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Quake II

aka: Q2, Quake 2
Moby ID: 405
Windows Specs
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Description official descriptions

A sequel in name only, this follow up to id's 1996 Quake is a first-person shooter revolving around the Earth-Strogg war. The Strogg alien race threatens the Earth, but Earth has launched a counter-offensive, Operation Alien Overlord. Overlord takes the battle to the Strogg homeworld with the ultimate objective of securing their capital city and killing their ruler.

As a FPS, Quake II contains a variety of weapons including the fall back Blaster, the Railgun, and the secret BFG10K. Health, armor, and ammunition pick-ups can be found during levels, as can the classic Quake’s Quad Damage power-up. Game play involves mowing down alien opponents as the player progresses through levels, completing in-game objectives. Quake II also comes with multiplayer support for Deathmatches.

Spellings

  • 雷神之锤II - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (Windows version)

43 People (40 developers, 3 thanks) · View all

Manual Design
  • JACKHAMMER - Dallas/TX
Programming
Art
Level Design
Business
Ending Cinematics by
  • Blur Studio - Venice/California
Environment models for Introduction Cinematic by
Assistance with environment design by
Sound Design by
  • Soundelux Media Labs
Music Composed and Produced by
  • Soundelux Media Labs
Music Composer (additional music)
Level Music by
  • Sonic Mayhem
Quake II Theme Song
Climb
Voice of computers by
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 88% (based on 45 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.8 out of 5 (based on 306 ratings with 15 reviews)

Shoot, Strafe, get the power-up, repeat; Q2 has a certain kind of mindless gameplay I wish they left out with Quake.

The Good
For a mindless shooter, it's excellent; good graphics, weapons and enemies. But other games like Half-Life and Deus Ex are way ahead of it, and it's about time id grew up and made a complex one player game with mission objectives or something, besides find-the-key gameplay. Still, Q2 is a classic, though not as good as lets say, Half-Life. BUT, Q2 has awesome multiplay, and it adds some much-needed replay value.

The Bad
Mindless gameplay that makes you always Shoot and don't ask any questions.

The Bottom Line
First person shooter in a sci-fi setting.

Windows · by Dragoon (106) · 2000

Not just an engine! A Real Game!!! *gasp!*

The Good
An actual game? You mean with a halfway decent singleplayer and multiplayer portion designed BESIDES the techy wow-wow?? Surely you jest! Nope. Quake 2 is (get this) a real GAME!!!

I must admit that this caught me completely off-guard at the time, and when the game came out I planned to shrug it off and wait for the first real game that used the Q2 engine. Eventually I did get my hands on it, and though it's not the best game ever it's still a pretty good classic-styled shooter.

There is an actual attempt at a plot here, what with some alien threat and you being a space marine (hmm were have I heard that before?) shot into the Strogg's (bad aliens) planet to kick ass and take names. However everything goes to the crapper and you get separated from your team, thus your mission is to survive and make contact with HQ and eventually (once you find per standard shooter requirements that you are the last hope of all the universe) go for the Strogg leader.

Paper-thin? Sure, but it's something! They even threw in some pre-rendered cutscenes, and they incorporated the story in the gameplay to a certain extent, ie. you have mission objectives which often involve going back & forth between some levels, briefings, inventory, etc. and you also get a small modicum of immersion a la C&C Renegade, for instance: you see ships fighting around, explosions, heck, you'll even be rejoined with your marine buddies, now helpless and completely traumated p.o.w.s. Cool, huh? That last bit also points out another area were Q2 improves over the original: detail. You are now surrounded by more or less credible settings. You no longer have the rocket launcher floating in the middle of a hallway, instead you find it in a place that makes sense, like an armory or cabinet. Furthermore, the levels become much more alive than on Q1, with working machinery, decorating details (a console there, a dead body here, a bio-mechanical station there, a dismembering machine over there, etc.) and a much more cohesive gameworld (gone is the medieval/techno/chtulu mix of the original) and you instead get a more concentrated bio-mechanical world.

