If you've ever played user-created levels for a game, you know there are huge gulfs in quality between them. One level might look as good as the real deal, and the next might look like a teenager gave up halfway through making their school. Coming off of Quake II and The Reckoning, Ground Zero is a real shock to the system, not in how it looks but in how it plays. And there's no amount of polish that can make up for how low its lows are.

Turns out that every chapter in the Quake II story starts the same way, with your hard-assed marine's drop-pod getting clipped by something and ending up where it shouldn't. This time you get ditched into an underground mining facility, which you'll need to escape to take out a gravity well generator that has the human fleet trapped over the Strogg homeworld. Just like the rest of the series, this means battling through units of interconnected levels to accomplish goals and proceed to more important locales.

Ground Zero starts promising enough, with colorful, atmospheric caverns and mining complexes. There are exploding crystals you can shoot, mine carts to ride, and excavators to Kool-Aid Man through walls. The pack vomits guns at you almost immediately, setting you up with half the arsenal not two levels in. Your foes are varied and scattered, with an unusually heavy emphasis on fliers of all kinds. All the elements are there for a different, interesting Quaking experience.

Then you reach a point where you've killed everything on the sizable level and don't know where to go. Maps in Ground Zero use a lot of loops and alternate paths without clear landmarks, making it hard to tell if you've even been somewhere before if there aren't bodies littering the floor. There's very little logic to the layouts of each area, with most designed first to slow your progress with meandering paths and second to provide an adequate challenge. The F1 mission objectives do nothing to help either, giving only vague orders to proceed to a new map or defeat all resistance.

By the time you reach the Tectonic Stabilizer you'll have spent a good bit of time wandering aimlessly through depopulated levels. It is here that you will be tasked to destroy sixteen small capacitor-looking things mounted on walls around the map. Sixteen. Afterwards, you must flip three switches, which triggers a 45-second countdown to escape the map. If you fail, you die. This all takes place on a dark cave map with multiple loops and crossing paths and indistinct chambers.

I was not kidding earlier, it is legitimately shocking how painful some of the levels in Ground Zero are. The Stabilizer isn't the only one with instant deaths, either. To even reach it, you'll have to brave a number of cave-ins in the proceeding levels that can crush you dead in an instant. Every single thing you do requires scrambling around winding paths to push a button that lets you get a key that opens a door to another path, and most of the time the goal is just to get to the next map.

Don't expect the new enemies or weapons to redeem this, either. There's a neat ceiling-crawling spider foe but the other additions are reskins with obnoxious gimmicks and ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ceiling turrets. The new rifle and mines feel very low-impact and situational compared to the base arsenal, and ammo for the expansion gear is far more prevalent than regular ammo, forcing you to make them work over keeping to your standbys. Weapon moderation is part of the challenge here, but the real challenge is sticking out the annoyances introduced.

Honestly, I couldn't get more than halfway into this one. Ground Zero is aggressively bad. It will go out of its way to waste your time with overly twisting levels, tedious backtracking, and instant death out of nowhere. The new enemies and weapons bring nothing to the table, and even the story is so much thinner than that of its predecessors. Fans of Quake II, I implore you, finish the base game and The Reckoning and then seek out community maps if you must. This just isn't worth the hassle.



Did you enjoy this review? I certainly hope so, and I certainly hope you'll check out more of them at https://goldplatedgames.com/ or on my curation page!

Remember one thing when playing this expansion.
Sentry Turrets! Sentry Turrets! Sentry Turrets!
The game its self is good, but with those sentry in every corner it's nearly impossible to pass the game on Hard. Who needs bosses when you could just add 100 Sentry Turrets!!!

Do you hate turrets? You will.

Ground Zero is an astonishingly awful expansion for Quake 2. Ground Zero fundamentally misunderstands every single last aspect of Quake 2's original design. It has bad level design, poor pacing, boring environments (even moreso than the original quake 2!), terrible enemy balancing and placement, and a general lack of interesting new additions.

The new weapons are not very interesting. The most worthwhile additions are the mines and the proximity bomb launcher (which is just a reskinned grenade launcher), which are still pretty boring and can be niche. The nailgun from Quake 1 is back, but it is far less powerful and is nowhere near as satisfying to use. A lot of the new weapons are not bound to keys on your keyboard, so you have to cycle through your inventory in order to use them.

The level design is possibly the biggest deal-breaker here. Levels are even more corridor-heavy than in base Quake 2, and environments are hardly mixed up in the slightest. Enemies that are so powerful that they counteract nearly your entire arsenal are placed around corners with no way to see them coming. Crossing a corner without the right weapon equipped (typically the minigun or the railgun) will often force you to reload a save. Secrets are rare and almost never contain worthwhile items, making them far less interesting and worthwhile than usual. Visually, the game is rather boring and uninspired, with the most interesting visuals and ideas being in the mines at the beginning of the expansion.

