Quake Champions Review

Look at that Lovcraftian monstrosity in the sky.

Quake Champions is a curious game. It's right up my alley; my multiplayer heyday was the late ninties and early aughts, when arena shooters were in vogue, and every competent PC gamer knew how to bunny-hop and set up a dedicated server. How times have changed. Counter-Strike changed the first-person-shooter scene, and battle royal games like Player Unknown: Battlegrounds and Fortnite seem to be initializing another paradigm shift. Arena shooters, in other words, are old news. Quake 3 was the last relevant Quake game, released in 1999, and Unreal Tournament 3 was the last triple-A arena shooter, released way back in 2007, and it was a flop. Quake Champions aims to update the arena formula by stealing from Overwatch and introducing characters that have unique abilities. This strategy is partially successful; mastering the abilities of each character gives the game more variety than it would have otherwise, since deathmatch, team deathmatch, and duel are the only current game modes. Still, the introduction of Champions ruins the perfect balance of Quake 3 (the weapons and damage numbers are more or less taken from that game). For example, the Death Knight Champion has the ability to launch a wide spread flame attack that does a lot of damage with a direct hit, as well as flame damage for a few seconds. It's very spammable, and I've often died while playing a weaker Champion from a blind flame shot emitted from a death knight who didn't even know I was there. Heavier Champions start out with one-hundred health and shields, which lets them withstand two railgun shots. With a full stack (100 health/150 shields), you'd have to hit them three times to kill them, severely limiting the usefulness of Quake's venerable sniper weapon. Give a heavy champ the mega health and mega shield, and they're pretty much invulnerable. Some active abilities, like Visor's wallhack, and Nyx's invisibility, are short in duration and take some skill to use, while others, like the aforementioned Death Knight's fire spam and B.J. Blazkowicz's dual wield, are unbalanced. All this doesn't matter much during a messy free-for-all, but I imagine it is frustrating for duel players.

The introduction of Champions, as well as lootboxes, alienates Quake's core fanbase. Yet because of the core gameplay, taken from Quake 3, newcomers to Quake will probably get squashed. Success depends on movement as well as map control; if you don't camp powerups like Quad damage or the mega health, you will get destroyed. Also, newbies have to play against people who've been fragging since 1996, when the first Quake title was introduced. A more in-depth tutorial system could fix this problem, as well as the introduction of more team-based game modes. Without those changes, Quake Champions player base will stay small, which is a shame, because it's the most fun I've had with a multiplayer game since Left 4 Dead 2.

Not a fan of loot boxes, but I had to have the Quake 2 railgun. Weapons skins from previous games are available.