YMMV / Quake II

• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • The Makron. Even more than the Super Tank and Hornet. Becomes painfully so if you had the foresight to save a Quad Damage and Invulnerability for the final battle, as two quad-powered BFG shots per form (while at this point you can get enough ammo for 6 shots) are usually enough to take it down. It's also a reason why the Quad has no effect with the Black Widow Guardian in Ground Zero.
  • The Nintendo 64 version ends with two Dual Boss fights against two special Tank Commanders who glow red when their health is low enough, and two Hornets.
  • The 2023 remaster may have buffed the Jorg with a massive health injection that forces you to use a Quad in order to finish it, however the Call of the Machine expansion introduced another example in the form of the Masters of the Machine, who are nothing more and nothing else than a pair of Flunky Boss Shamblers.
• Arc Fatigue:
  • The Mine Unit of the original game and the Wilderness Unit from The Reckoning basically boil down to "the main entrance to a big area is closed, find another way in".
  • The Warehouse Unit of the original game, which drags on long after you have completed the main objective (destroy the Strogg train). By the time you take out the train, you're barely halfway through the second level, and there's still a bit of the first and a full third one to complete before you leave for the third Unit.
  • The overall mission in the first level of Ground Zero is completed in under 5 minutes. The rest of the level is about locating the entrance to the Thaelite Mines and (once returning), proceeding to the next area.
  • Call of the Machine is 27 levels long. Tampering this is its division into six units of 2-6 levels each. While Operation: Corpse Run might be the closest thing to a straightforward Quake episode (with Operation: Darkest Depths being in second place), this is Quake II, where backtracking is a prevalent feature, with the rest of the units featuring constant back and forth until you reach the end of the unit. By the time you collect the 6 discs and enter the Temple of the Creator, you might want the game to finish already.
• Awesome Music: Shares a page with the rest of the series.
• Awesome Levels: The Strogg freighter in the first expansion pack, The Reckoning. You stow away in a crate in order to sneak in and have to hijack the freighter to fly to the moon base. Once you kill all the pilots, you find out the Strogg set the ship to self-destruct if everyone on board is killed and you only have 30 seconds or so to put the power cubes in place before it blows up.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The commercial for the game which is presented... as an art house film from a German director named Gunther. Well, this was from the 90s era which oddness like that sold games.
  Gunther: So do you like? (His ferret squeaks quizzically) I DON'T CARE IF YOU LIKE!!!
• Broken Base:
  • This game (and all the subsequent Quake games) started using a full color palette, rather than the Real Is Brown style of the original Quake. While some people think the games look better this way, others preferred the dark and gloomy atmosphere of the first game.
  • As usual for the time, the Nintendo 64 port replaces the metal soundtrack from Sonic Mayhem by Aubrey Hodges' signature ambient sounds: while some players welcome the change in the atmosphere it gives to the game, others consider this soundtrack uninspired and/or out of place in a sci-fi adventure like Quake II. Nothing stopped this soundtrack from appearing in the 2023 remastered edition of the game, and its main theme to be used as the remaster's main theme.
• Common Knowledge: It's frequently cited that Trent Reznor didn't work on the game because he thought it had no soul, but that couldn't be further from the truth. According to Sonic Mayhem, he simply wasn't available to work on it.
• Contested Sequel: The original game was essentially Doom 3 in all but name, while Quake II takes more hints from games like Hexen and Strife, with the hub level system and complex objectives to complete. Whether or not this is a good thing is dependent on the player, but Quake II is often far more focused on providing an interesting, slower-paced narrative experience over a moment-to-moment action-packed one, and many argue that the game suffers as a result.
• Demonic Spiders: It has its own page.
• Disappointing Last Level:
  • The Nintendo 64 version finishes with a battle against two Tank Commanders who Turns Red when at low health. Afterwards you get another Dual Boss battle against two Hornets. Afterwards, take the elevator... and that's it! Coming from the main versions which at least gave you powerful boss battles in the form of the Makron and the Black Widow Guardian, it's easy to understand the disappointment.
  • Call of the Machine ends in pretty much the same way as the Nintendo 64 version: after all the trouble getting the Strogg Discs, The Machine fights against the Servants of the Creators (a regular Super Tank and a regular Hornet, when the pack already used the more powerful Beta Class/Heat-Seeker Super Tank and the Carrier) and then against the Masters of the Machine... who turn out to be two regular Shamblers. Surrounded by 12 Mutants. After all the Marines went through in the campaign, it's quite disappointing that such a grand pack ends in such a low note.
