First-person shooters are one of the most popular types of shooting games. There’s nothing more exciting than being immersed in a whole new world, interacting with so many different characters and objects in the body of your very own character that you roleplay and grow to become the very best you can be. Quake II is one of the pioneers of the genre, which fully defined and shaped many FPS games as they stand today.
When Nightdive Studios and Bethesda Softworks announced they were releasing an enhanced version of Quake II, there was no time for Quake fans to get a calendar, circle a release day, and excitedly count down the days, because it was already released upon announcement! It was probably the most exciting surprise for those fans as they woke up that morning, who realized they suddenly got to re-experience their childhood in a whole new way.
So what did Nightdive and Bethesda do to enhance the Quake II experience? Let’s dive right into the game.
Setting the Settings
Since I’ve mentioned a few times that I always customize the game settings before playing through the story, I was pleasantly surprised that Quake II gave me an opportunity to do just that when I booted up the game for the first time. A prompt says the game’s Accessibility Settings – which aids in text readability and chat communication – are enabled by default and you can either customize these settings or disable them. My curiosity led me to investigate what these Accessibility Settings are.
Some of the accessibility settings include enabling High Contrast, using an Alternate Typeface, and a variety of features for multiplayer chat. There’s also display-related features, including controlling how long message prompts and chat features appear on the screen, as well as how much the screen flashes.
Once you are finished looking through the Accessibility Settings, you can still head back into the settings to see what else you can change. One of the other categories you can look through is the Input settings.
You can customize the keyboard bindings in the Input settings to suit your needs. There’s quite a handful of controls you can set. Here, I rebound Crouch/Swim Down to Left Control and Run/Walk to Shift to reflect the bindings I use for first-person shooter games.
Mouse settings can be changed as well. I find it weird that you can set a horizontal and vertical sensitivity, which are also what you find when setting the controller sensitivity. I used an alternative method to set my mouse sensitivity: I converted my sensitivity and FOV from Overwatch 2 to Quake II on the mouse-sensitivity website, created a settings.cfg file, and stored those numbers in that file.
There’s also controller settings, such as enabling Aim Assist, Aiming Sensitivity, and Look Inversion to suit your needs. For shooter games, I prefer using mouse and keyboard, so I decided I won’t try my Pulse Red Xbox Wireless Controller with Quake II.
There’s some interesting Gameplay Settings you can change, too. For one, I like how you can choose your Weapon Hand to either Left or Right-handed, which not a lot of first-person shooters allow you to do. You can also customize what appears on your heads-up display like Teammate Indicators and Hit Markers, if you want to control the visual clutter. Finally, you can customize your crosshair which I’m excited to see! There’s tons of base styles you can choose from, and you can customize many different parts of the crosshair such as the colour, visibility, and scale.
Display settings-wise, there’s a lot of options to go through. Nested within the Video settings is the Graphics API, which allows you to choose either Vulkan or DirectX 11. I switched to DirectX without hesitation, and as I was playing the game, I experienced zero issues. Admittedly, I don’t know much about Vulkan, and DirectX has always been stable and reliable for me.
Other settings that you can change in the Display Settings include CRT Simulation, Depth of Field, Motion Blur, and Muzzle Flashes to name a few. You can also opt to use the original in-game models rather than the Enhanced Models, if you want to truly experience old-school Quake II. The game models will be discussed a little later in this article.
The Fast and Furious Gameplay
If you’ve haven’t figured it out yet, Quake II is all about fast-paced shooting. It’s literally the first thing you see once you boot up the game!
One way to experience this chaotic action is with the Single Player mode. There’s six Episodes you can select.
If you want to familiarize yourself with the game’s mechanics and controls, you can choose the Tutorial. You’ll get to learn the movement and combat. You’ll also be introduced to some enemy types and which ones you should prioritize.
Once you’re finished with the Tutorial, you can head into one of the five other episodes, including both of the official expansion mission packs The Reckoning and Ground Zero, as well as MachineGames’ mission pack, Call of the Machine. You can also play Quake II 64, which is the Nintendo 64 version that includes new levels. Most players new to the game would probably want to start with the standard Quake II episode.
The opening cinematic wastes no time setting the scene and telling the story. You’ll hear that the future planet Earth was invaded by the Stroggs, and some major cities such as Paris, Peking, Reykjavik, and Tokyo had been devastated. As a marine, you join a counterattack on their home planet, Stroggos, and you’re given luck and Godspeed by the rest of humanity.
