Took me long enough after having it for so long. Just decided to bang it out across 2-3 days, and manged to do so. The base game at least is pretty solid for the most part.

The game starts strong, but loses steam as the game goes on. Mostly because Quake suffers from a severe lack of enemy variety, and also environmental variety. In terms of enemies, for the most part you'll be mostly fighting a mix of ogres, Knights/death knights, fiends, and scrags. Grunts, enforcers, and dogs are only in the first levels of each episode. Zombies only appear in some missions and are barely a threat. Do we really count the fish as enemies? Vores and Shamblers are awesome, but don't appear that much. Usually only a few per mission, if even that.

Spawns can go fuck themselves though. They arguably don't even really fit into the games aesthetic, they're small as fuck, and a complete pain in the balls to hit when they bounce around, doubly so since I'm on console, even with guro. When they're bouncing around and smacking you in the face, it sounds like someone smacking you with a dick. Of course for the cherry on top they explode in your face if you kill em too close. To paraphrase Civvie; they're fuckin bullshit.

The environments in the game are great, but get too samey as the game goes on. As much as i love brown castles and the blue-ish magic areas, you can only look at the same things for so long before it starts to all blur together into a blob.

Of course the core gameplay is still fantastic. Guns are great, action is fast when you're in it, most enemies are well designed even if there aren't many, and the game runs at a silky smooth 60fps on Switch 2.

Grandfather of the 3d first person shooter. Its not meant to be perfect by modern standards. Its like saying halo wasn't amazing because the library was repetitive.

I agree I hate the spawns I see one and run as far away as I can

I always wonder if I just freakin' love Quake 1 more than anything else because of when it was released, my formative age, and all that nostalgia. Started playing the new maps and man, it's so exciting to me.

Halo's repetition was widely remarked upon at the time, it was kind of inexcusable by contemporary standards. Its strengths were in other areas, and it's clear they were forced to rush out for the hardware release... But the legitimacy of modern critique doesn't really come into it.

Quake is similar. Most first person shooters of the next five years we're kind of a critique of its shortcomings. They sure owed it a lot though.

Pretty decent, huh? Oookay.

Now you can play on harder difficulty, find all the secrets (including secret levels), defeat all enemies, play the expansions, play the mods, speedrun maps, etc.

It keeps on giving!

Yeah fuck those things lol. If you can spot them before they notice you then you can drop a grenade or rocket on them and it kills them instantly. Once they start bouncing though that's a hard ask, best just use the nailgun or something.

The modern expansions are, and this will be blasphemous to my own eyes to type, SIGNIFICANTLY better. Currently finishing up Dawn of the Machine and I've been pleasantly surprised the entire way through.

I do recommend saving often though. 😉

Saving often is a given lol. Yeah the other expansions were kinda odd to me, you could tell id had no say in them.

Spawns are awesome!

It's realistic, not blasphemy. Quake modders/level makers have had decades to hone their craft.

The people at id had mere months to crank out a full game, using a new tool, on a true 3D engine that was also brand new. So even their ideas and approach to that kind of level making were new.

I'm honestly surprised the base game is as good as it is, based on they were the pioneers of 3D space and had a crazy time crunch to do it in.

Ngl definitely a choice to complain about the aesthetic choices of the base game given it is 30yrs old. Don't get me wrong, I agree with you but it's just what they could do at the time. Later episodes, especially the newest one, are so much better in terms of the aesthetic but they've also had so long to mess around with the engine that it'd actually be weird if they could bring more out of it.

Also agree with you in regards to enemy design and placement getting a bit boring the longer you play. Also just a sign of it's time so it's hard for me to be really upset when I know that for it's time it would've probably been great when compared to now I know it's just okay at best.

I recommend making your way through added expansions, I think they do a superb job in level design and really showing us what this engine can do in modern times. Hell I'm midway through the expansion they just dropped and it's been excellent

You're a bad person and you should feel ashamed.

I always thought the campaign was only ok. I say that as someone who did my first play though on a Pentium 100. As you say the lack of enemy variety is an issue after a while.

Deathmatch though? Now we're talking.