• Game-Breaker: There are too many ways to break this game, seen here.
• Genius Bonus: The Final Boss is named Makron, which is ancient Greek for "long" or "great". Fitting for the leader of the Strogg race.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Shotgun and Machinegun Guards, and The Reckoning's Laser guards. On their own they can be taken down without much hassle. But later they tend to come in packs (case in point: "Outlands" from the main campaign), and all these weapon classes qualify as hitscan, meaning that the moment they shoot, they hit you regardless of what you do, eating your shields and armor as a result. Furthermore, Shotgun guard attacks have quite the range, making them a priority to take down.
  • Airborne non-boss enemies. They have a tendency to appear from fake walls, out of thin air after some objective is accomplished, and their laser attacks bypass the Power Shield, dealing damage directly to your HP. Look no further than the original campaign's third Secret Level, "Comm Satellite", where the only kind of available enemies are Flyers, Technicians, Icarus and the Hornet, all of them of the flying variety.
  • The Reckoning has the Mutant-like Gekk. Weaker and slower than the Mutant, but with a Blaster ranged attack the original doesn't have. These beings are everywhere, especially in the first and third units.
• Good Bad Bugs: Physics bugs, some of which were already acknowledged by the time Quake III: Arena was developed:
  "id used to use an unsafe (no setting FPU control word) fistp. That seemingly caused subtle physics bugs which nobody cared about in 1.17. They then changed the UI code and ran into the UI bugs (...) Then they switched to using _ftol. Then they had to reproduce the old behaviour for the physics code due to public outrage."
  • Prior to version 3.18, "water surfing" allowed players to swim quickly while underwater. The Reckoning level "Water Treatment Plant" requires this in order to not get drowned for a specific secret.
  • Chain jumping, by taking advantage of box position. The second jump has a higher vertical push and is required in The Reckoning for a pair of secrets in the "Core Reactor" level.
  • Ramp jumping - a physics bug that propels players after they reach the top of a ramp. Both this and the above survived all the way up to Quake Champions, where they became Athena's passive ability.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • By way of an Easter Egg in the first level, players will find that the Player Character in this game is called Bitterman, despite him not having any selectable multiplayer skin. Quake III: Arena revealed in the manual that this is his nickname, and also reveals that the Strogg experimented on him, leaving him more alien than human. All of this becomes even more disturbing when another later game shows this Stroggification scene in full detail with another Player Character.
    • Furthermore, also related to IV, Ground Zero's level "Ammo Depot" has a secret where you get a Strogg disguise, allowing you to pass undetected throughout enemy lines back to the Munitions Plant level as long as you don't fire. To defeat them, you must become one of them, indeed.
    • The Processing Plant featured in this game is given a redux of sorts in Quake IV with a large factory that shows in gruesome detail how corpses are processed into the vital substance called Stroyent. Said chapter becomes progressive Darker and Edgier with the player eventually entering the Waste Disposal basement of the factory where live Failed Strogg transfers (zombies) are dumped and massive amounts of biowaste are left until the acid sprayers can disintegrate said waste.
  • There's an Easter Egg in the "Security Complex" level where one of the crashed pods (more specifically, the one before the entrance to the "Guard House" level) says "Willits", referencing Id developer Tim Willits. By the time of Quake Champions, Willits was the only original developer of II left at Id, until he left the company in July 2019.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The Easter Egg near the ending, where you find a Tank finding pleasure with two Iron Maidens, becomes this with the introduction of Tank Jr. as a playable character in Quake III: Arena, whose biography specifically mentions it being an offspring of a Tank and an Iron Maiden.
  • The aforementioned Willits Easter Egg becomes hilarious after Quake III Arena point release 1.32, which makes him a playable character, alongside plenty of other developers. By proxy, this also applies to the Easter Egg hall at the end of the game.
• Most Wonderful Sound: Many potential examples:
  • The boom-clank-clank of the Super Shotgun is a strong candidate thanks to the sound matching the payload it delivers.
  • The racket the Chaingun makes to indicate the dakka it is unleashing.
  • The clank-clank your Grenade Launcher makes, makes firing it a satisfying occasion as well.
  • Your Railgun firing sounds as if you can hear it for miles, and it hits like a truck as well.
  • The BFG charges up sounding like a nightmarish Wave-Motion Gun and delivers a suitably colossal room-clearing blast.
  • From Ground Zero we have the ETF Rifle, which puts to good use the recycled sound of Quake's Nailgun in order to emphasize its Armor-Piercing Attack capabilities.
