Quake Champions is a game with a core that feels mostly solid by way of it being Quake, but also one that feels like all parties involved just sort of gave up on halfway through.

Gimmicky champions and guest characters flirt with tapping into the hero shooter trend of the late 2010's, but without offering compelling character design updates to chase that same demographic or a business model that enables each champion to really distinguish themselves in any meaningful way, and stylistic modernizations don't land half as effectively as the rest of id Software's 8th Gen retro-revivals.

No sense of on-boarding mechanically and the lack of an immediately generous character roster makes the attempted modernization of Quake here feel like a disingenuous half-step made out of obligation that doesn't feel particularly charged to appeal to either purists or newcomers; Unless you're a greater Bethesda super-fan or an invested advocate for classic style Arena FPS games on the whole, this is simply a barebones shooter with all the appeal of Cliff Blezinsky's LawBreakers, and I still can barely tell if this thing is in open beta or not.