Review for "Quake 2"

Anayo

New Member
Quake 2 was originally a PC game, but having never played the original computer version, I'm going to be reviewing the Nintendo 64 adaptation that I have.

The shallow story to Quake 2 revolves around a space marine type guy infiltrating an evil alien base to generally screw things up for them. The aliens, called “Stroggs”, look like ugly, deformed humans and tend to tote big guns and take an unrealistically large amount of shots to kill. Other enemies include mecha stroggs with missile launchers, flying defense droids, and evil, freaky zombie-esque women that I presume are female Stroggs.


The graphics are rather crude by todays standards. Messes of red pixels fly from enemies when they get shot, and fake looking yet discernable swarms of black dots (flies) buzz around dead corpses randomly littered through the levels. The sound effects are somewhat underdone in comparison with other N64 first person shooters, but, like the graphics, you can at least tell what they are. The music is nonexistant.

The gameplay involves completing simple, straightforward objectives, such as “find the entrance to the Strogg complex”, “find the Strogg data disc”, “find the teleporter to teleport to the orbital defense station”, etc. While this might sound complicated the when worded like that, it boils down to you moving from point A to point B to point C in that order without getting killed. The controls are really intuitive and useful, far better than those of the famed “007: Goldeneye”, another N64 first person shooter. The guns you get are decent, including a shotgun, a machine gun, a grenade launcher, a rocket launcher, and various energy weapons. You'll need an N64 memory card to save your progress, otherwise your stuck with using a sixteen didget password.

It requires a bit of practice to get good at Quake 2, but once you master the art of strafing, dodging shots, judging the range of your grenades, cycling through weapons, and distancing yourself from your enemy, it's pretty fun to overcome your ugly Strogg adversaries. Granted, its no Halo, and certainly no Goldeneye, but it is mildly entertaining, enough to keep you occupied for a while, anyway. Once you beat the one player mode, however, I doubt you'll want to play it over again, and the multiplayer mode is slightly degraded by the highly limited selection of weapons.

All in all, the N64 version of Quake 2 isn't terrific, but it's enough of a challenge to make it worth your while. Buy it if you're looking for some good, cheap entertainment on your N64.

Final score: 3 out of 5
 
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