Right. Hexen II. Raven's take on Quake. Worth the wait? Debatable, but for me, a hearty yes. Mind you, I've only bothered to play the OpenGL version that comes in package. I bought the Righteous 3D within two weeks of it's release, and I have to say that with not one speck of exaggeration it is the best single gaming purchase I have ever made. Don't have a Voodoo board? Jesus man, get off your ass, go out and find one.

Hexen II comes to us from the venerable Raven, a software company intimately familiar with the devious, inner workings of Id. The precursors to Hexen II, Heretic and Hexen, were built on top of the Doom engine. Knowing a good thing when they saw one, Raven took the Doom engine and...well...'tweaked' it. Heretic added a medieval setting to the Doom engine, the limited ability to look up and down, the ability to carry items you pick up until you decided to use them, partial transparency, currents in the water, pushable items, and a slew of spells that turn enemies into chickens, allow you to soar like an aerodynamic nun, and power-ups to your weapons that doubled the style of death and damnation you could lay down on deathmatch patsies. Not bad, huh? Well, those bastards couldn't leave well enough alone. They had to 'improve' things. Like gamers want improvement in their games. Hexen: Beyond Heretic added more atmospheric effects, breakable windows, even better texture maps, parallax skies (you know, skies with multiple layers moving at different speeds?), more emphasis on solving puzzles, the ability to revisit worlds, eight-player networked games, and...drum roll please...three separate character classes with different skills and weaknesses. RPG Doom was born.

Now we have Hexen II. Id came out with Quake, everyone ooh'd and aah'd at the pretty graphics and had a blast with the Deathmatch. The single-player mode, however, was quickly and quietly forgotten. So Raven steps in and decides, yet again, to take it on themselves to improve a game. They take the Quake engine to start with. This time, they aren't content with one crappy medieval setting. No...they have to go and develop Egyptian, Greco-Roman and South-American worlds to go along with the gorgeous medieval one. And I do mean gorgeous. The texture maps are great, but pale in comparison to the architecture of the buildings in the levels. I remember reading early on in its development that a number of the buildings were created from the schematics of real buildings, like a Gothic cathedral. Well, it shows. And it feels. The atmosphere of walking into a cathedral with light streaming through stained-glass windows onto a tomb is beaten only by the next few seconds, when the barrage of chaos you unleash takes out a group of archers, a fallen-angel, the above-mentioned stained-glass windows, all of the pews, candles and any other $#!& that gets in your way. How about jumping through a portal you run across in the wing of a Hexen-cum-Egyptian ruin, only to find yourself flung millennia into the past, just so you can uncover areas of the ruin blocked by rubble in the present. It's this kind of attention to detail and visceral atmosphere that sets Raven apart.

The character classes are here. You can be a sword-swinging Paladin, a bone-crushing Crusader, a skulking Assasin or a nefarious Necromancer (who, by the way, is only out to kill the baddies because they've caused the general populace to stop fearing him so much). Each class has different abilities. The Assassin can become almost invisible in shadows, and can manage it in daylight at higher levels. The Necromancer can occasionally steal the souls from the recently-departed to replenish mana and health. The Crusader gets health bonuses for hammering heads for the almighty. The Paladin...uh...I forget what bonuses he gets, but rest assured, there's at least one. Each class has four basic weapons. The fourth is received after you find its two parts. Additionally, temporary power-ups change the weapons in a big way. For example, the Necromancer (can you tell I played him alot?) has a Raven staff for his biggest weapon. Normally, it spews out three projectiles that explode on impact. Nifty. Power it up, though, and every time you hit that little <Ctrl> button (I like the keyboard, OK?) a flock of blood-thirsty ravens straight out of Hitchcock swarms on the nearest enemy, generally ripping him to shreds. Peachy-$#@&'n-keen. One of the Assassin's weapons is the Scarab staff. All powered-up it would do Clive Barker proud, as any victim hit with the beetles it flings is skewered by four chains that quickly pull him or her into so many kabobs.

