Nothing quite beats the feeling of long-jumping off a little planetoid and seeing Mario orbit around it as gravity slowly pulled him in. It's a small thing, but I had never experienced something like that in video games and Mario Galaxy is full of moments like it. This game was a joy and I still think back on it fondly. One of the most original and delightfully innovative 3D platformers I've ever played. I loved it so much that I even 100%'d it which involved playing through the entire game a second time as Luigi.

For many years, if you asked me what my favorite game series was, I probably would've said Splinter Cell. This is like you sent a team of scientists to develop the polar opposite game.

It is unabashedly loud, stylish and raucous. There is no stealth, because you are a fuck-huge monkey. You are given no tools but your hands and the speed to run at them, because you are a big, fuck-off monkey. The tutorial is three button prompts. There's music to accompany you on your quest for freedom, battling with you to see who can best embody this frenetic energy. You don't need more.

spider man: 2
stars: 3

it’s like a freezer pizza: i enjoy eating it till there are a few slices left, then i realise its pretty average.

I was not a fan of the forced backtracking for the Chozo artifacts, but Metroid Prime is a classic for many reasons. There is nothing I can say about it without being redundant, so I’ll just say this is the definitive way to experience it. The graphics are incredible while also staying true to the original atmosphere. A game looking this amazing on Switch without framerate issues didn’t seem possible, yet here we are. The Spring Ball and flexible control options were great additions, but I wish you could remap individual buttons in-game. I might be alone in this, but mapping the shoot button to A instead of Y makes no sense, as you will be shooting very often and will have to uncomfortably twist your thumb or use a claw grip to hit A and B at the same time for shooting and jumping simultaneously. This was the first Switch game I felt compelled to remap my Joy-Cons in the main menu.

Don’t let that deter you from buying this though. Metroid Prime Remastered is a must-have for your Switch, especially if you never played the original.

My thoughts on Tears are pretty complicated, and there's lots I do like. But it ultimately comes down to what I was personally looking for in a sequel to Breath of the Wild. And what we got was very far off the mark of that.

I can't get past the feeling that Tears is a glorified DLC pack with a bad story and a clunky building/fusing mechanic stapled onto it, with few of the structural issues I had with its predecessor being addressed. In some cases, made worse. Too much of this game feels too familiar, with none of the new additions being interesting enough to pick up the slack.

As much as I can respect and enjoy Nintendo's games, their unwillingness to take risks or optimize player experience properly drives me nuts sometimes.

I will be slowly adding to this review, and it will likely end up being really, really long, but my summary is this.

Tears of the Kingdom is Domino's Pizza. I ate it sober, and the critics ate it baked out of their minds. To me, its a greasy bit of open world action that satisfies me, but never impresses. To them, its the best food they've ever eaten.

If you liked Breath of the Wild, this is basically that, but removing the sheikah slate powers with infinitely more impractical ones. Gone are remote bombs and stasis, instead you get the incredibly gimmicky recall and ascend powers. Ascend is a nice get out of jail free card in regular caves, but recall is totally useless outside of puzzles. Fuse is a cool gimmick that bellyflops the execution by making the act of fusing a constant tedious process, thats required to make weapons do damage. 90% of items are useless to fuse because they only affect elemental powers and a static power level.

The Ultra Hand steals the show, essentially being a more unwieldy GMod prop gun. The main problem with this power, along with fuse, is that I expected them to be so much deeper than they are. Fuse only really adds an element or higher DPS to weapons, and ultra hand can build bridges or useless makeshift vehicles for your amusement. To make matters worse, you have to grind up useful interactable props in a gacha machine in the sky. So making your own fun is often prefaced with grinding Zonai cores to trade in.

The other big nut tap I recieved was finding out how weak the dungeons are in TOTK. Theres 4 and a quarter dungeons in the game, and all of them can be beaten with little thought in less than 45 minutes each. The bosses are alright, although too easy with the expection of the thunder boss and final bosses. If there was one god damn thing I wanted Nintendo to fix after 6 years, it was the weak ass dungeons. And they couldn't even do that.

