This game is confused. It's caught in this weird period of transformation for the fps genre between the intense constant action of the classic id games and the attempts to add narrative and tie the player down to more concrete and compelling goals than "get to the end" that would find its mature form a year later with Half-Life.
See, you kind of have to talk about Half-Life when talking about this game because it is desperately reaching for very similar goals, short of the friendly AI. Quake II pushes the player through various alien complexes (most of which are some variation on "fucked-up torture chamber"...the sadistic joy it takes in throwing them in every possible kind of wood chipper gets exhausting) and has them complete tasks along the way that are more involved than "get key, open door".
On the surface it's more than keys and doors, at least. The tasks are actually part of the narrative, amounting to shutting down a computer here to get through this area and chase the boss, or whatever. For the most part the player does just run around and press buttons to get through different doors. It's very thinly veiled. To add that grounded investment and guide the player around, there's a computer bound to F1 which gives a brief sentence describing the next objective, and it's probably the worst design decision here. Breaking up semi-traditional id combat with reading log entries vaguely telling me what I'm looking for makes for an experience that really clashes with itself. It's also just a massive pain in the ass. Going in circles in these very samey environments, backtracking to find your way to another identical-looking area to find the right button to press is so draining and not what I want to be doing in an fps like this.
Half-Life would later marry these goals with mechanics and level design that actually compliment them, giving the player a sense of purpose through environmental puzzles, a strong forward momentum, and slower, more methodical combat which could feel oppressive. It's easy to look back at this era and think about how great Half-Life was and also lament its murder of the 90s shooter. That game killed the adrenaline, killed the crowd control, killed the early purity of the genre, and that kind of sucks. But when you look at games shortly before Half-Life like this one, you see that there's no way developers could have reached for the new kinds of experiences they wanted to give us while also keeping the intensity the genre and id's entries in particular had at their core. When you try to do both, you end up with games like Quake II. Painful stop-and-start and "WHERE THE FUCK DO I GO" moments really smack down the strong mechanical core that's here. More recently id themselves have been trying that balance again with the DOOM reboot, leading to similar issues, though modern conveniences like map markers and a much heavier focus on the action make DOOM 2016 a much more successful experiment than the second Quake. So maybe Quake II's take on the genre just came at the wrong time, and we needed to learn from the hard swing toward the Half-Life model that dominated the 00s to pull it off right.
Quake II does not at all live up to the tight near-perfection of its predecessor, but it's a solid shooter and worth a play. If anything, it's a fascinating historical document for anyone who cares about first person shooters. We're still trying to solve the problems that this entry was taking an early crack at, so I guess I can't blame it too much. It's still a good time. Shooting feels good, and once you get that glorious RL + rail combo everything falls into place. Play it and enjoy yourself, but you'll probably come out the other end happy that Quake II didn't spawn many imitators.
See, you kind of have to talk about Half-Life when talking about this game because it is desperately reaching for very similar goals, short of the friendly AI. Quake II pushes the player through various alien complexes (most of which are some variation on "fucked-up torture chamber"...the sadistic joy it takes in throwing them in every possible kind of wood chipper gets exhausting) and has them complete tasks along the way that are more involved than "get key, open door".
On the surface it's more than keys and doors, at least. The tasks are actually part of the narrative, amounting to shutting down a computer here to get through this area and chase the boss, or whatever. For the most part the player does just run around and press buttons to get through different doors. It's very thinly veiled. To add that grounded investment and guide the player around, there's a computer bound to F1 which gives a brief sentence describing the next objective, and it's probably the worst design decision here. Breaking up semi-traditional id combat with reading log entries vaguely telling me what I'm looking for makes for an experience that really clashes with itself. It's also just a massive pain in the ass. Going in circles in these very samey environments, backtracking to find your way to another identical-looking area to find the right button to press is so draining and not what I want to be doing in an fps like this.
Half-Life would later marry these goals with mechanics and level design that actually compliment them, giving the player a sense of purpose through environmental puzzles, a strong forward momentum, and slower, more methodical combat which could feel oppressive. It's easy to look back at this era and think about how great Half-Life was and also lament its murder of the 90s shooter. That game killed the adrenaline, killed the crowd control, killed the early purity of the genre, and that kind of sucks. But when you look at games shortly before Half-Life like this one, you see that there's no way developers could have reached for the new kinds of experiences they wanted to give us while also keeping the intensity the genre and id's entries in particular had at their core. When you try to do both, you end up with games like Quake II. Painful stop-and-start and "WHERE THE FUCK DO I GO" moments really smack down the strong mechanical core that's here. More recently id themselves have been trying that balance again with the DOOM reboot, leading to similar issues, though modern conveniences like map markers and a much heavier focus on the action make DOOM 2016 a much more successful experiment than the second Quake. So maybe Quake II's take on the genre just came at the wrong time, and we needed to learn from the hard swing toward the Half-Life model that dominated the 00s to pull it off right.
Quake II does not at all live up to the tight near-perfection of its predecessor, but it's a solid shooter and worth a play. If anything, it's a fascinating historical document for anyone who cares about first person shooters. We're still trying to solve the problems that this entry was taking an early crack at, so I guess I can't blame it too much. It's still a good time. Shooting feels good, and once you get that glorious RL + rail combo everything falls into place. Play it and enjoy yourself, but you'll probably come out the other end happy that Quake II didn't spawn many imitators.