In fact, your worst enemy when playing The Reckoning may well be your memory. Aside from those small but scary enhancements, the rest of the menagerie stays the same.Įxpect tanks, cyborgs, repair bots and those floaty things. If you try to avoid the grunt, he'll track you until you find a piece of decent cover. A grunt with a laser can spike you from a healthy distance.
The slight greyer variants now take a good three or four super-shotgun hits to spank, and when they turn to face you they could either fire blue laser bolts, electro-boomerangs or -worse - the evil, red laserpoint gun, designed just like the gadget that people from Essex and unimaginative clubbers use to spice up their evenings. The grunts, for example, now come in a few new, deadly guises. There have been some subtle enhancements to the usual roster of nasties, just to keep you on your toes. The meat explosion is yellow, and these silver lumps of fish flesh that are painful to the touch come piling down around you. And when you finally nail them, they explode into great gobs of deadly acid. With a disturbing likeness to Patrick Duffy in The Man From Atlantis, these yellow thugs undulate disturbingly through water, happily chasing you for miles through the various mountain springs which dot the episode. Like horrible bi-ped fleas, the apes spring about all over the place, which makes them hard to track and easy to be complacent about. These boys have a few gimmicks up their sleeve. The mission pack's one new monster is the Gex, a kind of leaping gorilla-type beast not dissimilar to the demons in the original Quake. However, the deadly 'dimensional gate' in PainKeep was more powerful, and therefore better and more hilarious than The Reckonings Trap. Avid Quake players might remark on the similar device found in the great Total Conversion, PainKeep.
Anything drawn in and splatter-caked by the device - be they DM opponent or nearby monstie -ends up as health capsules (useful when exploring the first aid-free levels). Giggle as beefy players flail around in mid-air, squealing to escape the might of the Trap. Lob it into a fray of pirouetting deathmatchers, then laugh maniacally as the glowing yellow spiral of light sucks in anyone within a 20-metre radius. It looks and works like the 'ghost-sucking' device in GhostBusters (the one you'd hope would suck in Dan Ackroyd but always ended up sucking in the ghosts). The Trap - which sits grenadelike in your inventory - provides some new hilarity for your deathmatches. The Ripper's weapons are fast and hurtful, and the random nature of their ricochets makes it possible to use them to shoot round corners or perform 'clever' shots. The Phalanx projectiles are powerful but irritatingly slow-moving, and their particle effects look a bit pathetic alongside the awesome might of the dissolving RailGun. The Ripper sends bouncy frisbees of light off walls at bizarre angles, forcing your opponents to do a bit of evasive break-dancing to avoid the painful boomerangs.īoth fit visually well into Quake Its armoury, but their usefulness or necessity in a rank of fairly well-balanced weapons is questionable. Firing it piles a couple of big fiery flowers in the direction of any foe, exploding nastily on impact with the force of half a rocket. The cannon occupies a meaty portion of your view screen with its grimy electronic look. The two new weapons - the Phalanx Particle Cannon (press nine, twice) and the Ion Ripper (press five, twice) - look and feel good. The main differences, apart from the architecture, are the three new weapons (two guns and an item), the new monsters and a whole pile of new deathmatch levels. Your mission takes you through sewers, swamps and waste sieves, into a Strogg compound with its warehouses and core reactor, and then beyond that into the intelligence centre, the waste treatment plant, until finally you reach the Strogg freighter and take part in all sorts of low-gravity shenanigans.Īlthough you pile through various mountain ranges and spooky blue caverns, the style of The Reckoning is definitely first-episode Quake 2-lots of industrial grilles, pipes and chambers big machines, ladders and barrels and shadowed secrets. This whole new episode features 18 levels spread over several hubs. The Reckoning is the first kosher mission pack for Quake 2and, we're happy to report, falls into the same category. The authorised commercial variants, however, have thus far been very excellent indeed. Most turned out crap -as Doctor Who to Babylon 5, you could say, if you were a sci-fi special FX buff. A lot of people have had a go at doing it. The way it enabled anyone with a bit of suss to change it, to add new levels, new monsters, new graphics and all that. One thing to tell your pale little grandchildren about Quake II in years to come is its open architecture.
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