Tears of the Kingdom is stuck in limbo. Its not fresh in the slightest, but it slaps some total gimmicks into a 6 year old game, like a 50 year old lady slapping on layers of makeup. The new powers are now my textbook definition of gimmick, its so face slappingly obvious. They seem like gamechangers for about an hour, before fading into the background for 45. The shrines exist as some form of justification for them, making cool but overly simple physics puzzles involving ultrahand.

The massive underground depths are again, cool at first. But they take way too long to explore, are butt ugly and also don't contain any substancial content. So...from a game design perspective, why even have them? It feels cynical, like making a big, second ugly copy pasted overworld will band aid the severe lack of change.

The sky islands are actually a great addition. They feel fresh, with cool geometry, puzzles and rewards, but there's barely any of them. It pains me to say that, because the thing thats all over the marketing actually works as an addition to good game, and they underdevelop them. What were they doing for 6 years??

And I don't really need to say it, but after reading countless critic reviews praising it, I need to. The story and writing is abysmal. Characters have very, very simple personalities. There's no wit or charm to the very inhuman dialogue, consisting of what feels like robots constantly congratulating each other. Way to go, Link! Zelda for example, is just a shell of a human, she doesn't joke, entertain or even try to do anything but exposition dump, as does LITERALLY every major player in the game.

I have more to say...but I'll break here for now. I wouldn't normally go this hard, but after beating it and seeing the insane 97 metascore, I feel obliged to kind of, put my hands up and say, "what the fuck, people?" Its totally good, fine, and fun enough, but so are Hogwarts and Jedi Survivor. Neither of which are worse or better than TOTK. Its like giving the Mario Movie an Oscar.

Breath of the Wild felt like a special game with a creative vision, Tears of the Kingdom feels like an unnecessary retread of it. And I say that, experiencing the new additions, feeling they aren't very meaty or interesting, and looking back at it from the end. I'm not like the reactionaries on this site who are disappointed and give it half a star. By all means, its polished and impressive by the standards of a Switch game in a post PS5 world. But it's no big shot mind blower like the original BOTW, or Elden Ring. It's not fun enough to beat out Sekiro, Doom 2016 or Hollow Knight. It's not creative or even close to as smart as Outer Wilds, Disco Elysium or Forgotten City. It's a fun mindless open world jaunt, and I'm not pretending it's more than that.

When I played Breath of the Wild five years ago, I was excited for the future of the series. Despite liking several of the older games more, there was so much potential in the new format. The chemistry system, physics, artstyle, and open world were crafted with such immaculate detail I was largely able to look past its many shortcomings. How Tears of the Kingdom addresses these is a double-edged sword. It has a lot of gameplay improvements that will make it difficult to go back to its predecessor. That’s what an iterative sequel should do. At the same time, it is impossible to review this game without reviewing Breath of the Wild. Both games look and play so similarly you would be forgiven for thinking the sequel was a glorified ROM hack. Keep this analogy in mind as you read. My review will be focused on discussing the additions and changes the sequel made, starting with the tutorial.

I’m not going to mince words. The Great Sky Island is the worst tutorial in any Zelda game I’ve ever played. I have two big reasons for stating this. Firstly, it goes on FOREVER. It makes the maligned intros of Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword look tame. Those games also had the benefit of establishing important characters in Link’s adventure. It would be hard to care about Zelda in Skyward Sword if there wasn’t so much time spent forging a connection with her before she’s taken away. After Ganondorf is introduced in Tears of the Kingdom, however, I spent over THREE HOURS reaching the tutorial shrines, with my sole accomplice being a Zonai warrior with a cardboard personality. Simple plot and characters aren’t problems in and of themselves, but Breath of the Wild wasted far less time accomplishing the same goal.

