Quake II (Sony PlayStation 1, 1999)

I bought this game just so I could have a solid four-player deathmatch game. Since I am extremely tired of First-Person-Shooters the only thing this game offered me was it's four-player deathmatch feature, which I still find fun (my multitap is in sore need of a good multiplayer game other than sports). Sadly the game is very disappointing in the fact that the controls spoil a possibly good game.

The gameplay in Quake II is pretty standard first person shooter action. In the One-Player game you are the lone marine dropped onto the Strogg (the evil aliens) home planet to gather information and mainly just kill everything you see. You more or less run around shooting everything that moves and occasionally flipping a switch or something like that. Quite simply I've played this type of game before and I've played better ones than this one before too (example: Goldeneye, Turok), so I just got bored and quit in the third level. In the One-Player it seems that every five minutes or so you have to load a new location, which is a distracting, but doesn't really diminish the game any. What does diminish the gameplay is enemy AI, they tend to just run at you and shoot with no strategy, on top of that if you get on a higher ledge than them they will just run in circles, which equals easy targets. The multi-player deathmatch features all the standard modes like "Frag Tag" and team modes, but it has no original deathmatch modes to separate itself from the crowd. On top of that you can't choose any different characters than a generic looking space marine, and all you can do with him is change the color of his uniform, plus you can't see what weapons other people have since it always looks like they are carrying a generic shotgun. All the fun of the multi-player deathmatch will probably be killed by the fact that the controls are extremely unnatural, and people tend not to like run in circles looking at the ceiling while getting shot at.

The sound in Quake II is nothing to complain about, nor are they anything to praise about. The music is moody and fits the atmosphere well. The sound-effects are much more important, all the common explosions are done in a common fashion. The only sound-effect that I found original were the enemies talk. Which was usually like to words "He's Here" through their masked faces, and then everyone runs at you shooting.

The graphics aren't very special either, good thing they made everything mechanically based because the whole game looks machined. All the environments look very blocky considering how much this genre has evolved. If you've seen one place you can easily mistake it for another since they all look the same. The textures are all pretty much the same and you'll swear that they repeat textures a lot, namely everything looks the same. The textures themselves are quite grainy looking and you can tell why they were able to get this game down onto the playstation (I'm sure they look a ton better on the PC).

All these small problems could be easily overlooked if the game had some easily handled controls that everyone could pickup and enjoy. The control is what really kills the games fun factor unless you have 3 friends who are game addicts and can adapt very quickly to a horrible control scheme then by all means give it a try. The package says that the game has customizable controls, which is true, but their definition of "Customizable" means you can choose from one of 8 horrible control schemes. I only found one workable scheme, that gave me adequate control without confusing too much, and it was based on the Turok control scheme. The left analog controlled where you looked and the triangle, square, X and circle controlled the direction you moved, just like in Turok but in the Playstation controllers case the buttons are just too far apart and it feels very unnatural. Which also brings me to the point that the Playstations Dual Shock controllers desperately need to have some form of resistance in the analog joysticks like the N64 controllers do, because my thumbs just don't have that much control to move the analog just slightly , which is what is required in order to keep from going from one extreme to the other. The developers also had the choice of using both analog sticks but they blew that chance miserably, one analog stick controls looking up and down, and strafing left and right, while the other one controls looking left and right, and moving forward and back. Is it just me or is that the stupidest control scheme ever? Why didn't they just have one stick for looking, and the other for moving?!?! With all the normal buttons in use you have to be very good with the shoulder buttons because they control everything else (which is at least five things, and you only have four buttons). The game may become extremely controllable if you have a playstation mouse (yeah, like everybody has one of these poorly supported peripherals) then this game could become very good. The only problem is that if you want to have a multiplayer deathmatch you have to have two multitaps, four controllers, plus four playstation mice (if you do you have all this you must be running a playstation peripheral warehouse).

This game is probably the one in my whole library that has spent the least time in my Playstation. For the the fact that I am pretty sick of First-Person-Shooters, so I wouldn't play the one player game much anyway, plus the fact that this games controls are so frustrating that any of my friends would just give up (they gave up on Turok 2 and it's controls are 5 times easier than these) and go play Goldeneye. If you want a good party game go get Goldeneye, or Perfect Dark or something with controls that are easy to pickup and play.




Recommend this product? No