It’s honestly kind of insane how good this game is. Quake is one of the literal first ever fully 3D first-person shooters, and in spite of its age, it’s still significantly more fun than 90% of the genre today. This is due to an excellent core design philosophy, strong level and enemy design, a solid offensive toolkit, and a surprisingly thorough grasp of atmosphere.

Quake is different to most modern shooters in that, rather than emphasizing cover mechanics and hitscan aiming, it instead emphasizes complex movement, positioning, pattern reading, and projectile mechanics. This means that you’re constantly moving and applying skills beyond “aim and shoot”, and the way the game layers its mechanics together and explores them through its level and enemy design is nothing short of brilliant.

Outside the first level of each of its four “episodes”, Quake very rarely employs hitscan enemies, meaning nearly every enemy’s attacks can be reliably dodged with the right movement. However, this doesn’t mean that avoiding damage is easy - flying enemies like Scrags can shoot pretty fast-moving projectiles, Fiends are tanky and will aggressively leap at you repeatedly, Death Knights chase you down relentlessly and are a constant threat, and Ogres force you to move sideways relative to them and to keep track of their grenades as they bounce around.

Those Ogres are one of my favorite enemies in the whole genre - the way their grenades bounce is chaotic but deterministic, and as a result, predicting their trajectory becomes a worthwhile skill. It’s especially worthwhile in encounters with multiple Ogres, which can quickly become a serious threat as they flood the arena with bouncing grenades.

Of course, not every enemy can be a winner. The Shambler is pretty boring to fight - whenever you’re not in melee range of it, it can start up a fully hitscan lightning bolt attack, meaning you either need to repeatedly bait its melee attacks or repeatedly duck behind cover and take potshots intermittently. It’s a pretty straightforward and repetitive strategy, but these guys have so much health (especially on the higher difficulties) that fighting them can really start to drag. Fortunately, they don’t show up more than once or twice per level until episode 4.

Sadly, the game takes a bit of a nosedive in quality a couple levels into episode 4. In addition to more Shamblers, it more or less stops using Ogres, the best enemy in the game, and it introduces two new enemy types called the Spawn and the Vore. Spawns are okay in small numbers, but they’ll incessantly jump at you and explode when killed, and in large numbers, which you’ll often encounter in the later levels of episode 4, you’re pretty much guaranteed to take a huge chunk of damage if you don’t kill them on sight. This means if you don’t memorize their placement, you’re going to die a lot, and if you do, they stop being a threat. I don’t find them very interesting to fight.

The Vore is a weirder case. These things can be fine in the right arena; they fire a homing projectile that can curve somewhat around walls to continue pursuing you. This more or less forces a specific movement pattern in order to dodge it in arenas that don’t have terrain that’s safe to hide behind. Unfortunately, most of the time they’re encountered down a long hallway or in an open room, which means that avoiding their projectiles becomes a matter of running in a circle or repeatedly running back down the hallway to block it using a larger wall.

Despite these issues, episode 4 still has a lot of really interesting level layouts. Quake and its contemporaries are different to most modern shooters in that their levels are often labyrinthine, highly vertical mazes with keys, doors, and secrets to discover. In addition to being interesting to explore and navigate, the excellent level design on display enhances the combat, because it enables you to utilize your quick movement to reposition quickly and take advantage of terrain structures which are often fairly complex. Good tactics and level knowledge can allow you to block line of sight with dangerous enemies, lure more aggressive enemies into another room, force multiple enemies into a chokepoint before destroying them all with an explosive, and much, much more. This excellent level design goes hand in hand with the great weapon roster.

Quake’s weapons include a shotgun, a nailgun, enhanced versions of those two which deal additional damage at the cost of more ammo, a rocket launcher, a grenade launcher, a lightning gun, and a shitty axe that’s almost useless and which can safely be disregarded. The shotguns and lightning gun are the only hitscan weapons in the game, and the shotguns deal fairly little damage while the lightning gun has heavily limited ammo and range. The nailgun, rocket launcher, and grenade launcher all require not only aim but assessment of projectile travel time. The rocket and grenade launcher deal heavy damage in an area but can damage you as well if you’re too close to the explosion, and have the longest travel time; this means that they’re difficult to use, but highly rewarding in the hands of a skilled player. The limited ammo and the fact that most episodes don’t give you the stronger weapons immediately help keep all of the weapons relevant, and I found myself switching between them regularly even towards the end of the game.