Reason number two is a lack of freedom. The Great Plateau worked so well because it was an authentic taste of the open world to come. The tutorial shrines could be tackled in any order and the minimal amount of text boxes allowed me to acclimate to the mechanics at my own pace. I was trusted to figure things out. Not so on the Great Sky Island. There’s a lot of Zonai constructs offering gameplay tips, some optional and some not. This doesn’t work for Zelda newcomers or Breath of the Wild veterans. The former will be overwhelmed by the mechanics, especially Ultrahand, and the latter will just want to get a move-on. More baffling to me is that each shrine has to be visited in a set order. The island is shaped like a donut and obstacles must be traversed by using abilities obtained from the previous shrine. None of the freedom that comes after leaving the island is present here. I was so desperate to explore Hyrule that I actually missed the paraglider for a few hours. I also used Rewind to reach a mini Sky island and thought I was trapped. Admittedly, this was a stupid idea and I could have fast-traveled to escape, but I got so fed-up with not having the paraglider that I looked up where it was. What do you know, I was heading in the oposite direction! Nintendo, why would you put an ESSENTIAL traversal tool in the middle of an OPEN WORLD???

As irritating as it was, the tutorial does not change the fact that Link’s abilities are a considerable improvement over the ones in Breath of the Wild. Ultrahand is what Magnesis should have been and then some. You can pick up any loose objects and Zonai devices, and then construct whatever your imagination can muster by supergluing them together. Nintendo should be applauded for allowing objects to be stuck together almost anywhere. It does mean mistakes are bound to happen, but the skill ceiling wouldn’t be nearly as high if you could only construct vehicles in a specific way. Admittedly, I only used Ultrahand when I needed to because I didn’t find Autobuild until much later and building a vehicle without that was not always worth the effort, but overall the system was a brilliant way of expanding on the physics-based gameplay.

Fuse is equally brilliant and my personal favorite ability. It single-handedly solves two major issues I had with Breath of the Wild: the weapon durability and the lack of utility for many inventory items beyond upgrading armor. Weapon durability was the hottest topic surrounding Breath of the Wild’s gameplay. I personally thought it was a good system, but suffered from diminshing returns. As the game went on, my inventory became bigger, but my weapons were still fairly brittle despite their higher damage numbers. It made me not want to engage with most enemies because I didn’t want to break my best weapons. Here, almost every weapon has a weak base damage value and the idea is to decide which monster parts or elemental materials you want to fuse onto the weapon to make it stronger. Weapons with strong base damage are few and far between. Even then, they almost always come with a trade-off. For example, bone weapons, which were useless in Breath of the Wild, now have much higher base damage to compensate for their pitiful durability, functioning like glass weapons in an RPG. Gloom swords obtained from Phantom Ganon inflict gloom on the player, necessitating meals that recover those hearts after use.

Whoever conceived the idea to fuse materials onto arrows is a genius. This eliminates the need for the previous game’s specific arrows, as your entire materials inventory now serves that purpose. I can only speak for myself, but in Breath of the Wild, I was constantly running low on arrows I wanted to use. In the sequel, only normal arrows can be looted, making them easier to stockpile, and fusing specific materials will achieve the effect of the ice, fire, shock, or bomb arrows from before, along with several new ones. This flexibility led to me using materials I never touched in the previous game, like Chuchu jelly and Keese eyeballs. However, being forced to select the materials for every single arrow breaks the flow of combat. Why not have the game remember the arrow you fired last time and give the option to switch back to a normal arrow like in Breath of the Wild? There also needed to be a faster way to select specific materials. Even with the sorting options, it takes way too long to cycle through the whole inventory. It’s mainly a problem when you want to use a material you haven’t touched recently. A personalized list of favorite materials that appeared alongside the general list would have been perfect for me.

I don’t have nearly as much to say about Ascend and Rewind, but they’re still great tools. The former is particularly special for how it asks the player to examine 3D space differently from the average video game. It is both goofy and exciting when Link is ascending for like five full seconds and I have no idea what’s at the surface. Its limitations on height and surface flatness also ensure it doesn’t overshadow climbing like Revali’s Gale did. Rewind is perhaps the least interesting, but its applications in motion-based puzzles and specific mini-bosses cement it as more worthwhile than Stasis. In other words, my least favorite ability in Tears of the Kingdom is more useful than the best ability from Breath of the Wild.