The weapons are both complete ripoffs, and sheer genius. You see, for the most part Id recycled everything, but this time they actually bothered to dress everything up as shiny and new, and even did some nice modifications. Your standard weapon is ranged (a wimpy laser pistol), then you have the standard and double-barreled shotguns but overworked to feel like the pulse rifles from the Alien films; then you have the nailgun and the slicer, now dubbed the machine gun and mini-gun, both well known but now with actual thought put into them (the machine gun has a mean recoil that makes it's use a complicated affair, and the mini-gun is pure rock-&roll-screen-shaking genius); then you have the grenade and rocket launcher (graphically reworked so as to be actually interesting, with pretty complex models were you see the ammo loading and all); a pulse-rifle like gun; Eraser's Rail-gun (stolen with the cool smoky trail and all); aaaaaand... THE BFG! Yes!! Completely stolen and unoriginal??? Yup. Absolutely cool?? That too!! The BFG charges up for an eternity, and then lets out with the first big texture lightning-heavy effect of any weapon in any fps. Kudos to id for updating a classic with full-polygon bliss.

Speaking of which, with 3D acceleration now a reality, Q2's graphics really shine. I remember firing this baby up after just installing my Diamond Monster 2 and just grinning while thinking "yeah, this is what I'm talking about" Hehehe.... The 3D graphics are much sharper and cleaner than those of Q1, and the use of colored lightning is a major plus. Furthermore, id really put some thought when it came to designing monsters, and the end result was a collection of greatly animated and superbly detailed baddies to shoot at (like the Iron Maiden, the Parasite, the all-mighty Tank, etc.). And this detail shows in the multiplayer area too. The player models have now a decided quota of variation and much more realism (gone is the steroid-ladden, blocky fella from Q1) Not to mention now standard features like right/left handedness, gender selection, skins, mods, etc...

The Bad
It took no new strides. Q2 merely attempted to deliver the same amount of braindead action Q1 did, while righting all of said game's faults. This gives us in essence what Quake REALLY should have been, however some time after Q2, the world would face Half-Life, and simple shooters like Q2 would become way too braindead for the uptight masses of "nü shooters". Q2 was the last of a now dying breed. And it's probably best that it died.

Other than that the only bad things you can point to Q2 are the usual "id palette disorder" and the fact that the engine, for as good as it was, didn't incorporate detail textures. Unreal beat it to that.

The Bottom Line
Quake done right! That is what this game really is. Of course, it's still Quake... But hey, that still spells braindead fun for me. Quake 2 is a real classic in the world of fps, a game good enough to be actually memorable as exactly that, and not a technical showcase like most other id games.

Windows · by Zovni (10502) · 2002

Absolutely KILLS Quake 1 and 3...

The Good
The original Quake, is, in my opinion, thoroughly overrated and disappointing. So, not surprisingly, I was expecting the same with Quake 2...but don't worry, Quake 2 is a great FPS, and the other games in the Quake series don't even compare! Truthfully, this game is so different and better than the other Quakes, it shouldn't be in the same series.

Unlike the first game's boring brown demonic setting, Quake 2 takes place in a MUCH better sci-fi world where an alien race of cyborgs called the Strogg have attacked Earth...searching for humans to convert into their own. Every time Earth loses one man, the Strogg gain one. It's a losing battle, but Earth gears up and attacks Stroggos, but the Strogg have a surprise, which I'm not saying...hold it...is that...YES, Quake 2 is actually a first person shooter with a real plot! While it isn't as great a plot as Half-Life, or many adventure games or RPG's, it is definitely something!

In Quake 2, the single player AND multiplayer are both fun...in fact, as a single player fan, I think that side of the game is better. While there are no really innovative weapons, ANYTHING is better than the first games stupid looking rocket launcher...and here you also get a BFG10K!...Many of the enemies are memorable and different from each other.

The game balances perfectly being an action game and eventually slipping into horror when you find the gruesome results of what happened to your fellow space marine's that weren't turned into Strogg, but this horror isn't overdone as it could easily have been...

The Bad
Why the hell do almost any developers making an FPS take the "it's you" and personality-less approach with your main character? It's boring! Admittedly, it would have spoiled the atmosphere in a game like this to have your character be a "Duke Nukem" or "Bruce Campbell", but it would have only made the game better if you hard-edged marine talked...and don't give me the famous "Half-Life" excuse of you "become" the character...I just end up feeling like I'm playing as some boring and shy moron with a gun...okay, rant over. Also worth mentioning, is with the near lack of colored keycard puzzles here, the ones that do show up stand out in a bad way.

On a final bad note, after the spectacular for-its-time opening cut-scene, the final boss of the game is too easy and the ending sequence a letdown and cop-out.

