Get used to seeing this.note
Part of the reason Quake II and its different versions and Expansion Packs are so hard is the regular foes you get to find across the levels.
Quake II (core game)
- In the original release, Parasites. Cybernetic quadrupedal creatures that are Made of Iron, fast and stealthy, often appear at close range and quickly drain your health with their unavoidable tentacle attack. When you hear its footsteps nearby and you're low on health, you know you're about to get owned. Lord help you if two or more attack at once unless you're outside their attack range, in which case they'll send off the tentacle anyways, making them perfectly still targets. Their attack thankfully received a nerf in the 2023 remaster, as it's now a dodgeable projectile that can get stuck onto surfaces, temporarily stunning & immobilising the Parasite.
- Gladiators are Made of Iron, have a hard-to-dodge railgun that chops off 50 health points, and their close-range claw deals a lot of damage. In Ground Zero and the 2023 remaster, the ETF Rifle (which usually makes mincemeat of armored enemies) has zero effect on these guys. Their only saving grace is that their accuracy is a bit subpar for a Railgun wielder.
- Mutants are Lightning Bruisers with a Deadly Lunge that can stunlock you to death with the recoil from their frantic claw slashes. Have fun trouncing the 12 bastards that the Gate Warden and the Masters of the Machine throw at you in the 2023 remaster.
- Tank Commanders, sturdier than the already hard Tank and with harder-hitting attacks, are extremely common in the City unit. Some source ports replace them with the regular Tank, drastically lowering the overall difficulty of the unit.
- Call of the Machine has even worse varieties featuring a Power Shield and/or homing rockets. Case in point: the Commander at the end of Operation: Wasteland.
- When you play the game on Hard+/Nightmare, even the game's common enemies become Demonic Spiders:
- All the Strogg lose their ability to flinch.
- Light, Shotgun and Machinegun Guards, Enforcers, Gunners and Berserkers attack much faster, rarely have to reload, can duck your projectiles with uncanny skill, and can shoot while crouching.
- The game's larger enemies can almost rapid-fire their weapons, and are even more resistant to being stunned.
- The Tanks' 3-shot blasters and rocket launchers now shoot constantly unless you break their line of sight.
- In the original release of the 2023 remaster, Berserkers have gone from being the game's least intimidating enemies to the Fiend reincarnate, all thanks to the reintegration of one of their cut attacks: the Ground Pound. With it, Berserkers can now leap whole corridors at lightning speed to close the gap, creating a damaging shockwave with a frankly ridiculous AOE radius upon landing. In certain maps, it's possible to bait Berserkers into leaping off into deadly areas (such as slime, lava, or bottomless pits), though the attack's considerable knockback makes it likely for you to get knocked off as well. They also now have a running hammer attack (another cut attack), which means they don't have to stop to attack you anymore. The Berserker was nerfed a bit following Update 1.
Quake II: The Reckoning
- All Beta Class enemies. Finding one is a good way to know that you're in for a WORLD of hurt.
- The Beta Class/Heat-Seeking Iron Maiden is not too different from the default model, except she has homing missiles. In a mixed firefight, they're a priority target.
- The Beta Class Brains have Hookshot-like tentacles that deal more damage than the original, have much longer range, and pull you in when they hit instead of sending you away, and an optic laser beam that can roast you inside your armor if you face it for over two seconds. Oh, and the 2023 Remaster replaced all regular Brains with them, so you'll see them in the base game too.
- The Beta Class/Phalanx Gladiator has MUCH higher health because of their Power Shield, a Phalanx Particle Cannon instead of the usual railgun (without the Gladiator's signature firing delay, too, and unlike the player it fires three mag slugs instead of two), and an extra painful clamp. In fact, the Beta Gladiator is tougher than the original game's Super Tank — and you only found two of those, in separate locations to boot — whereas the Beta Gladiator is possibly the third most common enemy in the final hub, only behind Gunners and Guards. The only saving graces are that it stands still while firing, making it a sitting duck of sorts; the three slugs are fired in a straight path instead of a spread formation like the player's Phalanx, making it easier to avoid when there's room to dodge; and they drop more Mag Slugs than it takes to kill them. The 2023 remaster nerfed them a bit, by reducing the mag slugs to 2 and making them quite frail without their Power Shield.
- The regular enemies also got some upgrades, making them harder than in the original campaign:
- The Enforcer only has to cock his gun the first time he attacks. Every time after that, he can attack right away.
- The Tank, if you dive behind cover, fires a rocket salvo instantly at your last known position, instead of waiting the long windup animation its shoulder launcher normally requires.
- The Weapon Guards introduced in the pack (Hyperblaster, Ripper and Laser) are relatively squishy but still have more armor than their more basic fellows, and their weapons can deal a surprising amount of damage — the Laser Guard in particular with his continuous hitscan attack can cook your armor down to ragged scraps. They're often perched high up as stationary snipers, and corner peeking with the rocket launcher or railgun isn't overkill against them.
Quake II: Ground Zero
Better get your pair of Double Damage and Quad Damage ready to use at the same time and learn their location with these damn foes.- All the monsters have the ability to jump over obstacles. Forget about them being locked to a plane as it happened in the vanilla game and The Reckoning.