With all of the abilities discussed, let’s move on to the shrines. Note that this is coming from someone who completed all 272 shrines across Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. In the former, they were a mixed bag. For every good shrine that iterated on a puzzle idea, there were at least three mediocre or bad ones. Given that there’s more shrines in the sequel, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised little was done to address this. Puzzle shrines are still inconsistent with how much effort seems to have gone into them. There are even shrines dedicated to teaching basic combat actions like shield parries, throwing objects, and shooting a bow. I want you to think about that for a second. Nintendo didn’t trust its players to figure out how to shoot a bow! What happened to Breath of the Wild’s approach of combining these tips into a single shrine players were unlikely to miss early on? Ideally, there would be no such tutorials, but I’ll take one that overstays its welcome over several that only exist to bloat the shrine count. The sole exception to all of this was the combat shrines. Instead of fighting the same guardian robot 20 times with a variable amount of health, these shrines have unique layouts with deviously-placed enemies and hazards. Even better is how you are stripped of your equipment during the trial, meaning you have to work with what the designers give you. Like the previous game’s Eventide Island and Trials of the Sword, these challenges had to be crafted with a naked Link in mind, eliminating the possibility of players cheesing them with overpowered weapons or not having enough resources to win. I always felt the combat was at its best when you are scavenging for weapons to survive.

Nintendo seems to have only taken a half-step towards addressing the complaints about shrines, and the dungeons are no better. They have stronger build-ups, look distinct from each other, and have unique bosses, thank goodness, but they all follow the same structure as Divine Beasts. This structure is not bad by itself, but the repetition, combined with how short every temple is, makes them disappointing. I’m not even sure these temples are better than Divine Beasts, as I found most of the puzzles and bosses here to be a cakewalk. The detailed map and lack of small keys means the spatial reasoning required of players in classic Zelda dungeons is mostly absent. Therefore, if the puzzles don’t pick up the slack, dungeons feel unfinished. As underwhelming as the Divine Beasts were, I firmly believe they had more interesting puzzles. At least you had to understand the consequences of manipulating the controls for each one. The temples here don’t have a unique gimmick like that, except for the Water Temple, but that also has the most braindead puzzles.

I’m torn on the world design. For something advertised as expanding the scope of Hyrule, the Sky really feels like an afterthought. The tutorial island is actually the largest Sky island, which wouldn’t be a problem if the others were interesting. Instead, Nintendo mostly just added a few skydiving challenges, copy-pasted a crystal fetch quest in every region, and called it a day. It’s barely better than how it was in Skyward Sword, which is a low bar to clear. In contrast, finding a lightroot in the Depths after stumbling around in the dark was consistently rewarding. Since it’s the same size as the surface, mapping out the Depths is practically a game in and of itself. It is a bit lame though that the only extrinsic rewards unique to this area are Poes, Zonaite, and the spoils of a copy-pasted mini-boss. Poes are used as currency for a specific chain of shops that could easily have been part of every other shop in the game. Like, why not just have those items in other shops and use Rupees instead? Using them for navigating the Depths isn’t a good counter-argument because brightbloom seeds accomplish the same thing in a much better way. Zonaite is used for buying crystals to upgrade the battery for Zonai devices. If you like messing around with Ultrahand, this will be a worthwhile investment. I didn’t start upgrading it until after I completed about 90 shrines and most of the temples, so while I was largely able to make do with the default amount, it’s still a nice inclusion. One more question about the Depths though:

WHY ARE THE DUNGEON BOSSES ALSO FOUND HERE?! This means they are not special, just like every other enemy in the game! WHY?! When I first saw this, I incorrectly assumed they could be found BEFORE exploring the dungeons and originally wrote this review with that belief in mind. I’m so thankful I was wrong. Imagine if you fought Twinrova from Ocarina of Time hours before the Spirit Temple, with no alterations between fights. It would spoil the surprise. Nevertheless, I still believe these rematches weren’t necessary. They just add repetition to a game that already has too much of that.

