While often criticized for being an insignificant upgrade over the first entry in the series, Quake 2 replaces the first game's oppressive, tonally inconsistent and abstract elements with something far more cohesive. It's still ultimately not very clever or ground breaking, but it's immediately more approachable.
Quake 2's biggest achievement is how it's able to work around the limitations of reduced enemy counts (compared to something like Doom) and still make fights interesting. The game heavily favours constant movement, in singleplayer and multiplayer alike. Weaponry has a lot of character to it, they feel powerful and yet each weapon has its place. The game is by no means perfectly balanced, as certain inventory powerups like the legendary quad damage or the power shield absolutely trivialize any challenge the game may throw at you.

The re-release package is overall excellent, as it not only boasts a new renderer supporting modern visual effects, like real time shadows, it also contains both of the original expansions, as well as the Nintendo 64 levels. While the original expansions are interesting as products of their time, the level design is often meandering and un-focussed and the new weapons feel underwhelming. On the other hand, Call of the Machine, an entirely new level pack created by Machine Games specifically for the re-release, is absolutely superb and it's very clear Machine Games has a great understanding of what makes Quake 2 work well.

The gameplay of the re-release is NOT identical to the original, which in my opinion is a good thing, since Quake 2 is such a divisive title. It should also be noted, that most of the gameplay changes come from restored content that never made it to the original release, as such nothing ever feels out of place and integrates smoothly in the game, another aspect done extremely well.

more tedious compared to quake 1, with enemies having weird, disproportionate health pools. however, the influence it had on modern human-vs-aliens shooters is unmistakably present. pure, distilled FPS fun. also, the new expansion is an absolute blast to play!

Worth it alone for Quake 2 64. An amazing boomer shooter, great levels, weapons and enemies.

10/10