Saturation Point
Content - Quake2 - Quake2 Levels - Quake2 Single Player |
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Saturation Point is a three level pack, where your goal is to stop a Stroggos lab from creating a poison that’s planned to be inserted into the human drinking water. A group of soldiers were sent in before you, obviously they failed. You start off in the first level outside of the base with the goal of finding your way to the service elevator.
Level 1: Saturation Point
Starting things off with the bad subject, you’ll find in the first level that you have enough ammo to take down a small army. Almost immediately after you start the first level, you’ll find yourself a shotgun and a pack of shells. Follow a short path to your right from there, you’ll find the Super Shotgun, after defeating a couple baddies of course. Then after you return to your original path, knock off a couple small stroggs for the machine gun. Around that time you’ll almost have 50 shotgun shells, and somewhere around 100 bullets or more. That’s just the beginning though, you’ll soon find yourself with full ammo for your guns. You’ll be able to easily move through the whole level with your super shotgun confidently raised and ready to fire freely. There’s also a chaingun in the level, that’s pretty easy to get to, and isn’t too horribly far from the machine gun. As far as health goes, I never had to worry too much, stayed above 60 health easily throughout the level. You’ll also find an armor jacket and combat armor, both are hidden in secret areas though. Don’t worry, you can’t miss `em.
As far as enemies go, there’s quite a few, not enough to over power you exactly, but its a good healthy balance, but it’d be better if you at least had to worry about making sure your shots hit. Since you don’t have to worry though, the enemies won’t cause too much of a threat for most of you. One thing I did like is that the enemies are placed really well. They’ll jump out of corners, dark crevices in walls, and in some occasions, rise up from elevators or come exploding through walls.
The best part I liked about this level, is there’s room to explore. Like the Super Shotgun, and Chaingun are not in your direct path, so if you don’t take an extra second or two, you’ll never notice that they were in the map. Having 2 or 3 different ways to go and see what you can find makes things a bit more interesting. If you just go straight through, the level’s short, but explore a bit, it can take you a bit longer.
Level 2: The SoulForge
After you’ve beaten that first level, you’re into the lower section of the labs, and you need to find your way into the main labs. You just need to find the blue key, to get to the room that lowers the bridge and also opens the door across from the bridge. If it wasn’t for needing to hit a button to open the bridge you wouldn’t even have to bother doing all the blue key stuff, thanks to the wonderful ramp lights. You can just run up and jump right across the gap using the bizarrely placed lights.
Once again, this level’s plagued by extreme amounts of ammo if you just sidetrack off the main path a bit. Right off the bat into the level you’ll find 4 boxes of shells. Then if you head up to the first door, look left, and drop down that ladder. Follow along that path, past the ramp lights (that look horribly out of place). Oh and don’t pay attention to the light object that’s not actually attached to the wall, and is floating a couple inches from the wall in air. Impressive floating lights those Stroggs have 
You’ll eventually run into the Railgun, and some slugs, because 10 slugs just isn’t enough when you only have full bullets and shells leftover from part 1. So now you’re holding 40 slugs, to mainly fight off small strogg soldiers. Want to have some fun in the level still? Just use the railgun, if you get a couple ‘two (three, sometimes four) for one shots’ you can make it through the whole level easily without needing any other weapons. Since there’s plenty of more slugs found throughout the level, and of course more shells and bullets. Also you’ll find yourself a grenade launcher in the map. For health purposes you won’t really need much, like I said, most of the enemies are just shotgun/machine gun toting punks, that are decently placed, and besides, you have a railgun. There’s not a whole lot that can stop you.
As far as enemies go, you won’t find yourself with any severe challenges. With more ammo on your back than you know what to do with its not much of a problem. The level’s pretty short, but the author managed to pack in quite a few baddies to try and slow you down.
In the first level I loved how much you got to run around exploring the level. Now in this level it almost seems like it was a bit rushed and the best element of the first level was basically removed making the level quite linear and short. You won’t even remember this level after playing through it, its short, and easy.
Level 3: The Sub Levels
This one felt even more rushed then the last. There’s barely anywhere to venture off at, and you find yourself just running with your guns blazing like all hell.
Once again, you’ll again find yourself with a ton of ammo. There’s a rocket launcher to be found in the level, but that’s about it weapon wise. Plenty of slugs and shells about, plus you have a rocket launcher and twenty rockets to fire off. You’ll get more of those also. Health’s never a problem, there’s plenty of it about. There’s just no bloody reason for this much ammo and health in a level. If you play through all three levels, you have a ton of ammo by the time you reach this one. There’s also a mega health to be found.
Enemy wise, their placement isn’t nearly as cool as in the first two levels. Now they just storm at you with full force, and in great numbers. Also you’ll find yourself against some bigger foes this time around. Which this makes things a bit more interesting, but considering there isn’t even a puzzle to solve, nor paths to venture off on, you’ll get bored just running forward and mowing down enemies aimlessly. The puzzle of this level you ask? Blow a whole through a computer screen that while wipe out the existence of the poison for the water. Now those evil stroggs can’t poison us!
Altogether this 3 pack of levels is a bit on the lackluster side of things. There’s ample amounts of ammo, and you find mainly weaker enemies proving for a simple run and gun fest. Although I must give credit to the first part level of the pack, it was quite a bit of fun. Room to explore, and almost had an acceptable balance of ammo/guns. I think the levels were a good effort, just needed quite a bit more polish on the item placements, and maybe some more time spent on the last two levels. So in my opinion, use your bandwidth elsewhere.
- f4nt0m45
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