Quake Review: Hard Target 2 (hrdtrgt2.zip)

Hard Target 2 (hrdtrgt2.zip, 1997) by Scott McNutt

Hard Target 2 is a techbase themed level released way back in 1997. It’s linear and rather short, taking only ten minutes to complete. The layout consists of a central hub and some discrete side areas. The hub is relatively open with an upper and lower level, some intersecting walkways and a large body of water in the centre. The flow of play is typical: find the switches to open up the first side area, collect the key, backtrack across the now-repopulated central hub to the next door and repeat. The elevated walkways keep the player under pressure from multiple angles and prevent the map from falling into the classic trap of just being a doom level in quake. But really there’s nothing interesting going on. The map lacks any architectural set pieces, unusual progression a unifying gameplay concept. It’s a step down from id’s techbases but a solid amateur effort – competently constructed, but otherwise on the lower side of average for 1997.

What elevates this level from generic to interesting is the sheer number of modifications to the base game it incorporates. Judging by the number of readme files included inside the archive, the author probably took a good look at the landscape of mods released in 1996/7 and crowbarred as many as he could into his level. There’s custom enemies, needless rebalancing, cosmetic modifications, and more.

The first sign that this level was going to be unusual was when I took a few steps down the opening hallway and instantly died. Part of the ceiling had collapsed and landed on my head. Cute, but a bit of an irritating gotcha moment I fell prey to almost every time I restarted the level. There are also destructible brushes and props littered around the map. The light pillars scattered around can be smashed in a single shot, darkening the corners they once stood in, which is cute. There’s also precisely one walkway that can be destroyed to no effect at all. Another nice cosmetic change is the shotguns ejecting spent cartridges onto the floor, which must have been incredibly sick back in the day. Those are the only weapon and aesthetic changes – entirely superfluous, but quite restrained.

They certainly didn’t exercise the same restraint when it came to adding custom enemies, because there’s a huge variety of them for such a short map. The base enemies you fight are grunts, enforcers and dogs – standard and appropriate techbase fare. Added to that are a few flying combat droids that hover around and ineffectively fire a burst of plasma now and then. The real danger is when you shoot them enough and they fall to earth, exploding on impact and doing a considerable amount of damage to anything that gets close.

Super-charged grunts with varying player weapons in their hands make up the bulk of the custom enemy opposition. There’s a couple of double barrelled shotgun grunts, some nailgun grunts, some grenade launcher wielding grunts and a quartet of rocket grunts. The weapons they hold have the exact same stats as the player’s arsenal, so they hit like a truck. Annoyingly, they all share the same model as the grunt so it’s impossible to tell them apart until they start shooting, which happens almost immediately because they have extremely fast reaction times. On the normal non-nightmare difficulties, they waddle around relatively slowly, but on nightmare they zip around at the speed of the player. They can also jump very far, very quickly in both difficulties, which is kind of jarring outside of nightmare. The aggressive way Nightmare’s nailgun grunt weaves around while spamming nails strongly reminded me of Mr. X from Scythe 2. They’re extremely fun to fight if you weave around on your back foot and probably the best part of the entire map. Here’s a short video of me fighting one which shows off all of their tricks:

The rocket and grenade grunts by comparison are absolutely miserable. Explosives in quake do a ton of damage and have a ridiculous splash radius. Because the map is so cramped and orthogonal you’re going to get bounced around hard by splash even if you avoid a direct hit. The map provides a lot of armour and health to compensate, but that doesn’t really matter when you get juggled for 200 damage before you can even react to what hit you. The introduction to the rocket grunts exacerbates this: Three of them are positioned at the top of a lift in the tightest space on the map. The first time I saw them they instantly gibbbed me, even though I was stacked up with red armour. I attempted to game the system by spamming the platform from below with grenades but this had predictably terrible results:

To make matters worse, they can predict the player’s movement and fire at where they will likely be, just like how Chthon throws fireballs at the end of episode 1. Dodging rockets in direct combat is therefore a complete non-starter and it has the unpleasant side-effect of making them spam the hell out of choke points if you back off in an attempt to gain an advantage by waiting for them to push towards you. Here’s a demonstration of how well they track at mid to close range:

I looked into it and it turns out these grunts are just very early multiplayer bots, re-purposed for single player. There’s a readme for gyrobot – or ‘Indecisive Bot’ as it calls itself – included in the archive. I assume the QuakeC source was publicly available and easy enough to modify for the mapper to place them holding specific weapons in an idle state across the map. They’re surprisingly decent bots for 1997 and feel vaguely human-like when they spam choke points with rockets or grenades. The only real weakness they have is their broken path-finding. More often than not they’ll end up clipping into walls and corners, completely incapable of moving.

Finally, there’s also three sexy anime girl enemies. You have the ‘manga babe’ (actual name) who is basically just an enforcer with a projectile that has splash damage like a rocket – redundant when you have rocket grunts and unthreatening. She’s very chunky and has comically low detail gibs. The other two anime girls share a slimmer model for a base and are supposed to be the bosses as far as I can tell. One wears a body suit, does kung fu kicks and fires grenades occasionally, while the other has nunchucks and fires lightning like a shambler. They both creep around painfully slowly and the kung fu girl shouts “fuck you” every two seconds. They’re harmless to the point where I didn’t even get to see the nunchuck girl’s attacks. When they appear at the very end of the map, the player has explosive weapons, a glut of ammo and will be have been trained by the grunt traps to cautiously peek around every corner spamming rockets wildly.

While these enemies are classic 90s early 3d babes, they’re also a combination of redundant, really out of place thematically and useless, leading me to think they were haphazardly included simply because they were out there and cool. It would have been far better if they had been passed over for some more custom grunt placement, maybe mixing and matching the different types to see how they interact.

Not content with loading the level up with custom enemies, the author also boosted the health of enforcers, probably in an attempt to make them ‘tough’ like the new super grunts. Unsurprisingly, it ends up being obnoxious and slows the combat in the first half of the map before the trickier fights right down. Grinding back to the point where you died after getting being blindsided by rocket spam, plinking away at the harmless enforcers with a shotgun or nails is very dull.

It’s an odd map – frustrating to play, especially so on nightmare, and a bit boring. Ultimately, it’s just not very good on its own merits. Its charms instead come from the novelty factor of seeing a bunch of 1997 mods mashed together. It would have been far more enjoyable set up as a pure deathmatch map with a couple of the gyrobots.

2.5/5