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Review: Hexen 2 -- Part 1© Dan Finkelstein
Sep 16, 1997
To put it into a few words, Hexen 2 is a souped up version of Quake. If you liked Quake, you probably can't go wrong with running out to your local software store and picking up the full commercial version of Hexen 2. It will be in stores Friday, Sept. 12.
Getting down to the nitty-gritty, Hexen 2, the sequel to Hexen, which in turn was the sequel to Heretic, continues the theme of battling it out against evil demons in an ancient time, and with a lot of cool ancient weapons to boot. Keeping with the previous games, you can be one of four different characters, each which has their own special abilities, weapons, and spells. The difficulty
can be selected, although higher difficulty settings do not (unfortunately) improve the enemies AI, just simply adds more of them.
Simply looking at the gameplay, one might think that Hexen 2 is very similar to Hexen, or even Heretic. That's pretty much right. But the one big difference
is that Hexen 2 uses an engine designed by a little company called ID software and which was used for a little-known game called Quake. And that's not all — in the year or so since Quake has been released, Raven software, working closely with ID, has beefed up the Quake engine, adding little things like transparent water, breakable objects, animated features (like a ringing bell which not only
can you hear ringing, but see as well). Little, tiny details that make Hexen 2 a better game. In my opinion, this "Hexen 2 Quake engine" runs much faster than the original Quake engine, and also is more detailed . . . . Obviously, this souped up engine is a hint at the next generation Quake 2 engine that we'll be seeing in a few short months.
Next week: The thrilling conclusion.
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