  • The sounds the Invulnerability and Power Shield items produce whenever an enemy hits you give you the sensation of being a Nigh-Invulnerable One-Man Army, with nothing standing in your way.
  • The Quad Damage's buzzing sound amps up the "ouch!" factor of all of your weapons whenever you fire them.
• Paranoia Fuel: Due to the presence of Medics in certain levels, Repair Bots in The Reckoning, and especially Medic Commanders in Ground Zero, you'll be wasting ammo gibbing corpses only to deny them the chance at resurrection.
• Polished Port:
  • The PlayStation version. Some features (such as the inventory system and only being able to save at checkpoints, contrary to the PC version where you could save at any time), enemies (Mutant and Technician), and many levels are missing due to the limitations of the console, yet at the same time it had its fair share of unique content to make up for this (mainly visual effects such as lens flares, shadows, and enemies glowing red when hit by the Hyperblaster). Also, in particular, there are more Strogg types: the twin-railgun Arachnid and the giant Guardian, a foe physically bigger than Makron's Jorg Suit, which holds the Anti-Matter Bomb you need to destroy the Gravity Booster).
  • The somewhat-obscure Xbox 360 port that came packed in with Quake IV is an unexpected surprise, in that it's a fully functioning 60FPS 1080p port of Quake II and the first console port to ever achieve such a feat with a totally stable performance while packing in a fully-functional 4-player splitscreen for both co-op and deathmatch. It even predates the 360 being able to run 1080p games natively by several years, making it one of if not the first proper HD remaster of a game historically.
  • The 2023 remaster, available for PC, PS4/PS5, Xbox One/Series, and Switch, has enhanced visuals that stay true to the original aesthetic, whole new CGI cutscenes, full widescreen support with uncapped framerate, cross-platform online play, 4-player split-screen, all expansions included plus an entirely new expansion made just for the remaster, the ability to play an upgraded version of the infamous N64 port, and an in-game gallery that includes concept art and playable beta levels.
• Porting Disaster: The N64 port. Due to the technical limitations of the system, the game had to be redesigned from the ground up on the Quake 1 engine. The war against the Strogg is presented in an entirely new story spread across several moons and space stations, instead of the homeworld shown in the original game. The 9 units and 39 levels story are reduced to 5 units and 20 levels; with each level being shorter than the PC counterparts (the entire Jail Area and City units are combined into one; while the Comm Center appears as its second half only.) The animations took a dip in quality and crouching was removed.
• Power-Up Letdown: The Rocket Launcher in Doom and Quake was a thunderous, destructive weapon that obliterated all but the toughest foes in a handful of rockets, out-stripping most other weapons in raw damage potential besides explicit use cases (and the risk of self-fragging). In Quake II, its explosion splash radius is considerably smaller, needing enemies nearly huddled around the resulting cloud instead of easily wiping rooms in seconds, while its damage and fire rate are notably decreased; a Berserker can die in two point-blank Super Shotgun blasts, whereas it takes three rockets to the face to gib them with overkill unless you swap to another weapon to finish the job, and this damage also strongly affects the splash damage. While it's safer to use than the Super Shotgun over range, it also is a projectile, which means most humanoid foes can and often will dodge it. As a result, the Rocket Launcher ends up becoming a more middle-of-the-road weapon instead of a dominating force, which is annoying given how long it takes to get the weapon.
• Remade and Improved: Nightdive Studios' 2023 remaster includes the same quality-of-life improvements as the first game (graphical and sound-related options, the original soundtrack reincluded, extra console support, crossplay and weapon wheel), the original Expansion Packs The Reckoning and Ground Zero, a new one by MachineGames titled Call of the Machine, fully remastered cutscenes, a new deathmatch map, and even a full remaster of the Nintendo 64 port of the game adapted for modern machines. It also changes the AI of some enemies, making them more dynamic than before and giving whole new abilities to some. Also, while the remaster of the first game was criticized for forcing players to have a Bethesda account to play online, this one allows peer-to-peer online play and even old-school LAN multiplayer.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • The Machinegun used to have an annoying recoil mechanic that made the weapon go upwards with sustained fire. Mouselook made it slightly less frustrating, but you would still miss several hits. The 2023 remaster removed this mechanic, automatically improving the weapon and making it the preferred alternative to the Chaingun.
  • The lack of muzzle flashes rendered in any of the guns is often ridiculed, as it makes it difficult for the player to identify directions the enemies are firing from. The 2023 remaster readded them.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The Chaingun eats a lot of ammo just on the first shots. In the 2023 remaster, it's only used on sturdier, non-shielded foes.