This repetition is most abundant on Hyrule’s Surface, which should be a crime considering that’s where Breath of the Wild took place. The caves, for example, were fun at first, but they did little to stand out from each other, losing their appeal after the 10th one. The Bubbul gems in each one were also completely unnecessary, as they’re only used for one shop that doesn’t offer enough useful items to justify its existence. More enemies is great, but they’re reused just as incessantly as Breath of the Wild. Once you’ve beaten your fourth Lynel or Gleeok, subsequent encounters become a chore. It’s nice to see that Tarrey Town expanded its construction business, but repeatedly holding up a sign for Addison gets old fast. The Korok challenges ran themselves into the ground before 100 seeds, let alone 1,000. The escort missions are particularly dull and that same concept is used to unlock the fairy fountains. Why are the fairies in different locations anyway? Having them all next to stables robs the sense of mystery they had in Breath of the Wild, where only a diligent explorer could find them.

No need to worry about story spoilers in this next paragraph. I’ve carefully written it to avoid any details that weren’t shown off in the trailers.

I wasn’t planning to mention the story since most Zelda games have the same one, but this one is so underwhelming I have to make an exception. To start with the positives, the tone is more epic than last time, which is a better fit for a game about saving the world. Matthew Mercer was also a perfect choice to voice Ganondorf and the final battle with him did not disappoint like the last game. Sadly, everything else sucks. For one, the story is hidden away in memories that can be uncovered out of order. Breath of the Wild also did this, but it was much more forgivable since those cutscenes did not spoil important plot details. They were just focused around Zelda’s relationship with Link and her journey of self-discovery. It was flavor text that nicely complimented Link’s journey in the present. Tears of the Kingdom, however, tries to tell a typical Zelda story through these memories and not only does the nonlinearity make it easy for plot twists to be ruined, but the memories add to a long list of moments where characters explain the same events over and over and over. The ending also undermines the most intersting idea the writers had. Unforgivable considering how effortlessly Nintendo nailed similar moments in past games.

Going into Tears of the Kingdom, I was optimistic Nintendo would find a way to make the recycled map and assets interesting. In several ways, they did. But I don’t believe there were enough alterations to Hyrule. I’m not a huge fan of Majora’s Mask, but it did a far better job recycling assets and I will always respect it for not repeating Ocarina of Time’s formula. But even when Nintendo did go back to that formula with Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, and Skyward Sword, they still reimagined Hyrule with a new layout and artstyle. Heck, if you want an example of a reused map done right, just look at A Link Between Worlds. It brought new ideas to the series like merging into walls and renting items, which were paired alongside dungeons that reimagined old ideas. The resulting overworld was both familiar and fresh. The reason I don’t feel that in this title is because I found myself doing a lot of the same things from Breath of the Wild, and I was rarely incentivized to change that approach.

Tears of the Kingdom being so familiar despite six years of development is proof enough for me that it is not only not worth $70, but a sign Nintendo needs to scale back future Zelda games. Let’s be honest, any other company that put a similarly mixed effort into remixing old content would be accused of laziness. For all the problems the older Zelda games may have had, it really hits home how much I yearn for their comparatively smaller scope. Just think about how dense the map would feel if every region had its own dungeon, inhabitants, and music. That’s one of the many things I and lots of other players love about Zelda. Obviously, the series has come a long way since its inception and ignoring that evolution would be unwise. Nintendo should continue to build on their open-world design, just like they did here, but the size of the map should be correlated with the amount of unique discoveries. Dark Souls and Hollow Knight both proved to me that such a world is possible in the modern gaming landscape, but even they did not offer a true open world. I don’t know if an open world that dense with unique discoveries exists or even will exist. If I find it, however, you will know, because it will probably be the best game I ever play.

"How could Nintendo ever top a masterpiece like Galaxy 1 with a straightforward sequel?" That's what I thought until I played this.