The level design often feels built around making it as difficult as possible to safely use explosives, which makes it all the more satisfying to use them effectively. I played on Hard, and my playstyle in the later parts of each episode often consisted of finding the safest way to use the rocket launcher, which was made far more challenging by the often claustrophobic levels and the dangerous and aggressive melee enemies. The explosives also enable advanced techniques like grenade and rocket jumping, which open up a huge number of routing and traversal possibilities for skilled players at the cost of some health.

The atmosphere of the game is also excellent - the soundtrack written by Trent Reznor and performed by Nine Inch Nails, combined with some great sound design, lend a suitably unsettling tone to each level. The Lovecraft-inspired story is fairly thin but mostly effective, and serves as a solid backdrop for the game, which mostly thrives on its gameplay and delightfully creepy aesthetics.

I do have a few stray complaints - for a start, I think the game could really use a proper checkpoint system. The quicksave system as it exists is a bit too freeform and can easily lead to save-scumming, but ignoring it entirely can make some of the longer levels extremely frustrating on a blind playthrough. Some kind of autosave would go a long way towards alleviating this irritation. Moreover, the game features a couple bosses, but they’re really nothing to write home about, and mostly consist of making your way to a specific part of their arena, which is kind of underwhelming in its failure to test your shooting skills. The Nightmare difficulty in the original version is actually considered by many experienced players to be easier than the Hard difficulty due to its enemies’ tendency to stand in one spot and fire constantly, making them more predictable. Fortunately, this is remedied in the enhanced remaster.

Despite my few complaints, Quake is a very solid game overall. The first three episodes more than make up for the disappointment of the fourth, and even if you stop before E4M4 (which is where I found the game to start getting really unenjoyable) the game still provides plenty of excellent levels to sink your teeth into. If you couldn’t tell already, I strongly recommend playing this game, not only to experience a seminal piece of first-person shooter history, but also on its own merits as one of the genre’s best entries to this day

Assim como Quake 2, gameplay é bem fluido e a dança no meio da luta é bem legal, e o design das fases é bem melhor que Quake 2, porque não nem de perto tão confuso. Sendo mais linear acaba sendo um benefício muito grande. Terminei em dois dias, não tive vontade de parar.

Porém o design dos inimigos é extremamente fraco. O inimigo lançador de granadas é o mais comum no jogo, o que é em si ruim, mas há dois inimigos que só pulam em vc de forma extremamente rápida, um deles explodindo quando morre, e todos tendo MUITO hp. Para compensar o caos, o jogo te dá muito medkit, mas isso não torna o combate melhor. Assim como no Quake 2, joguei no modo difícil, e novamente acredito que se eu jogasse no "normal" seria mais divertido.

Além disso, se eu reclamava que no Quake 2 inimigos apareciam atrás de você o tempo todo abrindo portas falsas, nesse eles simplesmente se materializam na sua frente, é bem tosco e fraco. O último chefe também é extremamente ruim.

"wait - you haven't played quake?"
~almost everyone who i've gushed about this to game in the past few days

a little about me: i'm partial to industrial grit, my favorite doom games favor grimly edgy atmosphere over 80s thrash worship, i'm a big NIN fan and the downward spiral is one of my top 5 favorite albums. so this should be a no brainer, right?

well - yeah, actually. that's exactly right. throughout my playthrough all i could continually ask myself was, "why the fuck didn't i play this sooner?" and rightfully so. i think the reason quake has eluded me for so long is because its holistic reputation is eclipsed at this point by a diehard multiplayer community that i frankly don't give a shit about. i'm not much of a multiplayer enthusiast for anything - let alone tech-y arena shooters - and honestly i probably would've continued ignoring this absolute fucking masterpiece if not for my pressing curiosity towards trent reznor's involvement

that'd have been a huge mistake; quake is easily the best boomer shooter i've ever played

