Whoops! I meant to have this posted days ago! Sorry to leave you all hanging on the next installment of "Cammy reviews Quake mission packs", but such is life. I'm busy and I worked a nine hour shift today.
Summing up rogue
I was pleasantly surprised—I remember hearing from somewhere that Dissolution of Eternity was the one with all the annoying traps, but it was a pretty smooth playthrough throughout. hipnotic is definitely the objectively better pack, but rogue is fun too. One of the most striking things about it is the texture theme—rogue actually uses a cut id1 Aztec temple texture theme (and as someone who has a copy of and has worked with the original id Amiga Deluxe Paint texture sources, I can confirm a lot of these are OG). I hate the idea of things going to waste, and these look great, so I'm happy Rogue Entertainment was finally able to bring them to light.
 |
 |
In fact, lemme rave about the look of the levels some more. I love these kinds of compact, multi-level temple levels. My first attempt at a Quake level was supposed to be a weird lava temple, and it kinda sucked! I mean, I find it charming as hell, but I had no idea of texture themes and I doubt I'd even beaten id1 by that point. I was just enamored that much by the idea of making my own Quake levels, and I suddenly had access to a level editor and zero regard for human life. So yeah, this sorta ominous half-buried temple thing is my jam, and I think rogue nails it. I've heard some people describe it as visually flat, and I think that's a bit unfair. It's true that it doesn't usually have the wow factor of hipnotic's setpieces, but it's clean and compact and flows really nicely. By this point, modders and mission pack developers alike had figured out how to build good-looking and well-performing Quake levels, and rogue is a good-looking and well-performing pack, and that's good enough for me.
As with hipnotic, rogue adds some new weapons and enemies, and these are another big sticking point for folks that I actually liked a bunch. For one thing, you get lava nails, which are tracked separate from your normal nails and completely ignore armor (in deathmatch, in singleplayer they just do more damage). In other words, they take health off the enemy as if they had no armor, and give a nice, satisfying sizzle as they stick in the flesh of your targets. Nice! rogue also adds "multi-rockets"—which shoot four rockets per shot, you'll be surprised to hear. These admittedly make rogue pretty trivial to play through, but I'm one of those people who uses Quake like a stim toy, and I like it when I can breeze through things.
For new enemies, easily my favorite are the Hephaestus, the mini-Chthons. One of id1's two bosses is Chthon, a demon that rises out of lava and lobs fireballs at you, and while you can't kill the first one with your rockets (you have to use lightning bolts in the arena), these, you can, and they're such a striking, fun fight that I wish I had access to them in the base game. There were also the Egyptian Guardian enemies, these Poseidon-looking motherfuckers with lasers coming out of their tridents, and they're tough enough that the game likes to use them as mini-bosses, a couple protecting specific portals between levels. They were fun to fight.
 |
 |
The final boss of the game is, well, a dragon. Wholeass just a dragon. You'd think that alone would be an upgrade over Armagon, but honestly, I found it to be one of the most unfair fights in all of Quake, not necessarily frustrating, but certainly one that took a ton of attempts and save-scumming. It takes place in this cool as fuck lava canyon, but you're not gonna be able to make much use of it because of the dragon's unavoidable, speedy projectiles that pretty much require you to take refuge in the spawn area. If you think the Anti-Grav Belt (another cool but underutilized rogue idea) evens the odds any, you're a fool. It actually makes it much harder to land anywhere that isn't directly in lava and change directions quickly to avoid Dwaggie's shots. Anyway, hit it with enough multi-rockets and it dies and you'll discover all of the cool pickups and powerups that would've been very useful for evening the score, had you not been chickenshit from being browbeaten into hiding and getting only cheap shots in during the fight. Ah well.
As much as I did and do enjoy rogue, and as much as I recommend it, hipnotic is definitely designed a lot better (outside of traps—rogue does actually decent traps like swinging blades and not CBT like that fucking rock tumbler tunnel). rogue introduces a ton of new content, monsters, and weaponry that barely get used, I always had 100 normal rockets in reserve, and secrets, I eventually just stopped looking for because they were laughably obscure. I suppose some of it adds replay value, but I always got the sense, for as much as I liked the look of rogue, that it would be a lot better had someone else been designing all the maps.
In fact, the most perplexing thing is that rogue doesn't use any of hipnotic's upgrades. There's a part in one of the later levels where you have to throw two levers to lower a drawbridge, a clearly good use of hipnotic's rotating entities! Instead, they're generic sliding func_buttons. I yearn for some way for the two packs to be combined, their new weapons and enemies and technical upgrades in tandem to make for a truly unique and brand new Quake singleplayer experience. I also am just happy with what we got. It was fun, and it kept me at Quake for another week or two. Nothing's ever perfect, but Dissolution of Eternity is still just as much worth a spin or two as hipnotic was, even if you do have to cheese a dragon to finish it.