The Bottom Line
Quake 2 is a great FPS, and far better than the other Quake games. It is no wonder that Quake 4 will base itself off of it...

Windows · by Mr. Me (28) · 2003

[ View all 15 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Screenshots Geamandura (2326) Dec 10, 2009

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Quake II appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Action figures

In 1998, Quake II action figures were released to stores by ReSaurus. There was only one series of figures. The series was composed of: Marine (& Barracuda Shark), Jungle Marine (& Strogg Parasite), Iron Maiden (& Strogg Technician), Tank, and a limited edition Psycho Marine.

European version

The UK Windows Version Quake II CD has the following printed on it:

This product is intended for sale outside North America only and will not function on North American operating systems.

Upon testing this seems to be untrue, it works on every North American version of Windows tested. Assumedly this was to prevent people importing the CDs from the EU and selling them in the US.

German index

On December 20, 1997, the PC version of Quake II was put on the infamous German index by the BPjS. The Nintendo 64 version followed August 31, 1999.

For more information about what this means and to see a list of games sharing the same fate, take a look here: BPjS/BPjM indexed games.

Language

This is the second time id Software has invented an alien language for use in their games (the first was in Commander Keen). Like Keen's Simplified Galactian Alphabet, the Strogg language in Quake II is a simple letter-by-letter cipher. Although no-one has ever made a Strogg font pack, you can decipher signs and messages in the game using the Strogg translator at id's Quake 4 site.

Release

The game was rushed to be ready for the very lucrative Christmas 1997. It shipped with a lot of bugs, missing features (no multiplayer maps) and multiplayer was almost unplayable on the net at first, but id fixed all these issues with numerous patches.

Soundtrack

The soundtrack, composed by Sonic Mayhem, features a total of ten tracks in CD-Audio quality. If you listen to the CD be sure to skip the first track, which is the data information.

The rest of the tracks are:

  1. Operation Overlord

  2. Rage

  3. Kill Ratio

  4. March of the Stroggs

  5. The Underworld

  6. Quad Machine

  7. Big Gun

  8. Descent Into Cerberon

  9. Climb

  10. Showdown

Source code release

On 22 December 2001, the full source code was released. It can be downloaded from the ID software website.

Zeebo version

On June 15, 2010, both Quake and Quake II were removed from Zeebo's wireless network, the Brazilian Zeebonet. Both games were offered for 10 Z-credits and each Brazilian Zeebo came with 35 Z-credits, so the games were sold virtually for free. They were replaced for Zeebo Extreme Rolimã and Zeebo Extreme Jetboard as free downloads.

Awards

  • Computer Gaming World
    • March 1998 (Issue #164) – Action Game of the Year
  • GameSpy
    • 2001 – #47 Top Game of All Time
  • Interactive Achievement Awards (Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences)
    • 1998 – Computer Action Game of the Year – Won
  • PC Gamer
    • April 2000 - #8 overall in the "All-Time Top 50 Games" poll

Information also contributed by Apogee IV, chirinea, Maw, Mike Quigley, PCGamer77, Sciere, Xoleras and Zovni

Analytics

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Related Sites +

  • Bill Brown - Music Composer (additional music)
    Listen to streaming and MP3 music tracks from this title at the composer's official site including the intro and ambient tracks
  • Linux Quake HOWTO
    This Linux HOWTO describes how to get Quake, Quake World and Quake II running on a Linux Box
  • PlanetQuake
    One of the most comprehensive Quake, Quake II and Quake III: Arena sites, PlanetQuake is multiplayer-oriented and contains huge amounts of information, patches, maps, addons and just about anything Quake-related.
  • Quake II
    Official page on id Software's website
  • S&F Prod.'s Quake 2 Page
    Here you'll find a funny skin and more.

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 405
  • [ Please login / register to view all identifiers ]

Contribute

Are you familiar with this game? Help document and preserve this entry in video game history! If your contribution is approved, you will earn points and be credited as a contributor.

Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Brian Hirt.

Macintosh added by Corn Popper. Windows Apps added by Kam1Kaz3NL77. Zeebo added by chirinea. Amiga added by Kabushi. PlayStation added by Adam Baratz.

Additional contributors: Tomer Gabel, Cochonou, Adam Baratz, Unicorn Lynx, Frenkel, AdminBB, Dan K, Havoc Crow, Patrick Bregger, Titan10, FatherJack.

Game added November 10, 1999. Last modified June 2, 2024.