Entry into the alien planet doesn’t go as smoothly as you would’ve liked. Once you enter Stroggos, you get to see the dark and eerie landscape and architecture of the Stroggs. As the marine communications suggests, everyone’s having a rough landing. Once you reach ground zero and make a crash landing, it’s time to explore and shoot things.
Although the game is story-driven, the levels aren’t exactly linear. You’ll have primary objectives to complete, but there’s multiple routes, hallways, and corridors you can take to get to where you need to go. You’ll often find yourself obtaining weapons and powerups hidden away. Secret levels may also be discovered, where you can obtain powerful weapons upon completion. So if something looks off to you, or looks interesting enough to explore, don’t hesitate – investigate!
Since there are many paths you can take, it’s easy to get lost. That’s where your compass comes in – An activation of this handy little gadget in your Inventory Wheel will show a green arrow overlay showing you where you need to go. So if you’re finished investigating a curious-looking path and you forget where you actually need to be, you can always pop the compass and follow the markers.
Speaking of the Inventory Wheel, the game is so fast that sometimes you’ll need to make an inventory or weapon selection in the middle of the action. While you have the Inventory and Weapon wheels open, time will slow to a crawl so you’ll have enough time to make your selection and not stand there idly taking damage.
Finally, if you don’t want to play through Quake II alone, there’s a multiplayer mode included as well! You can play in a 4-player splitscreen mode for local multiplayer action. You can play through a variety of popular game modes such as Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, or a co-op mode for all of the episodes. If needed, you can also add AI bots to fill a lobby.
It doesn’t matter which platform your friends play on, because Quake II supports cross-platform for all PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, and Nintendo Switch players.
Visuals, Sound, and Music
There’s a lot of little details in this game that a lot of players will appreciate. Combat-wise, shooting is engaging. Even if you pop an enemy’s head off, they may still try to get up and shoot you! So you’ll have to take that extra step to completely disfigure their bodies so they literally can’t move around anymore – It’s gory, I know! And if the corpse is truly dead and enough time passes, Strogg flies will start to hover over the corpse.
I haven’t played the original Quake II, but it’s very easy to tell a lot of effort was put into making the enhanced version look pretty darn amazing for 2023 while maintaining that nostalgic 90’s gaming feel. It’s awesome that this game fully supports widescreen, so nothing looks stretched just to fit the display, and there’s no UI element that’s oddly out of place. There’s also G-Sync support, which allows players with G-Sync-compatible monitors to experience smooth framerates with no screen tearing.
Quake II also received updated textures and models. As we’ve discussed earlier, you can go into the Settings and opt to play with or without the updated models. If you want to see the new models up closely, you can head into the id Vault, which we’ll discuss further below.
As expected, the auditory experience of Quake II is top notch. The sound effects still hold up quite well which contributes to that retro gaming vibe I noted earlier. The nu-metal soundtrack provides that perfect extra positive stimulus to keep you engaged within the game’s atmosphere.
id Vault
If you want a little break from the action and just want to explore and learn about the Quake II universe, you can do so within the id Vault! All of the id Vault entries are unlocked and ready to explore, so you don’t have to play through the game to unlock any entries (this is compensated with in-game achievements).
There are five categories within the id Vault you can read through. One of them is the Concept Art, which shows you all of the artistic inspirations behind the game, from the game’s logo to different weapon and enemy sketches. Meanwhile, the Development category shows you the development process of the game, such as the tools used to make the textures, and some early weapons and enemies in their early stages.
If you want a closer look at the assets currently in the game, you can view all of the game’s enemies, weapons, and pickups. You can get useful descriptions of the assets and perform close inspections of the assets, including zooming, rotating, and showing the original model.
Closing Thoughts
Bethesda and Nightdive gave shooter fans an absolute treat with the surprise release of the enhanced version of Quake II, especially before the release of Bethesda’s own highly anticipated title, Starfield. This isn’t some lazy remake either, as many parts of the game both big and small were improved to make you feel like you’re playing a whole new game. There’s a lot of exploration to do and episodes to play through, so there’s never a dull moment in Quake II, now available to play for free with Xbox Game Pass.
GLHF and happy gaming!!
