Beware of the Fiends! (Quake (PC))

Member Name: Burning_Darkness

Product:	Quake (PC)
Date:	29/06/09 (20 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Solid engine, Graphics still look quite good, atmospheric

Disadvantages: Repetitive, unimaginative gameplay, weapons not much fun to use

The release of Quake was hailed as a watershed moment in gaming back at the time in 1996, but in retrospect this claim has proved to be both true and untrue in equal measures.

Quake's engine was the first to offer a full, 'true' 3D gaming, allowing players to look in 360 degrees, allowing for platforms to exist on top on one another, and featuring fully 3D enemies as opposed to the simple 2D sprites that had previously been the norm. Unfortunately, ID appear to have got so caught up in creating a revolutionary engine that they allowed actually making a good, fun game to slip way down the list of priorities.

Quake's graphics were hugely impressive at the time, and still look reasonably good today, but it was released before the days of 3D acceleration and as a result everything tends to look dull, dingy and brown, brown, brown. The level design mixes medieval and futuristic settings in an interesting way, but the textures are very bland-looking and there's nothing to really catch the eye. There's a lot of very repetitive find-the-key stuff involved as well, and an annoying amount of platform jumping, resulting in frequent plunges into murky, watery ditches followed by interminable periods of wandering about aimlessly trying to get back up. Again, it's as if the designers were so focused on the exciting new things that they could do with their engine that they forgot about making their new creation fun to play.

The game is far from a disaster however, and there is some fun to be had fighting the interesting enemies that populate the levels, some of which can be genuinely scary. These include the usual shotgun-wielding cannon fodder, zombies (that can only be killed by blowing them to bits), and fiends: big doglike demons that are all teeth and claws and can leap vast distances and eviscerate you in seconds. Then there are Shamblers- massive, grimacing, bearlike monsters with lightning bolt attacks that take a hell of a lot of ammunition to take down.

Unfortunately the weapons are all rather uninspired, including several shotguns, an automatic nailgun (which sounds far cooler than it really is), a grenade launcher and a rocket launcher. Nothing really feels like it has much of a kick to it, unlike in Doom or Quake 2, feeling puny and dull instead.

The music is another let down as well- co-written by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, it had the potential to be both tense and disturbing, but instead the murky, ambient tunes come across as turgid and flat, adding little to the overall experience.

The multiplayer mode is fun too, but has been superceded today by the newer Quake titles so there's very reason to return to it now. One particularly fun feature that's worth mentioning however is use of the lightning weapon underwater, which instantly kills both you and anyone else that might be having a swim at that moment. Otherwise though, its just straightforward multiplayer fragging.

Although there is some fun to be had in Quake it quickly gets tiresome once the novelty of its engine wears off, and indeed seeing as its novelty has now long since disappeared from the gaming world, there is even less reason to return to it. I remember playing it the Christmas it came out and getting bored after a few hours and going back to playing Doom 2 instead.

Despite its failings as a game, Quake deserves its reputation as a landmark title for creating the FPS (first person shooter) template that later, better games would employ to great effect. And it does give you the opportunity to telefrag Shub Niggurath, which should keep Lovecraft fans happy. But as a gaming experience its pretty boring, and loses out to Doom every time in terms of raw, timeless, gore-soaked playability.

Summary: A revolutionary engine with a mediocre game tacked on.