![]() Quake flipped the dichotomy of story and frantic gameplay on its head, however, by including the most nuanced tidbits of world-building. The collection comes from an era where story elements were a premium in gaming. Quake is an easy crowd-pleaser thanks to its overall simple design and frantic twitch-shooter gameplay. In short: the Quake Remastered collection is nothing short of exalted 90s nostalgia, all the way from its classic visuals down to its original core design. It is so wonderfully remastered that not even the pixels seem out of place. The player-character moves fast and enemies move even faster, all the while Nine Inch Nails blares in the background like the pure testosterone trip the original developers intended. There are horrific, Cthulhu-inspired enemies around every corner, and literal canons moulded into a set of weapons with pure Mad Max inspired designs available for pickup at regular intervals. Players will find ghastly coloured and spacious hallways contrasted with dark claustrophobic corridors. One thing about the collection is vastly apparent: all the games still retain their iconic designs throughout. ![]() ![]() Spoiler alert: they succeeded with aplomb. Such is the plight of NightDive Studios and id Software, studios who took it upon themselves to modernise the collection and bring the genre-defining shooters to life with Quake Remastered. As such, bringing any of the founding titles to modern generations holds a lot of weight and can be quite a daunting challenge. I wouldn’t call it an evolution of Doom in a design sense, which was kind of disappointing, but it’s another great entry into the type of shooter Id popularised which is now seeing a resurgence lately.The Quake franchise defined the video gaming first person genre, and therefore holds a special place in many hearts. The level design is labyrinthian and challenging, the enemies provide a good test of movement and the player’s ability to quickly assess a situation and act accordingly, and the grimy presentation sets a unnerving atmosphere. I’ll say this now, I think for what it is, Quake is a perfect iteration of an old-school FPS. As someone who has played a lot of the original Doom series, and thought that the 2016 game was fine, and hated my time with Doom 64, I think I was already a little worn out on this type of shooter going in, even if I hadn’t touched one for about a year prior. If you just love shooters, then this is a great game to play, and if you’ve only touched the newer Doom games, Quake is a great taste of the older generation of Id’s game design. I think your mileage of Quake will vary depending on a multitude of factors. This is as good a segway as any into my main complaints with this game. As of writing this review, I’m close to the end of the first one, Scourge of Armagon, but I’m not sure if I will continue any time soon. The remaster also includes a quite a few official mission packs that I didn’t get around to playing. I didn’t delve into them all, there’s only so much Quake a man can take in the span of a few days, but they all seemed like good fun. The game looks and plays great on PS4 and comes with a bunch of free downloadable map packs that are nice additions. Much like the Doom series, Quake was remastered recently to be played on modern consoles, though so far only the first game has been given this treatment. ![]() Because of that experience, Id Software became a developer who’s backlog I was more interested in delving deeper into, and Quake seemed like the perfect next step (though, let’s be honest here, Wolfenstein is the only other real contender). I greatly enjoy the Doom series, especially the first two and Final Doom which I consider to be the pinnacle of first-person shoot level design. Quake is a game that I had been looking forward to playing since I played the Doom series throughout 2019-2021.
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