It’s time to play Quake’s second expansion.
It dives into the
action faster than Scourge. There’s no warm-up techbase to get you
started. You’re thrown straight into one of two episodes: a mainly
medieval fortress, or a time travel themed episode. Episode 2 is the
more interesting of the two, with a much greater diversity of levels
offered by its’ theme.
Monster placement is suspect: shamblers
in clear rooms, fiends in tight corridors, and ‘let’s spawn a scrag in
front of that wind tunnel just as you jump in, so you fall into the lava
and die’). The new weapons are minimum effort re-skins and lack oomph
but they do make combat feel faster and more exciting.
The new monsters are introduced slowly. Some of the design choices strike me as baffling.
Who thought it was a good idea to make a Spawn the same colour as the wall textures?
I wish I could just click my fingers…
Dissolution is marred by designs like that. Slip ups that make some sections far more frustrating than they should be.
The Nephrite Games Blog 