Meatloaf, drop biscuits, and roasted broccoli 😋

Quake 2 is okay for a Quake game.

This is a game that has been around long enough for multiple phases of opinions to be formed about it. The current opinion phase seems overall to be at best a "meh": Quake 2 merely exists. It goes in, does its job well and without complaint, then leaves. Back when the first-person shooter market was a lot smaller and a lot more fresh, this didn't really bother too many people. Now, after three decades of gun-bobbing action, it's easy to be bored. Hell, my spouse won't even play Quake 2 with me, and a single episode of Quake 1 was only managed after a lot of negotiation.

That's the problem when looking back at these old games. You very much had to have been there to truly get why these games were so special. Compared to games of today, these old-timers are vastly outclassed. My spouse enjoys story-heavy titles, and that just wasn't a priority for the FPS genre in the '90s, though Quake 2 was probably the closest id Software would come to telling a coherent story beyond just "get the rune-thingies" or "Mortal Kombat, but guns."

Ironically, that probably lead to its being overlooked in the original Quake trilogy: without the design ala-carte whimsy of different "realms" from the first game, or the fast, balanced, competition-readiness of the third game, Quake 2 is slow, and samey. It had its memorable set pieces, but almost all of it took place on the planet Stroggos, a rusty brown world of mechanical horrors, metallic bases, and trapezoidal hallways. Its art direction was solid to a fault. Was that a problem when the game came out? Not to my friends or me. It's definitely noticeable today.

Is there some higher objective truth as to whether any of these games are good or not? A textbook one can open a page to, and point out what things Quake 2 did right or wrong, maybe with a few gradable multiple-choice questions thrown in for good measure at the end of the chapter? Probably. I really don't care, though. It's likely you could dive into a dozen YouTube essays on this game and get all your bases covered, so while this review is needless, it's not going to be that repetitive.

I can, however, tell you why Quake 2 is special to me. While Quake 1 and DOOM were already letting players flex their creative muscles in ways few other games were allowing at the time, Quake 2 was even more generous. We got to see more ambitious mods, a veritable army of custom Q2 player models, and we enjoyed a further refinement of a still-embryonic "machinima" scene that first materialised in Quake 1.

To a young girl lost in dreams most of the day, it was fertile ground for seeds of imagination. None of it was so strict as to lock down fantasy with canonical rigidity, and the game even allowed me to play as a woman! (AND A DOG! A DOG WOMAN! A GENETICALLY ENGINEERED DOG WOMAN SOLDIER WITH SOVIET GUNS BLASTING AWAY ALIEN MARAUDERS IN A BID FOR HER FREEDOM AND ACCEPTANCE ON EARTH, I TOTALLY DID NOT WRITE A REALLY BAD FANFIC ABOUT THIS). I think the only other major shooter at the time that let that gender flexibility happen was Unreal, though not in dog form, and certainly not while wielding an RPK.

Today, the game is still solid enough to take for a spin every now and again. There's still a small, vibrant multiplayer community, bots for when you can't tolerate humans, and in keeping with the id Software tradition, there's even a little bit of fancy tech demo work being performed.

Does that make it all worth it? If, for one reason or another, you've never touched Quake 2 before in your life, is it worth it to pick it up and play it today? Probably not, though I'll tell you to just buy it or pirate it, you nerd. If you do grab it, I'd hope you would be astute enough to realise that most of the game is outside of the game, not inside it (whatever that means).

I'm actually kinda surprised that it's that fast? And that's slower than average, apparently. Like, on the one hand, I'm not surprised that the same hell language that has consonant clusters like /lfθs/ or /rsts/ has to take things slow compared to languages that don't even have consonant clusters, but I'm surprised that "slow" ≈ six entire syllables, on average, per second.

(I'm aware that the average syllable in English is maybe, like, CVC or C(continuant)VC, but.)