The monsters are nice. You've got horn-headed archers, multi-colored spiders, jackal-headed magic-slinging zombies who's dismembered arms will keep coming, teleporting skull-headed mages who leave spiders behind when they die, golems of the stone and crystal variety, and bitchin' leopard men. These last guys are really nasty. They keep jumping and rolling, making it hard to target them. Also, if they get in close, they will do alot of damage, and soak it just as easily. At the end of each of the four worlds, you get to fight the Boss. This, of course, is a time-honored tradition stretching back to the arcade games of yore. Here in Hexen II, you get to take on the Four Horsemen, and I don' t mean the wrestlers. These guys are great. They ride around on horses and dish out destruction Apocalypso-style. It is so damn eerie to watch a horse gallop by several feet above the ground, while the shrouded figure on top slings pestilence and decay your way. Bottom line, the Boss animation is a step-and-a-half above what I've seen yet, and no where is that more true than with the final Boss, Eidolon. This guy is truly frightening. Imagine a demon. Imagine Godzilla. Imagine their love child. When he busted out through the wall, my knees were shaking; I bolted for the farthest reaches of the level.

The puzzles are a bitch at times, but they give a purpose to jumping through the levels beyond 'Frag everything that moves.' Not that most people need a better reason than that, of course. Which leads us so naturally to deathmatches. I jumped onto a GL Hexen server the other day and had a blast. My complaints were two: a limited number of levels to play over and over again, and that damn Crusader kept blasting my ass to Hell with his staff of Ra (it shoots one muthah of a laser that ricochets off walls, ceilings and floors and has a nice range to boot). I think the Crusader may be a bit overly powerful. When powered up, he smashes with his mystical hammer, whips up tornadoes that float around picking up other characters, rains ice storms from on high that crystallize anyone in their path, and unleashes THREE beams frmo the staff of Ra, with all of the above-mentioned attributes. Add to that his relatively high strength and constitution, and he is one bad-ass prophet of love.

The engine is great. If you've seen GLQuake, you know. If not, I pity you. Hexen runs beautifully, with only a bit of choppiness at the very beginning of a level duee to the massive texture load. Similarly, thhe game does take a while to load up at first, but again they've got reams of textures and sounds to account for, so it's understandable. There should be a patch out mighty soon to take care of a few niggling little bugs in the game. Basically, the engine is, if anything, improved over GLQuake. I'm not the guy to run to if you want to know about Frame rates on varying machines at varying resolutions; basically, if the damn thing runs nicely and the game is fun, I could care less whether I'm getting 2 or 3 more FPS than some other schmuck.

Now, from my glowing review, it seems obvious that you should run out and gun down your local game-retailer Turok-style in an effort to lay your grubby, little hands on the game. Hold on there Slim. It depends. It depends on whether you feel like shelling out between fifty and sixty bucks for a game that when all is said and done, is really just a suped-up version of another game...Quake. It has a hell of alot of improvements, but then so do a number of spanking partial and total conversions you can download for free off the net. Personally, I think Raven has done as slick a revision as I've seen, but not all of the contenders are out. I keep reading about SiN, and the interesting new elements it will bring to traditional Quake play, like independant development involving characters in the game while you're running around capping criminals, or cut moments utilizing the game engine. Halflife is supposed to have some far-out AI, allowing monsters to figure out they should run away and get reinforcements. Daikatana looks to include alot of this stuff, too. And as for character animation, Unreal looks hard to beat. Let's not forget to mention Quake II, scheduled fot a holiday release. So when all is said and done, I have to say that you should think hard about purchasing Hexen II. How much of the Quake engine rehashed are you going to be able to spend cash on in the remainder of '97? That's up to you. Me, I'm going back to that server and shove a flock of razor-beaked ravens down that smug Crusader's throat.

 

My rating: 90%

Tested on: P166/64Mb/4Mb Millennium/Righteous 3D @ 57Mhz

Required: Who cares, it obviously runs on my computer, doesn't it?

Supported: OpenGl

Publisher: Activision

Developer: Raven

Reviewed by: Christian Panas (9/20/97)