Words cannot fully describe how phenomenal this game is. The level design is unbelievable, moving between ideas so imaginative you wonder if the designers at Nintendo are even human. Even more amazing is how the game doesn't crumble under its own ambitions. Every single idea is gradually introduced before being pushed to a more challenging level. Many of the best challenges come from the Comet missions in each level, which were implemented much better than Galaxy 1. This game set a new gold standard for platformers that still hasn't been topped in my opinion.

+the environment design is probably my favorite part of the game. the space station model is a nice change of pace from the caves and tunnels that usually make up metroid games, and the amount of variety in each of the sectors is laudable as well. I even appreciate the vibrancy of the coloring as well, even though it's more of a result of this game being designed for a poorly-lit original GBA and me playing this on a much brighter SP101 model
+overall the focused mission-based model for the game is refreshing on a portable console. obviously it's not the same as a usual metroid game but it feels easier to play in short spurts thanks to this reason
+certain story beats are quite exciting, especially as the game draws to a close. I also like how many ties there are back to both super and return of samus.
+my favorite puzzle was definitely the one post-ice missile, where you have to kill an enemy in a certain room, let its X parasite infest a nearby lethal tower of vines (?), freeze it, and then use it to bridge a gap in a set of platforms used to speed boost through a wall in a different room. I wish there were more puzzles like this in the game (and I also wish it wasn't followed up by more mindless wall-bombing)

-by far my biggest complaint is the puzzle/progression design. the game frequently locks you into an area four to six rooms large and then forces you to find some hidden pathway through to continue. the concept itself is not bad (most of the metroid games do this occasionally) but the frequency and opacity are what frustrate me. some of these provide clues on where a passage might be, but there are just as many that require mindlessly bombing walls and floors. there are better ways to gate progression than using this repeatedly
-this game is just absolutely bursting to the seams with bosses. while earlier on I enjoyed them, the later game bosses left a very sour taste in my mouth. yakuza (the spider boss) can easily chain together grabs, and it's not obvious that mashing L+R specifically is the key to get out initially, so quick deaths are very common (especially since the save point is soooo far away). SA-X at the end also made me tear my hair out thanks its copious i-frames and the janky physics of its screw attack. in contrast, meta ridley felt underdesigned compared to both the other bosses and his iterations in both super and zero mission thanks to how non-aggressive it is and how easy it is to spam with missiles. having to destroy the spiked capsule thing after each one is also annoying; an entirely needless addition to each fight.
-the one failing of the mission structure here is that there's really no fun in finding new items, especially since virtually all of them draw from previous games. you nearly always know what you're gonna get, and thus the accomplishment of getting one and powering up is lost
-I thought there would be a point where I could run to each of the sectors fully powered up before taking care of the endgame, but this is not the case... I don't believe it actually locks off each sector near the end of the game but there's some trigger involving recharge rooms that causes them to be inaccessible.
-the X parasite concept replacing the inert hp/ammo drops of previous games is neat, but never really pans out past the puzzle mentioned above. for one, the drops give so little in comparison to the shocking amount of damage dealt by enemies in this game. they also have a tendency to escape and become something new with barely any downtime for samus to catch them (I have a feeling this may be scripted for certain enemies, as it's not universal)

glad I pushed through but really not my favorite metroid experience. I came in knowing about its polarizing reception, and while I initially enjoyed its new take on metroid structure, plenty of other issues cropped up. there's still the heart of a metroid game here though through and through, and I'd look forward to a remake that can capitalize on the atmosphere and structure this game was aiming for without the pitfalls.

Quake is a game that I had been looking forward to playing since I played the Doom series throughout 2019-2021. I greatly enjoy the Doom series, especially the first two and Final Doom which I consider to be the pinnacle of first-person shoot level design. Because of that experience, Id Software became a developer who’s backlog I was more interested in delving deeper into, and Quake seemed like the perfect next step (though, let’s be honest here, Wolfenstein is the only other real contender). Much like the Doom series, Quake was remastered recently to be played on modern consoles, though so far only the first game has been given this treatment. The game looks and plays great on PS4 and comes with a bunch of free downloadable map packs that are nice additions. I didn’t delve into them all, there’s only so much Quake a man can take in the span of a few days, but they all seemed like good fun. The remaster also includes a quite a few official mission packs that I didn’t get around to playing. As of writing this review, I’m close to the end of the first one, Scourge of Armagon, but I’m not sure if I will continue any time soon. This is as good a segway as any into my main complaints with this game.