The terrible level design goes hand-in-hand with the terrible enemy design. While most of the enemies from base Quake 2 are fine here, the new enemies are some of the worst I've ever seen. The worst offenders are the turrets, which do an insane amount of damage (piercing armor, too!) and are placed in incredibly cruel places. What this means is that the game devolves from a movement shooter to a "tactical" shooter, where you need to slow to a halt to check your corners whenever you enter a room (because if not, you're guaranteed to lose most of your health in one shot!). The other awful offender is the new medic enemy, which summons hitscanners (potentially higher tier ones!) so ridiculously fast that you generally won't be able to kill it without the minigun or wasting a ton of resources. A lot of the other new enemies are less offensive, but they're typically extremely tanky reskins of enemies from base Quake 2, so they're very boring.

Please don't play this! It is absolutely painful. I like Quake 2 more than most, and this expansion simply doesn't get what made the game enjoyable in the first place. Running and gunning not being viable in a Quake campaign is utterly sinful. This expansion offers you less than nothing, and you'd be better off saving your money and playing a free mod or simply replaying the main game.

I've never thought I would end up not suggesting a Quake game but here we are... I have lot to say about this expansion but I am so exhausted by its silly issue, I'm fed up with it. It took me such a long time to finish it not because it's hard, it rather pushed me away every session I attempt to play it. Its map design actually is quite cool, Rogue Entertainment obviously tried hard to make big, complicated maps with many entrances, exists, paths. BUT, from the 1/3 of the game, the player kept being bombarded by sentry turrets, over and over and over... I am still astonished by amount of sentry turret for no good reason; this is not a short expansion pack even for its day, I just cannot comprehend the artificial and unfair challenges the player is forced into...

If you want more Quake 2? Keep away from Ground Zero; there are countless SP mods, just pick one of them; I find Quake II: Zaero quite cool for example.

Oh, lastly; don't bother to play the game with vanilla release. Get a modern source port to have modern features like high resolution, wide screen, 64 bit, music support, etc...

Yamagi Quake II:
https://www.yamagi.org/quake2/

Short version: avoid this and play the infinitely-superior Reckoning instead. Long version: Rogue apparently thought they were still making Strife, which means that a Q2 mission pack somehow features confusing and maze-like maps with terrible backtracking elements. The new weapons range from passable to useless, with the reskinned splash-damaging nailgun being the best, and the chainfist being the worst, since you're required to get up-close to the average Q2 enemy to use it, universally-known as a terrible idea

And to complain about both, the level design severely-limits how you can effectively-use the rocket and grenade launcher, two things a Quake game should never have an issue accommodating by design. The cramped and compacted rooms and corridors make using both either suicidal or a total waste of ammo, as enemies will either be on hard-to-hit ledges, blocked by walls/poles/architecture, or too close to where you bathe in the splash damage yourself

And then the ENEMIES, every new enemy is a horrible pain to deal with, and not in the fun strategy-deducing way, but the projectiles-that-might-as-well-be-hitscan way, I'm looking at YOU, plasma-shooting spider-thing. The worst addition however is the fact that there are autotracking sentry turrets EVERYWHERE, you generally can't go a minute or two without running-into one, and they hurt, a LOT. They take forever to destroy due to the fact you have to be constantly-moving in order to avoid either their painful blaster shot, or usually-instagibbing rocket shot, and they have an ungodly amount of health for a fixture, so better make sure you actually hit them

Skip this one. It doesn't introduce anything interesting and while parts of the level design are interesting, it suffers from severe "Gotcha!" design that's extremely annoying. Its difficulty is totally out of whack too, so if you really, really want to play it, do it on Easy or use cheats. Its default difficulty is a huge pain in the butt.

Would be a decent slice of Quake II, if it weren't for the ****ing turrets absolutely everywhere. Now, you might be thinking - "Turrets? That doesn't sound too bad?"

Wrong.

They're camouflaged, fire rockets or plasma blasts that take off 20-30 points of life with each shot and take two railgun slugs or three rockets to destroy. They all but ruin the game.

now i see why people did not recommend this QUAKE expansion game.

there was 129 enemy at one level and others at least 70-80.

enemy placement really terrible. they are every side of you in a small place. you can't run away.

new weapons are unbind you have to push tab button and search for them.

and of course that damned turrets. i will not talk about that. i agree other players review.

Quake 2 Mission Pack: Ground Zero is the second mission pack for the game, being made by Rogue Entertainment and released in 1998. Comes with new single campaign, new mosnters, weapons, items and such.

