Quake Rocket jumps and castles, thirty years on

You are Ranger, a warrior with a serious arsenal and a simple job: hunt down four magic runes across four dark dimensions. The journey takes you through infested military bases, ancient medieval castles, lava-filled dungeons and gothic cathedrals, all crawling with corrupted knights, deformed ogres and worse. Only with all four runes do you stand a chance against the ancient evil threatening humanity.

The tone is pure dark fantasy: grim, gothic and unsettling, with a creeping dread the original pioneered. A grenade bounces down a corridor with a telltale ting, and you already know what is waiting around the corner. It is fast, it is brutal, and it never stops to explain itself.

Quake moves. The whole game is built on quick reflexes and constant motion: you strafe, you rocket jump, you twitch-aim through hordes before they close in. Enemies lunge from the dark, ogres lob grenades from ledges, and the only answer is to keep moving and keep shooting.

The Enhanced version leaves the original mechanics untouched, so the feel is exactly as it was, just running clean on modern hardware. The rocket launcher in particular remains a thing of beauty, and the super shotgun never gets old. This is the game that taught a generation of shooters what speed means, and it still outruns most of them.

Half of Quake's power is in your ears. The soundtrack and theme song come from Trent Reznor, and they are dark ambient dread rather than action music: low drones and industrial scrapes that make every corridor feel wrong. The Enhanced version includes the original soundtrack, which some earlier releases left out.

Visually, the remaster adds up to 4K and widescreen support, enhanced models, dynamic and colored lighting, anti-aliasing and depth of field. The low-poly shapes stay, and that is part of the charm: angular knights and blocky ogres in moody colored light still look striking. The mood is the point, and it lands.

The base game alone would be a lot, but this package stacks up fast. You get both original expansion packs, The Scourge of Armagon and Dissolution of Eternity, plus three newer ones from MachineGames: Dimension of the Past, Dimension of the Machine and the all-new Dawn of the Machine.

In Dawn of the Machine, Ranger is trapped in a dimension of endless illusion, reliving the same violent cycles and dying thousands of times trying to escape. Rumor points to the Nightmare Machine: destroy it, and the loop breaks.