this is where i could talk about how i adore the weapons and their balancing, the general focus on straightforward maps with powerups everywhere, the difficulty being largely driven by how easy it is to kill yourself in tight spaces - or even the god tier ambient score that has just the right amounts of otherworldly screams and metallic chords strewn about - i COULD go into those things and we could be here for a considerable amount of time - but instead of doing any of that, i'm just going to say that the shambler is one of the greatest enemy designs in any fps. in fact, my feeling towards quake 1 can be summarized roughly with my thoughts on the shambler; he's absolutely perfect. i love this giant, dopey, teethy foreskin man in all his fleshy (not furry - fuck you) glory. and i haven't even begun to MENTION his timbs yet

my mans butters be outright otherworldly

A sublime FPS with its DNA lying dormant in nearly every major shooter to come for the next two decades. If Doom is all guts and glory, Quake is dread and disaster. The game’s aesthetic is a delirious blend of cosmic horror, swords and sorcery, and inscrutable sci-fi technology. Every gun smacks. Every episode smacks. Secret missions and Quad Damage power ups reward persistent exploration, and the hidden Nightmare difficulty is a pure shot of adrenaline up there with the best FPS campaigns of all time. If you like shooter games, you should play Quake.

certainly plenty of dumb bullshit present, especially as it goes on, but that doesn't really change it into not being one of the most fun to control FPSes of all time...

really makes you wonder if the outsized influence of the cinematic leanings of half-life resulted in the medium worse in the end, with the entire big budget space not content to finetune and speed up their games, instead opting to re-do ideas from hollywood but worse. there's very much been a push in the indie sphere to get back to this sort of thing and there's always gonna be a market for it, but the overwhelming decline in popularity of singleplayer fps campaigns (combined with the continued floppage of every comp-focused movement shooter) shows that it will probably be many years before we again see the year's biggest shooter be this snappy and transparent.*

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*doom doesn't count. doom has a press to lock on and kill enemy button which changes the flow greatly, with eternal especially completely ignoring the aspect of quick environment traversal present here instead opting to lock you in big kill rooms until it decides to let you move on. games like ultrakill are the real continuations of this style

Sinceramente apesar da gameplay ser extremamente fluida e eu reconhecer a importancia desse jogo nos jogos que eu amo hoje em dia é claro os erros que ele tem. Começando pela parte que em teoria é a mais importante pra um jogo assim que seriam os inimigos, ELES TEM MUITA VIDA tipo nivel de um inimiguinho normal ser necessário 5 tiros de shotgun pra matar ou 2 tiros de rocket launcher, e isso estraga totalmente a minha vontade de jogar o jogo, se tem literalmente um inimigo normal que é necessario tipo 30 tiros de 12 pra matar desculpa mas você me perdeu ai. Mas ainda não posso falar que é um jogo ruim, afinal os mapas (apesar de serem em design basicamente todos iguais) são bem interessantes e de novo a gameplay é extremamente fluida, mas isso dos inimigos me broxou muito a continuar jogando.

Not content to put out just two of the most influential games in history with Wolfenstein and Doom, id went all-in with their first foray into true 3D- and knocked it out of the park.

Quake feels like a more restrained companion piece to Doom's confident carnage. The combat here is slower and more methodical- Ranger isn't the human bullet Doomguy is so you have to play more carefully. Enemies do more damage- Shamblers, Fiends and Spawn are significantly more dangerous than your average demon, and they're a lot tankier. Quake is definitely the tougher of the two, even with health kits and ammo everywhere I found myself dying more than I would in Doom. It's not as much of a showcase of the player's power, but the harder difficulty means that even small encounters can feel like a huge triumph once you kill the last monster. Quake is full of those little moments of satisfaction.

Quake is also a lot less flashy and showy than Doom, which leaves the player focusing on the technical marvel for the time- it was released not even 3 years after Doom, which was already groundbreaking for the time, and feels like it belongs to an entirely different generation of gaming.

The lighting is dark and foreboding instead of bright and visceral, the music is ominous industrial groans (by fucking Nine-Inch Nails, how cool is that?) instead of roaring guitars and banging drums. Your enemies are deep browns instead of saturated reds, greens and white and even their blood is murky and oxidised instead of bright crimson. The most powerful gun is simply called the Thunderbolt instead of the Big Fucking Gun. The final boss is a puzzle, not a beef wall. The halls you stalk are brown and grey brick, not fleshy corridors. It's almost understated in its approach- apart from the fact you're still blowing ghouls into paste. But even then, it's not as loud and bloody as in Doom.