  • Xatrix's dislike of Rocket Jumping (as evidenced by the Easter Egg "No prize for you, Rocketman") made the Rocket Launcher one in The Reckoning, as the previously useful (for Sequence Breaking, at least) technique gains a higher knockback and damage than before. This is especially at odds with the fanbase as the Rocket Jump is a staple of the Quake series, and considered a core talent to master.
• Scrappy Weapon: Depending on the game mode, some weapons are much better in single-player than deathmatch or vice-versa.
  • The Blaster has little use outside of saving ammo when shooting switches and destructible objects. Good luck hitting somebody with its weak shots in Deathmatch.
  • The Shotgun's main drawback is it's a Master of None, with an unimpressive rate of fire. The Railgun is better at extreme range and even up close, while the Super Shotgun is better up close and personal.
  • The Hand Grenade's lack of accuracy and chance of self-harm if you cook it off^note hold it while the fuse is primed and counting down for too long before throwing it. It was cut from the Nintendo 64 port and never appeared again in the series.
  • Also from The Reckoning, the Phalanx Particle Cannon is a lesser version of the Rocket Launcher. It eats one ammo unit per two shots and consumes its own type of ammo rather than that of another weapon, but that's about it. The two slugs it fires deal less damage than they're supposed to, its reload time is higher than the regular RL and the Super Shotgun, and unlike the RL it cannot be used to do meaningful jumps.
  • In the single-player campaign of Ground Zero, the Plasma Beam eats energy cells like there's no tomorrow in exchange for its hitscan properties. If you're good at aiming with the Railgun, you may as well save on cells for the Hyperblaster (it's the more ammo-efficient single-target weapon), BFG, or the Power Shield. In addition, bullets are more expendable so the Chaingun is more desirable at short-medium range.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: The game is much easier than its predecessor. Considering what the first game was like, that is not such a bad thing.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike:
  • The Ground Zero expansion outright shows you that you're in for a world of hurt when you can get half the arsenal and a pair of powerups in the first level alone.^note Just starting, you get the Shotgun. After skipping the mine area, you can turn to the left to get the Super Shotgun — the so-called "powerful weapon" you get early in the Secret Level "Lost Station" of vanilla Q2. Then as you progress before entering the Thaelite Mines, you get hand grenades, Tesla traps, the Machinegun (in the base game you get this weapon in the second level), the Prox Launcher, a Double Damage and a pair of IR Goggles (you only find your first powerup in vanilla in the third level of the first unit, "Comm Center"). Then you get handed the BFG10K as a secret in the second level of the second unit^note And by that point you get almost every vanilla weapon in the game, including the Rocket Launcher, Grenade Launcher, Chaingun and even the Hyperblaster.. And not without reason, as you'll find plenty of Stalkers, Turrets and Medic Commanders, which will make your life pure hell.
  • Ground Zero also amps up the difficulty regarding the main game, as if it was thought with Cooperative Multiplayer in mind. For starters, some enemy classes that the players are introduced to halfway through the regular game such as the Icarus appear as early as the first level, there are improved versions of some of the original game's enemies such as Daedalus (a stronger Icarus with a Power Screen) and the Medic Commander (a stronger Medic with Enemy Summoner abilities), the very first area has a powerup near the entrance (for comparison, the Quad Damage is introduced in the third level of the base game), and the game's new low-tier enemy is a damage sponge, taking three point-blank shots of a Super Shotgun whereas a mid-tier Gunner takes only two.
  • The 2023 remaster improved further the AI of all enemies, taking some pages from kmquake2. Medium and Light enemy classes can now jump over obstacles; all Brains in the main game were replaced by the Beta Brains from The Reckoning; Berserkers gained two powerful cut attacks in the Ground Pound and the running hammer; Super Tanks can now shoot grenades; Hornets now have a brain; Gunners can vertically aim their grenades and stop their attacks whenever their prey left their field of view... All episodes became harder as a result of all these changes.
• So Okay, It's Average: The single-player portion of the game played much like Quake before it but with a Hexen-like hub system that players may have found lacklustre due to the backtracking slowing down the action and rarely providing additional enemies to make return trips more interesting. This was a problem that also haunted the Mission Pack Sequels.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • The final mission briefing of the core game campaign has a desynchronization between the audio and the video. The video displays the "shut down the communications laser" objective, while the audio omits this and goes directly to the "kill the Makron, TERMINATE WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE" mission. There's even a part of the video without any kind of sound at all.
