game I loved so much, I even saved up my money to double dip to get the PC port, as well as the failed X-Men tie-in. It ranked up there with the original Doom titles, Goldeneye 64, and Turok games as personal favorites. Needless to say, I held this title on a pedestal of nostalgia, but sadly, it was one that this port didn’t live up to. At least outside of the Nintendo 64 version.

If you somehow have made it this far in your life without playing Quake, it follows the battle of Earth vs the Strogg army. It’s basically Doom with aliens opposed to demons. It’s easy to write it off as such, but there were some great upgrades from the granddaddy of the FPS genre that not only improved on the arsenal at your fingertips, but addef jumping and actually aiming to the mix; all while taking clear inspiration from id’s previous releases.

Like most of the 90s FPS greats, the main focus is mowing down the opposition while you flip switches, collect keys, and blow stuff up. It’s a mostly enjoyable experience that is hindered by a few minor issues, but those are easy to overlook when you take into account how entertaining it is to turn the enemies into red puddles with the overpowered roster of both standard and futuristic weaponry at hand, and even moreso when you turn on the optional unlimited ammo option that permits you to just decimate the enemies with BFG spams. It looks great, sounds great, and avoids many of the retro-re-release pitfalls in terms of the visuals looking kind of flat on a 4k display.

This is a mostly complete package of every expansion (excluding X-Men: Ravages of Apocalypse, likely due to a rights issue since Disney now owns Marvel) in addition to the base game in both the original release and my favorite, the N64 port, which is actually an entirely different experience. There is also a brand new campaign by way of the most recent Wolfenstein developers MachineGames. With the inclusion of crossplay, both co-op and PvP multiplayer, 4k support, and accessibility options galore, this makes for a huge package for a meager $9.99 or subscription to GamePass.

I spent most of the past weekend diving into everything this game had to offer, mostly in co-op play with my son as well as a rotating roster of friends. It was time well spent that allowed me to show my kid how FPS games used to play, and also let me relive some of my childhood with friends who moved too far away to take advantage of split-screen play, which on the Xbox and PC versions allows up to 8 players on the same screen if you’re a true masochist. I personally don’t see how anyone could do it, but I also struggle in my old age when playing Mario Kart in 4 player split-screen on a 55-inch screen.

There were a few areas of the game where things were less sunshine and gib-shots and more cursing and rage, largely due to optimization issues. While I never personally had this problem as the constant host, we did experience somewhat frequent drops in my online party where members would end up being kicked to their desktop or home screen, depending on which platform they were playing. Additionally, most of the campaigns suffer from frequent loading screens, which was a standard back in 1997, but I can explore almost all of what Elden Ring offers in a single load, or walk clear across the world of Fallout 76 without loading once, so I found this to be annoying. This is especially true when there are many points of the game that you will walk onto an elevator, hit a loading screen, then walk through a corridor, and hit yet another loading screen. This became downright annoying by the mid-way point of the main game due to the fact that most of the missions are broken into multiple backtracking heavy segments that you’ll be going back and forth through, and if one player loses their bearings and goes through the wrong door, your whole group is getting warped through another load and then has to sit through another one to get back on track.

If you do happen to get lost, which is easy to do since there are many repeated assets within the game, there is a handy new feature that allows you to ping your objective with a fancy green arrow that will show you where you need to go from your current standing akin to those found in the Dead Space series. Some of the time. We ran into many areas that would show the objective, but the path forward was either missing or would send you in the completely wrong direction. In addition to this, there is also a spiffy grappling hook that lets you re-enact my personal favorite level from the original Battletoads as you see fit.

Outside of these issues, it’s the same running and gunning experience you remember, with its janky platforming as it originally appeared. I feel like this would’ve been an opportune time to remedy this, but that’s not the case. Most of my party’s bullshit deaths came by way of missing a moving platform, getting stuck in-between an elevator and a hard place, or just over-estimating our abilities. This is partially due to our own hubris at times, but it would be fair to place some of the blame on the game largely due to small adjustments made between the campaigns on your movement speed and jump abilities, with the N64 option being the most forgiving with floaty physics. I feel like evening out these inconsistencies, at least among the expansions from the PC version would’ve made swapping between the games more fluid. There were also a few instances where we would lose our entire arsenal between missions within the same story. We also ran into this when reconnecting to the game after a disconnect, when other players would drop in and receive all of the weapons we had earned right off the rip, but the player who had been there up until their disconnect would have to start from scratch.

Up until Quake 2, Bethesda has been on a roll with re-releasing its classic games for modern consoles with all the bells and whistles you’d expect. At the end of the day, it looks and plays like a game from 1997. This is still a great game, and if this is the only way you can experience it in 2023, I would recommend it – but don’t expect the same level of care that was given to the likes of Doom 64, Quake, or Doom 3. Except for Quake 64. That one still kicks so much ass it almost makes up for the mild shortcomings in the other options.

8 out of 10

Pros

• Online Play with Crossplay
• An Almost Complete Package of Quake 2
• Quake 64

Cons

• Poor Optimization Resulting in Frequent Loading Screens
• Uneven Mechanics Between Campaigns
• The Navigation Beacon is Hit or Miss

Quake 2 was developed by id Software, Nightdive Studios, and MachineGames, and it was published by Bethesda Softworks. It is available on NS, PC, PS4, PS5, X1, and XSX. The game was not provided to us for review and was played on XSX. If you’d like to see more of Quake 2, check out the publisher’s site.

 

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