Summing up impel

impel is funny. It doesn't officially count for a mission pack, and you can tell because it uses all custom textures that mimic the textures of the original game. This was common for unofficial paid expansions back in the day—you weren't redistributing id's stuff just because your levels worked with Quake, but the textures you use in a level get embedded into the level file, and if you're using id's textures, that is their property. As a result, Aftershock for Quake and the like all had brand new texture sets prepared for their levels so they could sell them.

I actually rather like how impel looks! They're not amazingly unique textures, obviously, but they're appealing and they're used well. Thing you'll learn about impel is everything comes with a catch—so while they're good textures, it becomes clear that they were only developed with the original GLQuake engines in mind. To condense a big Quake source port history lesson, GLQuake (so the original OpenGL-accelerated build of Quake) was notoriously rushed and buggy, and "fullbrights", the sixteen colors on Quake's custom palette that always render at max brightness, didn't work right in it (they'd render at normal brightness like any other color). When they converted their textures into their WAD makers for use in their level editors, they only ever tested these in GLQuake—and the WAD maker (or maybe even the texture maker himself!) mapped some of the colors in the textures to those fullbright colors, leading to unintentional glowing spots on some of the textures, especially in dark corners of the levels. I guess I'll have to fix those manually if I ever want to use them myself (and I really might, I like their overall style).

impel's levels are decent—with the catch that they are pretty questionably designed at times. Health and ammo gets annoyingly scarce sometimes. I hate having to rely on infighting or outright skipping fights just to survive. There's a box room in one of the base levels a few in, and normally, large stacks of boxes hide gadgets and ammo. I hop in behind the boxes, only to discover there's not only no goodies, but it's also a softlock. You cannot get out of this fairly large space without noclip. The impel developers didn't consider this. Another badly designed spot that sticks out is the start of one of the levels where you're immediately attacked by a rottweiler—and then a fucking fiend spawns in seconds later with a chance of telefragging the rottweiler. That's very much not how nice levels are built. This probably makes it sound like impel is badly put together, and I wouldn't necessarily agree with that, it's competent—it's just that all the stuff that sticks out days later are not exactly positives.

impel has some new weapons which range from mildly fun to absurd and somehow useful. The Napalm Gun is just a Grenade Launcher with no bounce, and it causes the enemies to glow and take residual flame damage over time before gibbing. Not bad! There's an electrical weapon sorta like the one in rogue that causes enemies to be spun around as you hit them—that one was a little odd. Finally, there's this fucking harpoon gun that's the silliest thing on the planet. The javelins don't even stick in the monsters and it has an absurd kick, but this thing legit saved my ass a few times in tight spots, even against shamblers. It uses your rocket ammo pool, which makes sense, given it's basically a Rocket Launcher but without the explosions.

The tongue-in-cheek story of impel is that Shubby's highest minion, the Dark Reaper Legond [sic], has taken it upon herself to target you for bringing her down in Dissolution of Eternity (uh, I thought we killed Shubby in id1?), and naturally, she's the final boss of the game. Amusingly enough, however, she's just a woman? Literally just a bionic woman. She's fast and shoots rockets and tries to pull you close to her. Other than being a fast, annoying damage sponge, she wasn't too hard to beat. It was those fucking juggernaut things (giant indestructible robots that lumber around the base levels) crowded around the arena that were a bigger pain in the ass, but she still went down first or second try.

Is Abyss of Pandemonium worth playing? Yeah, I liked it. I'd say it's worth one playthrough, but not two. The levels look nice and are decently designed except when they're not, the new enemies and weapons aren't anything too special, and the sparseness of ammo and health definitely made me resort to cheating once or twice. I don't know how much it cost back in 1998, but I've definitely played better custom free levels from that time—one for the curious and Quake completionists only. impel did get a free 2.0 reissue in 2008 (I presume for the tenth anniversary of its paid release) that proports to patch some of its bugs, and it's a very conservative upgrade. I noticed a few visual bugs fixed, but the fullbrights issue with the textures remain, nothing was rebalanced, and the softlocks are still there. It's definitely the way you want to play impel, but I was disappointed. Don't expect miracles.

Like I said in my writeup for Dissolution of Eternity, the big disappointment with all the mission packs is the lack of integration between them. Neither rogue nor impel use hipnotic's stuff, and when they each have improvements to the core Quake feature set in breakables, rotating entities, earthquakes, and so on, it really makes me wonder what one big mission pack episode or two would feel like. I know Quoth and Arcane Dimensions have probably taken every idea from the mission packs there is to take, but still—they felt different and unique enough to me that I'd certainly like to see more where that came from.

Hope you enjoyed my several thousand words about each of the Quake expansions! I have actually a few journal posts queued up about my creative happenings this month—things are picking up again. Thanks for your patience.