  • In The Reckoning this happens directly in the ending cinematic: as the moon base falls apart, at the second scene, right after the ship departs the hangar, some of the falling debris is spontaneously generated.
  • The Doom-esque rudimentary weapon reloading animations of the Nintendo 64 version also qualify, especially if the player comes from the PC or PSX versions of the game.
• Tear Jerker: The poor prisoners you meet on various levels. They've all been tortured to the point of madness and beg you to kill them.
• That One Boss:
  • The Reckoning has the Beta Class Super Tank, which now sports Power Armor, fires rockets faster than the vanilla version, and does even more damage than before.
  • The already difficult Ground Zero has two: the Carrier and the Black Widow.
    • The Carrier is a beefier version of the original game's Hornet. It loses the Rocket Launcher the original had, but in its place, it has a Railgun beam, a Grenade Launcher, and the ability to create two variants of Flyers: the regular one, and a homing, explosive one which deals quite the damage. And if that isn't enough, it has quite an amount of health: it takes three BFG shots with both Double Damage and Quad Damage active at the same time.
    • The Black Widow, meanwhile, is the Final Boss of the game. It has two forms: a humanoid one called "Guardian", and a spider one, the Black Widow proper. In its first form, it alternates between shooting Railgun blasts, Hyperblaster bolts and summoning Stalkers, and if you attempt close-range tactics, she will kick you like a ball; this form takes up to 7 or 8 BFG blasts to put her down. The second form is even worse: the Hyperblaster is switched by a Plasma Beam which goes in a circular way, and if you get in the way of the laser, you'll get fried to death, while the Railgun was switched by a Disintegrator which fires a homing, pitch-black projectile which disintegrates you from the inside, and trying to attempt close-range tactics is a bad idea, as her front has a hookshot tentacle attracting you to it. Making both of these forms worse is the fact that, during the fight, if you attempt to use either Invulnerability, Quad Damage or Double Damage, she will proceed to copy your powerup's effects.
• That One Level:
  • mine5, "Lower Mines". An unstable area with plenty of earthquakes and lava pits and some of the most annoying enemies you can find (Technicians, Gunners). Point of No Return and Everything Trying to Kill You are in play here, as backtracking is not an option^note If you missed an item, you need to finish the level and do backtracking to the Drilling Area hole by passing through the Borehole area's platform and the level features quite a bunch of earthquakes, that can make you fall from wherever you are onto the lava pits, which are featured throughout the level. And you have a laser machine that you can operate in order to proceed, however, the machine itself is guarded by a Tank on the lower level, and a Gunner on the upper level who operates a button-triggered boulder crushing whoever is near the machine, not to mention the laser itself is deadly. Past the laser, there's a Rocket Launcher that triggers a drilling machine, which you must avoid if you don't want to be crushed. Last, but not least, the end of the level has four Gunners waiting for you, attacking from the upper level as you take the elevator to the entrance to the final part of the unit. Have fun!
  • The entirety of the second unit of Ground Zero^note rware1 "Eastern Warehouse", rware2 "Waterfront Storage", rbase1 "Logistics Complex" and rbase2 "Tactical Command" is the most painful section of the Expansion Pack, and that's saying much considering the last two units have the harshest bosses of all of Quake II. Not only there's a numerous presence of both Turrets and Stalkers, but halfway through, you also get to meet Medic Commanders. Every other class of enemy (including the Tank Commander, whom you only met in the final levels of regular Quake II) sans the Mutant is present in the unit as well. And the levels' labyrinthine structures will get you lost most of the time.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • The Reckoning changed the properties of the Rocket Jump to give it extra propulsion and extra damage. This didn't sit well with players.
  • Ground Zero changed the behaviour of many enemies, adding to the overall Harder Than Hard difficulty of the pack.
  • Some changes introduced by source ports (i.e. kmquake2's improved AI for enemies, and some ports which rebalance the game's weapons) are this for people who were used to the old mechanics.
  • The 2023 remaster introduced some... controversial changes. The most controversial of them are the changes to the levels (in order to integrate their cut content) the Berserker's newfound Ground Pound attack (especially with the high blast radius and knockback), the Gunner's newfound grenade spam, and the Nerf to the Railgun (went from 150 to 100) and the switch from red cross to green cross in health items.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Noah Caldwell-Gervais laments that Call of the Machine, in tying Quake II back to Quake I, seemed like it was building up to have the final boss be Armagon, final boss of Scourge of Armagon, a techno-organic monster that had clearly foreshadowed the design of the Strogg. Instead the boss is two Shamblers.

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