- The stalkers are small arachnid robots that only shoot a blaster bolt but can attack you from either the floor or the ceiling, take two Railgun shots or three Super Shotgun point-blank shots to destroy (for comparison, the Gunner takes one Railgun shot or two Super Shotgun point-blank shots to fall), and can jump over any non hitscan attack. If there's a reason to use the ETF Rifle, it's these guys. Have fun battling a bunch of them with the Black Widow Guardian spawning them constantly; the Invulnerability and Quad/Double Damage items that she's immune to are still invaluable to mop them up.
- Halfway through Call of the Machine's Operation: Wasteland, you'll have to fight a Carrier boss, the Garbage Carrier, that summons Stalkers instead of Flyers, making for a notably annoying fight, combining two annoying enemy classes.
- Take the Icarus, an already annoying semi-durable flying enemy of vanilla Quake II that shoots a bunch of blaster bolts, add extra health and a Power Shield to it. Then make it a common enemy on par with the already annoying Flyers. Presto! You get the appropriately named Daedalus. If there's one reason to sacrifice Cells from your Power Shield and use the Hyperblaster or the Plasma Beam, or use the ETF Rifle, it's this dude.
- In the original Ground Zero, the turrets. Taking these bastards out is a chore more than anything, and it severely detracts from the expansion pack's enjoyment. It's a testament that while the 2023 remaster buffed several enemies, it instead nerfed turrets to the ground. Let's count the ways:
- They're far too tough. You need at least three rockets or two railgun slugs to destroy one, and they resist environmental damage, as the turrets located in the otherwise deadly reactor area of "Waste Processing" can attest. The remaster reduced their health to the point where one rocket is enough to destroy them.
- Their projectiles hurt. A lot. The Blaster turret, the weakest of the three variants, hits for a ridiculous 20 points of damage, equal to a Tank's blaster. Plus, they fire twice as fast as a stationary Gladiator, and save for the Railgun turret, they can Lead the Target.
- After they're first deployed, turrets are completely silent when not firing, so you'll only know one is around after they've fired, and by then there's no way to dodge. A targeting laser that signposts their position was added in the 2023 remaster.
- Once they're introduced, they are EVERYWHERE, to the point where — since you're forced to look in every wall, every ceiling and every nook or cranny therein for a new turret every time you enter a new room — they break the regular gameplay flow.
- What's worse is that the above advice doesn't even work all the time, sometimes you'll enter a room with no visible turret but a part of the ceiling will explode and a turret will appear behind you and in a few instances, this is while you're busy fighting enemies that are in front of you.
- In the original version of "Waste Disposal", at one point you have to go through a burial chamber for damaged containers. Right after you've entered the area, above you, you'll be greeted by the RAILGUN TURRET! Combining the Railgun's stealthiness with all the annoying attributes of the original turrets, this turret used to be one of the main causes of death on the level. The 2023 remastered edition replaced it with a different kind of turret, and the Railgun turret is nowhere to be seen.
- And if you are annoyed at the turret, allow us to introduce you to the game's number one Elite Mook: the Medic Commander, the mook that justifies the use of the BFG10K. Stronger and sturdier than the already annoying Medic, with an upgraded laser attack, and most importantly the ability to summon other enemy classes to the battlefield, ranging from Weapon Guards to Gunners to other Medics. If there's a huge bunch of enemies around, make no mistake, there's one around and you need to clear him with a BFG shot before the summoned Strogg outgun you. Some source ports replace the Medic Commanders with regular Medics, drastically reducing the difficulty of the levels those are in and showing you how bastardly difficult they are.
- The 2023 remastered edition of the game gave them the ability to summon the weapon guards from The Reckoning in Call of the Machine, making some of the fights even harder than they used to be. Oh, and the new Tutorial also features them, showing you how they work.
Other
- Downplayed with the Arachnid from the PSX version and the 2023 remaster. It's sturdy and comes armed with twin railguns, but is thankfully quite inaccurate.
- The source port kmquake2
shows what happens when the already difficult monsters of the game are given even more flexibility and freedom to execute their attacks. Suffice it to say, Nightdive Studios took more than a few pages from the mod for their 2023 remaster:- All light and medium-class monsters can jump. This includes the already difficult-to-engage Berserker since it can now chase you regardless of whatever obstacle they find.
- Every enemy is now notably more aggressive as well. With projectile-based foes, this isn't so bad, but with hitscanners, you're going to take a lot of hits because they'll start blasting almost immediately after spotting you, and in several cases can do it on the run now, too. Foes that do use projectiles like Gunners or Tanks, however, also have a nasty habit of launching grenades and rockets respectively at your last known location, trying to bait a corner-dodging player into coming back out into a barrage of death.
- Unlike the main game, where they fall victim to Goddamned Bats, Gunners can aim their 4-grenade burst vertically. In the vanilla game they aren't very dangerous, since the fixed horizontal launch angle makes the grenades' trajectories predictable and easy to avoid; in this port, you'll come to find very quickly that when properly aimed, it's a huge burst of damage that comes with very little warning and is difficult to dodge.
- In Team Evolve's unofficial Expansion Pack Zaero, you'll find an annoying enemy class called Sentien, the stars of the pack. These are humanoid robots with a laser attack that they never hesitate to use, turning their encounters into Pixel Hunts. It isn't until you get access to the EMP Nuke and its fantastic ability to nullify enemy attacks that you get a chance to fight these androids on equal foot. They're also everywhere from the moment you meet the first of them.
