Besides remaining a strong first-person shooter title to this day in its own right, the 2021 remaster of Quake is really just a showpiece for how truly impressive the technological wizards at Nightdive Studios are. It seems that whenever they're involved, the notion of a product 'showing its age' never really feels applicable. Especially with their work here, it's a masterful blend of updating the graphics, performance, and game feel of the original just enough that it feels reasonably modern while still keeping the core experience and nostalgia of the original release. It's incredibly impressive work.
As for Quake itself, it's a very solid shooter taking place in a Lovecraftian gothic fantasy world with horrific creatures and steampunk-adjacent technology and weaponry. Combined with the unsurprisingly strong Nine Inch Nails soundtrack, it gives it all a deeply unsettling vibe throughout, even though you're always reasonably equipped to deal with its horrors and delve deeper into its harsh dark fantasy world that remains incredibly rich to explore in each chapter.
That being said, I'd say the base campaign is perhaps the weakest of the bunch, with the expansions providing much more fulfilling gameplay elements and levels, with Scourge of Armagon providing the best of the former and Dimension of the Machine providing the best of the latter.
Otherwise, despite how intriguing its world proves to be throughout these campaigns, the gameplay itself wears thin pretty fast, even though, as I hinted, they do switch it up with new weapons, power-ups, and puzzles now and then. The formula for each campaign quickly becomes bland and formulaic, though perhaps the onus of that is more on the player for going through all of them consecutively than the campaigns themselves since they all had years between each of them.
Still, Quake is a very solid tour of the old id Software factory of first-person shooters and, despite Quake's faults, is still proof positive today that they really are one of the best to ever do it.
7/10
As for Quake itself, it's a very solid shooter taking place in a Lovecraftian gothic fantasy world with horrific creatures and steampunk-adjacent technology and weaponry. Combined with the unsurprisingly strong Nine Inch Nails soundtrack, it gives it all a deeply unsettling vibe throughout, even though you're always reasonably equipped to deal with its horrors and delve deeper into its harsh dark fantasy world that remains incredibly rich to explore in each chapter.
That being said, I'd say the base campaign is perhaps the weakest of the bunch, with the expansions providing much more fulfilling gameplay elements and levels, with Scourge of Armagon providing the best of the former and Dimension of the Machine providing the best of the latter.
Otherwise, despite how intriguing its world proves to be throughout these campaigns, the gameplay itself wears thin pretty fast, even though, as I hinted, they do switch it up with new weapons, power-ups, and puzzles now and then. The formula for each campaign quickly becomes bland and formulaic, though perhaps the onus of that is more on the player for going through all of them consecutively than the campaigns themselves since they all had years between each of them.
Still, Quake is a very solid tour of the old id Software factory of first-person shooters and, despite Quake's faults, is still proof positive today that they really are one of the best to ever do it.
7/10