Despite all of these comparisons to Doom, Quake stands firmly on its own merits, and the contrasts to its sister game only serve to strengthen it. It's a landmark in game design and graphical fidelity, and that's not even mentioning its shadow looming large over pretty much every multiplayer shooter since its release. It's aged surprisingly well.

(This is the 120th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)

I've officially gotten into the Big Three of id Software IPs. First there was Wolfenstein 3D, which built on lesser known Catacomb 3D to be the introduction to the FPS genre for some. Then came Doom, which was the introduction to the FPS genre for many. After that came Quake on June 22nd, 1996, which brings the genre to a whole new level.

I enjoyed them all over the past 12 months or so, none more though than Quake. For what on the surface might look like another Doom sequel, Quake does so many new things that spice up the entire experience. It introduces more puzzles, platforming and way more creative level design to the genre. As someone who mainly plays id Software FPS games through this challenge, it also lets you view up and down with the mouse for the first time in their history, which puts the icing on the cake.

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 2/10

As per usual, the story is an afterthought for an id Software game. I mean, John Carmack famously said: "Story in a game is like story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not important". So it's actually a positive surprise that you get as much as you do I suppose.

Earth is invaded by an enemy code-named Quake (Shub-Niggurath). You need to find 4 runes to eventually find your way to Shub-Niggurath and kill it. The difference to Doom is its Lovecraftian theme and that these alien beings can jump through portals I guess, but you're not gonna be playing the game for the lore, or be disappointed if you do.

GAMEPLAY | 17/20

90's id Software FPS gameplay at its finest? I'm sure Doom vs Quake has been debated endlessly online, though I'd say both are very fine games in their own right. What makes Quake better for me is that it simply improves upon nearly everything over Doom from an objective standpoint. More enemy variety? Check. 3D objects over sprites? Check. Much more interesting and clever level design? Check.

The weapons are slightly different in Quake, and the weapons that both games share are balanced somewhat differently (like the shotgun, which I felt is weaker in Quake). Types of enemies are a bit different, music and theme are not the same either. So taste will play a role in these cases. But just based on what id Software was able to do with Quake in 96 versus with Doom in 93 from a technical standpoint just makes Quake a smoother, more modern experience that obviously resonated with me more in 2024.

Similarly to Doom, you enter a stage and need to kill enemies on your way to the exit. You gotta find keys hidden throughout the level to open locked doors in the meantime as well. The difference here is that id could do so much more that they couldn't with Doom 3 years earlier.

You can jump, you can platform, rooms can now be placed below rooms (exploring a river under a bridge in the first level as an example), secrets are not just moaning at every wall texture anymore but rather placed more intuitively, enemies are not just ranged threats anymore but also in melee thanks to enemy types like dogs, fiends and those horrible spawns, as well as others that have both ranged AND melee attacks combined.

Simultaneously, the most powerful weapon in the game, at least that's how I perceived it, are the rocket and grenade launchers (at least in terms of weapons that you regularly get ammo for). The trick with them is that they do significant damage, but when you're (not even all that) close to the enemy when they detonate, you take a lot of damage yourself. This means it's a high risk / high reward situation against all these enemies that rush you in the close quarter environments that Quake has, adding a strategic element to battles. Do I go quick and easy with these launchers but risk my own health, or do I go back to the shotgun and take them down slowly while opening myself up to more punishment from the enemy?

Vertical camera movement being possible also adds a lot here, though from what I understand it wasn't as smooth on MS-DOS back in the day as it is now. From a today standpoint, it's a fantastic addition of course.

On the face of it, it looks like a full 3D Doom with a visual upgrade, but all these additions make the gameplay experience much more smooth. Personally, I prefer this over Doom for sure, though Doom is still worth playing today as well.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 9/10

Sound effects sound solid, and the soundtrack is very good. Quake goes for ambient music mainly, which I found interesting, but it adds a lot to the atmosphere. It's not music you can listen to outside of playing the game, but I can already hear you say "the music has to fit the game, not your Spotify playlist you nerd" and you're very correct about that indeed. In that regard, Quake's OST is very good as I mentioned.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 9/10

The jump to full 3D suits the game very well. Enemies look much scarier, environments much prettier and overall, levels and episodes are way more varied visually and thematically.

ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 10/10

The visuals and ambient music make for a great, dark atmosphere. The lighting effects for 96 are also pretty impressive and add to each level, especially whenever you see a dark room with a small, well-lit corner and a strong enemy standing right in there, staring at you menacingly. I'm still not sure whether to be disappointed by the reveal of Shub-Niggurath or impressed by what it means, but I think I'm going for the latter.

CONTENT | 10/10

Lots of content to indulge in here. A 7-8 hour main single player campaign over 4 episodes, multiple equally long expansion stories, plenty of weapons, power ups and enemy types to have fun with and I've read many times that Quake's multiplayer is supposedly fantastic, if you're interested in that. I'm sure it has an active mod community as well.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 9/10

Outside of very few individual levels, including the final one, the level design is just superb here. So many different environmental challenges, so much variety, so many secrets that can be found through simple exploration instead of wall spamming to unlock some random door and getting rewarded so many times for it makes for a grand time. Thematic differences in episodes adds to all this, really impressed.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 9/10

Sure, it's yet another FPS by id Software, but it more than sufficiently brings the genre forward in great ways. Vertical camera movement, jumping, platforming, more clever puzzles, more exploration, more differently acting enemies etc. If I played this when it came out, I'd feel like I'm playing something familiar like I would have wanted, as well as feeling like I'm playing the next gen version of it, which is all, if not more than I would ask for.

REPLAYABILITY | 3/5

In the sense of replaying the main story, there is some incentive to do so in terms of finding more secrets, going through levels quicker and going for higher difficulties. In an overall sense, more campaigns and multiplayer obviously make this game endlessly replayable for the right player.

PLAYABILITY | 5/5

Works well at all times.

OVERALL | 83/100

1996 continues in strong fashion with Quake. My expectations for this game were definitely met and then some, and it's probably my favorite old school FPS after Half-Life now. It's a shame to read up on all the issues during the development of this, as well as the fallout, but all the more impressive that this was the end product of all that anyway. Going back to the starting days of the FPS genre and experiencing the growth has definitely been very enjoyable and if you're a fan of the genre I would definitely recommend you to do the same to gain a new appreciation for it all.

Ah yes, the real Doom II.

Energetic classic FPS action with a horror edge and a love for sick tunes, everything id Software did best. Big step back up from Doom II in my opinion--the levels here are more fun to navigate, the enemy pool isn't so expansive as to be so much to juggle, and restarting levels with everything I had going into them is far less frustrating than pistol-starting. Episode 3 of Quake is probably my favorite of the game's levels.

Interesting to realize just how much the reboot era of Doom takes after Quake--the Quad Damage power-up, arenas and progression accounting for verticality and movement, Eternal forgoing the pistol entirely like this game does, etc. Were the names and aesthetics of those newer games different, they might've passed for new Quake games instead.

Took a little bit for the game to click but once it did, it was satisfyingly fun. Easy recommendation. Shoutouts to the final boss having a name I don't feel comfortable saying (Thanks, Lovecraft.)

i'm not really that big on shooters in general, and when i tried doom i just did not glom with it all that much. so, i was gifted quake fairly recently, and gave it a shot because i got it for free. and MAN i had a great time with this. i played the steam remake, and everything about it felt super slick. i love the mix of sci-fi and medieval aesthetics, and the enemy designs are super grody and awesome. the spawns scared the shit out of me every single time i came across one, and i love them for that. also a big fan of shamblers, cool electric guys :] i loved all the weapons there were to choose from, lots of really fun tools to play around with. my favorite by far was the grenade launcher, bouncing shots to hit enemies out of reach was one of my favorite aspects of the combat. i think what made quake click for me more than doom was it's larger focus on movement, as opposed to doom's focus on combat. the jump, of course, was a pretty big addition, and you can tell the folks over at id software were ready to stretch their legs with the new physics engine, like with the aforementioned grenade launcher. ive only checked out the main quake campaign, but i've noticed the other options in the menu like scourge of armageddon, and i'm pretty excited to check those out. overall, quake holds up crazy well, and i can't recommend it enough