"Player was eviscerated by a fiend"

Quake was a long-due step in 3d gaming, to move past the 2.5D design of Doom and Duke Nukem 3d and popularize the 360 degree polygonal 3d rotation that had been used, with much lower detail levels, in 3d flight sims like Terminal Velocity and Descent, but never perfected in the realm of a human-led FPS. Beyond these graphical achievements, the Nine Inch Nails audio and thrilling gameplay make it flat-out amazing.

Graphics--For the time, very high detail textures, lots of polygons--it accounts for several sides of every limb and gun, which is a lot more than Descent could say with its fairly flat-surfaced Pyro-GX and robots. No more sprites for weapons, items and other small objects, either; guns, Nine Inch Nail boxes, and health pickups are shown in all their 3d glory. Every wall and beam is much more complex than the other shooters of the time. The water, teleports, and lava textures twist around, too. While the lighting was rendered well when it existed, Quake was also one of the darkest games of its time, a lot like Doom 3 was when it came out. It's a huge contrast from the bright, pastel Doom and the city lights of Duke. Turn the gamma up if you like; the brownish-grays can be a little ugly with bad contrast, though. If you have the darkness all the way down for the effect, you might want to kill the lights in the room you're playing so you can actually see everything on screen.

Sound--Thank you, Trent Reznor. Even people who have only played this game once or twice remember the opening theme. Then you created a lot of songs that didn't have a whole lot of melody, but were absolutely flawless at creating ambience for the dark mood of the game. "Parallel Dimensions"' and "Life"'s constant beating and "Damnation"'s constant ringing provide more atmosphere for the dungeons than high-strung percussion and rock would. Then you have your sound effects, also courtesy of Mr. Nine Inch Nails. You hear a soft basic shot, explosive/metallic higher weapons, clanging grenades, metallic armor, numerous enemy groans, GREAT gibbing and fragging noises, and best of all, loud chords every time Quad Damage is used. That jumping grunt is a little annoying, though.

Gameplay...Solid controls...it's fairly easy to swiftly move between attacks, jump to where you need to, and quickly point your gun in the right direction. You can even grenade-or-rocket-jump to places you're not supposed to if you can spare some health. And fragging enemies...best part...it's gross and it looks good, especially when you can pull it off with lower-level weapons (a Grunt can get fragged by the double-barreled shotgun if he's weak and doubled over.) You basically have to frag Zombies with explosive weapons or they'll come right back at you and keep throwing their bloody remains at you, although basic gunfire will do if you have your beloved Quad Damage! You have to love the big Q...the screen turns blue and every battle gets a lot easier, as you can frag enemies with just the basic shotgun or nailgun. The level structures are smooth to work through, and vastly more detailed than Doom, Duke or Descent; there's always an underwater region to plunge into, a hidden door to find a new weapon in. A map would be nice, but it's usually hard to get lost or miss the next goals, and if you really want you can always noclip, walk out of bounds and see the bigger perspective (cheater.) As far as difficulty goes, honestly this may be one of the easier early FPS's. Even on Nightmare mode, a reasonably competent player can make it through all four episodes by learning attack patterns, using powerups resourcefully, and saving at the right times. That's not to say you won't get smashed by Shamblers and their lasers or exploded by Vores (the game really established a lot of terminology for various modes of death) and their homing purple shots many times even on the lower difficulty modes. And while the game moves very quickly and will rarely bore you even when you search around for the next key and lose track of your progress, very few people can play nearly as fast as the Quake Done Quick authors! But the game won't unreasonably frustrate even outstanding players the way Nightmare-mode Doom can with infinite respawns or Descent can with Mega Missiles and Smart Missiles and numerous other shots coming at you all at once.

Absolutely worth getting with WinQuake or some other shell. Almost perfect, and have to round up to 10 here. You won't find yourself saying "Player becomes bored with life" playing this!

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 02/26/07