Once again id software game that doesn't work out of box. Steam box, that is. May as well copy-paste from review of previous mission pack:
This game will not even launch properly without some work. The simplest way is to open game's folder and edit "ground_zero.bat" to delete "+set cddir D:\data\max" line from it. Then launch this .bat file. Steam will count you as launching Quake 2, by the way. Or you can use source port if you don't care about Vanilla experience.

The music once again was not included. You will have to track it down in some way or another. Or find retail copy. Unless you use source port, Quake 2 reads Redbook music from the first disc drive. You also will have to find and learn neat _inmm program to make music loop correctly.

And then there is lack of widescreen support by default, albeit I heard it can easily be edited in config or with source port.
Oh, and it would slutter for me a lot. Unless I would go into Video options in game's menu and then exit, as it got fixed by itself.
It also doesn't seem to save configuration so you have to redo in-game options tweaks everytime you launch it.

Multiplayer community, well, I didn't check personally. But I think that it uses same stuff as Quake 2 and no one uses expansions packs.

The plot of this mission pack is simple. Once again we follow another soldier during human's attack on Strogg planet. And this time you have totally unawesome name "stepchild" and have to politely blow up Gravity Well which trapped human's fleet in planet orbit who are being actively shot by the Big Gun. Good thing you managed to crash.

This time around the level structure of main campaign changed a bit. Rogue Entertainment, makers of Strife, made Quake 2's kinda-there-hubs take a next step, as their levels are now huge, mazey and may require backtracking. There is still one certain linear way to get through the unit and game usually tells you what to do next in objective, like "go back to previous level now". Or "turn on the three valves" and then you will be spending your time in the level, poking around as you didn't care to remember where valves were.

Sad thing is that while I enjoy such exploration aspect, but Quake 2 setting isn't Hexen. It's the kind of setting that is cool in short burst, not the one you want to explore. It's nothing but a boringish black-red tech stuff of tech generic evilness. Of RED colored OpenGL lights. With some heavy-whatever-you-count guitar music grinding on your ears after a while. So eh, not so awesome idea after all.

You also was given new tools to handle enemies. There is EDF-something that is actually just a nailgun from Q1. Ohai my baby. It's supposed to ignore target's armor and thus in single it's only useful only against new modifications for those jetpack soldiers with shield. Oh well. Plus some continious laser that eats cell ammo like no tommorow, so much that I feel I will rather use BFG than that. Plus grenade launcher that throws proximity mines that are tad weak to be used as a mine. I just shot them when I didn't want grenades to bounce away. Oh, and there is a chainsaw. Chainfist, actually. By the golden holy rule of 90's FPS, it's a melee weapon that sucks.
Too bad that developers forgot to set keybinds to some of those weapons, so you either have to learn how to make autoexec files or just have to select them clumpsily from inventory.

Then from inventory weapons you got new Double Damage. It's like Quad Damage, but half as good, but more common. Then there is VR Googles which will put you into R-ZONE! Or at least make objects fully red. And various spheres that float above you and do something. Like, Sphere of Defender shoots back at whoever injured you. And then there are gimmicky Tesla throwable devices. Once landed, they take a while to set up and then zap at nearby enemies. Too bad that monsters AI was programmed to not enter this device's range and just to shoot it immeditly, thus there are very little uses for it. Only as distraction. Weapon switching speed in Quake 2 is too slow for much use otherwise.

But then come the new enemies. Well, there are spider things who can crawl over ceiling and play dead. Fool me once, gib them all. New modification of jetpack Strogg with shield in front. Medic Strogg is now actually dangerous as he also spawns other Stroggs around himself, thus being number one priority target. And good reason to pull out BFG. And there are totally new bosses. Final bosses are supposed to replicate powerups that you currently use, so using Quad Damage means that they do quad damage as well. It still doesn't help to save them much, at least on Normal. Still, awesome.

Oh. And turrets.
Freaking turrets.
While the first hub has none, the game is going to slowly cover the levels with them, hidden and placed in all the corners that you don't expect to see them. They are small, they take 2-3 rockets or railgun shots, they shoot high damage projectiles and often come out from hiding behind you. Even worse if they are armed with rockets. Their AI is also pain, as they predict your movement to shoot ahead and can even keep shooting near the corner where you hid away. In other words, they are pain in the back. And while you may learn to handle them better, despite having to quickload when you get surprised anyway, it doesn't fit to Quake 2 pace at all.

Oh, and they say that they improved AI. Mostly means that they made enemies harder. Mostly by making them take less time to shoot. All yay being shot by light guard right as you peek around corner. Light Guards are also more aggresive. And Stroggs shoot grenades more accurately, which might be a good change. Oh, and there are some scripted events too, like shooting something explosive near you as you enter the room.

Overall, with all the difficulty spikes and pacing problems, partly thanks to turrets, as well as setting getting old before the end of a game I think that this mission pack is skippable. Really, not all that fun.