I think your mileage of Quake will vary depending on a multitude of factors. If you just love shooters, then this is a great game to play, and if you’ve only touched the newer Doom games, Quake is a great taste of the older generation of Id’s game design. As someone who has played a lot of the original Doom series, and thought that the 2016 game was fine, and hated my time with Doom 64, I think I was already a little worn out on this type of shooter going in, even if I hadn’t touched one for about a year prior. I’ll say this now, I think for what it is, Quake is a perfect iteration of an old-school FPS. The level design is labyrinthian and challenging, the enemies provide a good test of movement and the player’s ability to quickly assess a situation and act accordingly, and the grimy presentation sets a unnerving atmosphere. I wouldn’t call it an evolution of Doom in a design sense, which was kind of disappointing, but it’s another great entry into the type of shooter Id popularised which is now seeing a resurgence lately.

Playing this game now, so far from its initial impact, it’s not a special experience. It’s a game I feel I’ve played before but just with a different coat of paint. Even for the time, every aspect of it is so similar to Doom that I don’t think my opinion of it would be any different if I played it in it’s heyday. Quake doesn’t do enough for me to warrant me agreeing with its status as a masterpiece, but would never call it a bad game in any means. It’s fantastic, just unfortunately a victim of repetitive game design from my own personal experience with Id’s games.

For another complaint, the enemy roster is tiny, and while they provide some fun, challenging encounters, seeing the same monsters over and over again got stale. To be fair, Doom has the same problem, but Quake’s enemies I would say are much tougher to deal with, so I unfortunately tired of them quicker. It wasn’t a huge deal, however, but for two of the four episodes, they end with enemy encounters instead of bosses, which aren’t as interesting tests of skill. On the other end, the two bosses that are in Quake are terrible. The first one is pathetic, and the final boss possesses no real challenge apart from the swarms of the strongest enemies in the game coming at you in a tight corridor, so the actual boss isn’t even the real fight. You take it down in a strange way that the game doesn’t explain at all, though it was more confusing than frustrating at least.


The bosses pale in comparison to the early Doom titles, which still had very few, but the Cyberdemon and Mastermind are iconic battles with tough enemies made even harder because of the level design of their arena. It’s a shame Quake couldn’t muster similar encounters, but I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt as it was Id’s jump to 3D so designing a giant boss monster to overcome was probably too ambitious for the time.

As I stated before, I have yet to play through the remaining mission packs, so I don’t know if they address the boss issue or not. From what I played of the first pack, they do introduce a new grunt enemy which was nice, but they weren’t very interesting to fight. Frankly, I’m not sure if I will ever be curious enough to play through them all. Quake was a fun time, but even in it’s short length, it wore out it’s welcome. As a veteran of Id’s early games, Quake was nothing new. It’s the same kind of levels, same kind of enemies, same kind of weapon arsenal. Quake is just Doom with a 3D coat of paint. That’s not a bad thing. It feels like a proper Doom 3 than the actual one we got, but there is only so much of this type of game I can take now, and Quake showed me that my patience has unfortunately run out for this kind of FPS design.

If anything, Quake was a nice swan song to play as I say my farewell to the ‘boomer shooter’ (I hate that term). This review isn’t really here to recommend this game, more as a way to document my feelings towards this type of early shooters. I am still a big fan of the early Doom games, and Quake was good fun for a while, but my appetite is sated for now. If you think you’ll like Quake, then you should play it. I’m still very glad I finally played it.

It’s a testament to the quality of Id’s game design that even though I would classify my experience this game as a mostly negative time, I can still eagerly recommend Quake to anyone who is even remotely interested. Quake is a great game, unfortunately, it’s just not my thing anymore.