Chaos Deathmatch

Content - Quake2 - Quake2 Mods - Quake2 Server-Side Mods

Author: Chaotic Dreams | Rating: 7.45 | Download: chaos11.exe / chaos111_update.exe / chaos114b4-win32.zip

Chaos Deathmatch turns your plain old Quake 2 into, a chaotic deathmatch (go figure). This mod brings new weapons, items, maps, and even bots to the table, but how does it all pan out? Well for the most part, not so bad but like anything else in this world, it definitely has its downfalls.

Lets kick things off with the weapons, which there are a complete ton of. Unfortunately some of the weapons are just gimmicky, and in battle have little to no use at all.

Bastard Broadsword - It’s a really sweet idea, but it’s kind of useless if you’re chasing down a guy carrying a shoddy. Although it has a pretty sweet model and looks really cool when you’re swinging it, you’ll find that you never use it. Although you can actually have some pretty sweet sword fights with it, and block some projectiles!

Chainsaw - I found it terribly difficult to hit anything with the chainsaw, and it makes a ton of noise so you’ll most definitely be easy to spot. Once again it looks really nice, and sounds great, I just have to question its usefulness.

Explosive Super Shotgun - In order to get this weapon, you need to grab the SSG, then find explosive shotgun shells somewhere in the level. So basically its just a different form of ammo for your SSG. When fired the shells cause a pretty massive explosion that looks damn sweet. All in all a wonderful enhancement of the SSG.

The Crossbow - Personally, I love the crossbow, mainly because its something you don’t run into often in the world of Quake. There’s three types of ammo for this bad boy, your regular ammo which can make short work of your enemy, poison arrow which causes your opponents screen to turn green and makes them vomit, and the explosive arrows which are similar to the explosive shotgun shells. Kick ass weapon all around.

Airgun - This weapon can provide a ton of fun for you and some friends. Grab this puppy and watch your friend go for a weapon then fire it out of his reach, repeat as necessary. Also if you don’t like taking damage from rocket jumping, aim the airgun at the floor and fly!

Grenades and Launchers - You have your basic Q2 grenade launcher, that I’m sure you’re already familiar with right? Well then, lets move on to the real goods, the new grenades. Along with the regular q2 grenades you can now fire poison grenades, and flash grenades. Poison grenades do the same thing your poison arrows do, except grenades have splash damage! The flash grenades will cause your opponents screen to turn bright white, and blind them momentarily. For those of you who like to set up annoying traps, there’s also laser mines that you can plant throughout the level. When planted the mine will send a laser across to the next surface, but they can only be placed by hand. One last addition to the grenade family is the Proximity Grenades and Launcher which launches proximity grenades, but they’re ‘living’ grenades. They hop around and chase your enemies down, and sometimes they even chase you down!

Homing Missile Launcher - This is another ammo for the rocket launcher that runs your rocket launcher into a homing missile launcher. Extremely useful against turrets.

The Buzz Saw - Now this weapon is just the most beautiful creation ever. It fires saw blades at a pretty fast rate that are sent flying at insane speeds, once they hit a wall they reflect off of them and continue zinging through the air. If they hit a player they just slice straight through them, causing a ton of damage!

The Gravity Vortex - Definitely an interesting weapon, but never really sat right with me. Once you throw it, it begins to suck everything within a pretty good radius into it, so for about fifteen seconds an entire room and areas nearby it are completely inaccessible. In some small maps you can throw it in one area and cause players to have to hid in the farthest corners of the map until it goes away, so it can definitely damper game play.

Turrets - There’s two types of turrets that you’ll run into, automatic sentry turrets which come fully loaded with some serious chignon firepower, and an automatic rocket turret which fires triple mini rockets out at you, and for the most part, makes serious short work of you. As far as DM goes, this in my opinion ruins game play, yes they’re possible to kill but its the same thing as camping just you don’t have to do the work.

Well that covers all the weapons that are included within Chaos Deathmatch, some of the weapons are seriously bad ass, while others either ruin game play or are just useless. In the end though, most of the weapons can make things very interesting.

Next on the list of chaotic goods is the Havoc Bots. I really liked the idea behind this, it gave poor dial-up users like me, the opportunity to play Chaos, although it didn’t pan out so well. At first I tested the bots out on the lowest possible skill level just while I was getting a feel for the game itself, but was horribly disrupted by the bots. They seem to have near perfect aim, barely ever missing a shot and somehow they’re always on your ass. Granted, this provides an amazingly good challenge, but you would expect with the skill level set to rock bottom, to stomp over the bots with ease. Instead you find yourself scrambling for health 90% of the time because the damn bots don’t miss! However, they do deserve some credit. They can effectively use just about every weapon and item that is provided in the game which I found pretty sweet. They even setup turrets in high traffic areas, which I was kind of impressed with. I would have expected the bots to randomly lay turrets throughout while instead they seemed to almost strategically place them. I wouldn’t say the bots are necessarily bad, but they can be seriously brutal, or maybe I just suck, who knows.

Now what would all this chaotic stuff be without chaotic maps? Sure you can play Chaos DM on any old map, but there are of course some maps included. Unfortunately some of these maps are a bit disappointing. There’s a couple maps, namely Chaosdm1 and 6 that I like quite a bit. Both are decent sized and have some sweet item/weapon placement to provide you with an chaotic fragfest. Although some of the maps are just obnoxiously large to the point unless you have 6-8 buddies to frag with, they’re useless. Also these big maps don’t really flow all that well, they’re just huge areas without a whole lot of flow. Granted you’ll be able to have a huge fragfest, but you won’t be able to remember where you found that railgun of yours. Speaking of finding weapons, you’ll find that in some maps, weapons change. Like in Chaosdm1 there’s a weapon spawn point that spawns the BFG, both turrets and a Gravity Vortex. So if you want that BFG, you may have to grab the weapon that’s currently there 3 times before it cycles back to the BFG. It makes sense why this is done, but I don’t necessarily like it. To sum things up for you, unless you’ve got a bunch of friends to frag with stick with the smaller maps, otherwise you’ll find yourself wandering aimlessly for about thirty minutes or longer while you learn the map. The maps all look quite nice though, and with the option to turn off all the lights in the level, it definitely can keep you on your toes. Also each map seems to have a different gravity which is really sweet, and varies up game play quite a bit.

Speaking of turning off the lights, Chaos DM has a ton of sweet items, such as the flashlight for use when all the lights are turned out. If you’re having trouble still, and the flashlight isn’t helping you, then turn on your radar scanner. Be warned though it burns up your power cells. There’s also the antigrav belt, which allows you to jump insanely high and not come crashing into the ground. If that’s not good enough for you, then why not grab a jetpack and fly around throughout the level! If you’d prefer something a little less drastic then there’s the grapple hook of course. This isn’t your normal hook though, you can climb up and down with it, so you can swing around with it! What would a Quake2 mod be without powerups though? You have your 4 basic CTF powerups, Power Amp, Time Accel, Disruptor, and the Auto Doc. Also there’s an invisibility powerup, that does the obvious. All these items definitely add to the overall fun of Chaos DM, and they’re all pretty damn useful.

Last but not least we have a nice sized list of sweet features the mod brings to the table. Such as the fake death which causes you to make a death sound, and fall to the floor, but not die, the kamikaze which is pretty self explanatory, and the extreme server configurability. With it you can tweak just about everything in the game with an easy to use cfg file.

Overall Chaos DM, is definitely a good modification of Q2, although its not something you’d be a serious player for, its still good wholesome fun. So if you’re throwing a LAN party here soon, you might wanna crank up a Chaos Server, and have a blast!

- f4nt