Quack 2: Back in Action

[Dark Jaguar]

Nightdive Studios did it again.  On the tail of the recent remastering of Rise of the Triad, they've given us an amazing remaster of a rather contentious Quake 2.  The game had... flaws as it was the first id made after Romero left the company, and unfortunately it showed.  The level design consists of numerous tubes, and the enemies are very... samey.  The remaster does a few things to fix this.  Namely, it reenables a number of AI subroutines to make the enemies more interesting to fight.  But, the biggest contribution?  They put in Midway's Quake II 64 (like Doom 64, a whole new game).  Now, it's not a true port of that game.  Instead, the levels are brought in from the N64 game but are running in the Quake 2 engine proper instead of a modified Quake 1 engine as on the N64.  Still, the new AI additions manage to enhance that experience too.

But, the biggest addition is a whole new campaign from Machine Games.  They proved themselves with their campaign in the Quake 1 remaster, and their dedicated to good retro shooter level design is on full display here, with the benefit of zero hardware limitations meaning they can just ooze out hundreds of enemies all over the place and make levels that are detailed and sprawling.  This is frankly the best campaign ever made for Quake II, and I'm including both the second expansion pack and Midway's Quake II 64 in that assessment.

It's good stuff, and unlike so very... very many modern ports, they kept full support for LAN play and direct IP connections.

Edit: Corrected a name mixup