Install the Ultimate Quake II Patch to restore the Sonic Mayhem soundtrack.

As for the gameplay, it's alright for a 90s PC expansion made by a different developer. The new weapons are a lot of fun to use, but the last few stages can become really tedious having to wittle away at numerous beta class gladiators around every corner that have energy shields and beefed up health. It's not a problem if you're speedrunning, I guess, but in my opinion they tend to slow normal gameplay down because there are so many of these punching bags to go through near the end of the game; not hard, but somewhat boring. The standard Strogg guards are now equipped with hyperblasters, ion rippers, and Warhammer 40K style red laser flashlights that are suprisingly accurate and damaging, unlike the 40K Imperial Guardsman's lasgun. The railgun or rocket launcher makes quick work of them at long range when you get it, though.

TL;DR 7/10, it's alright, worth playing at least once

If you like QUAKE II then you will like this expansion pack. You get your moneys worth with this expansion, it took me about 7 hours to finish! Plus the ending bits were cool and challenging. I would recommend this to anyone who enjoyed QUAKE II.
8/10
(If you can't launch this mission pack you will have to right click on QUAKE II and select properties. Then click Launch Options and type in: "+set game xatrix" (without the " " ). Then launch Quake II and it should launch this expansion.)

Synopsis:


The Reckoning Is a expansion pack for the 1997 smash hit Quake 2. The expansion adds a couple of new weapons, ranging from the Ion Ripper which bounces projectiles against walls in a similar fashion as Unreal's Razor Jack and then the always fun to use Phalanx Particle Cannon which shoots dual explosive energy orbs which explode on impact and have a small AOE blast.

Most of the stock enemies had reskins into more powerful variants such as the Gladiator which instead of his normal Rail gun mount, instead now has a triple shot Phalanx Cannon. Another new enemy are the swamp mutants which look like large insectoid primates.

Be warned however if your going to play on Nightmare! difficulty, it definitly will test your skills over the ease of Vanilla Quake 2's nightmare setting. But if your looking for a challenge you have come to the right place.

Overall The Reckoning is a highly enjoyable expansion pack for Quake 2 and if you enjoyed the base game you will definitely have a blast with The Reckoning.

Final Score: 85/100

Quake II The Reckoning is one of the two Expansion packs for Quake II. There's not much to say, this expansion consist of a fistful of "hubs" with different levels each. The gameplay remains unchanged, and the only particular things are a couple monsters and weapons added. The level structure is well done and appropriate and I didn't notice any incongruence or conflict with mission objectives inside the same Hub (as it happened with Ground Zeroes or few times in the original Q2).
This pack is appropriate for those who just want more quake two and don't need any particular revolution in gameplay to enjoy the game.
Since this is an expansion pack it requires the original Quake 2 installed and because of this it presents the same incompatibilities of the original game.

• ENGINE. The Quake II Engine is quite old now, but it still is enjoyable nowadays.
  
• SOUNDTRACK. Very Badass Soundtrack. 'Nuff said...

• COMPATIBILITY ISSUES. This expansion presents the same compatibility issues you might run into with the original Q2. Luckily there's the Steam community with various solutions and patches that will make this game run flawlessly, as if your i7 with your GTX 970 was an MMX with a Vodoo 3dfx... And, seriously, if you want to exploit more your hardware you can always look up for some Port that will load the game for you with enhanced graphics.

In this mission pack you look at the story from another point of view and as always new weapons and enemies, good game!

There's not a whole lot I can say about Quake II's first expansion pack that I didn't say about the base game. That's because unlike a lot of expansions, The Reckoning hews so close to the original that it could almost be mistaken for the real thing. It isn't a perfect copy for reasons that I'll go into, but know up front that if you want more of the Quake II campaign, you will get exactly that.

The Reckoning follows a smaller squad of drop-pod hard-asses launched into the outskirts of the Strogg military-industrial complex to track down and destroy a reserve fleet of spacecraft. Your pod, surprise surprise, gets knocked off course and dumps you in a swamp outside the main facility. That sets off a long and bloody journey through caves, valleys, bunkers, factories, and spaceports full of fleshy enemies to gib. The campaign is structured just like the original, with five units of interconnected levels to backtrack between. The connections are a little more convoluted this time but your objectives are helpful enough that you never really risk getting lost.

You'll spend more time outdoors and in space this time, but there's plenty of familiar tech bases and factories to tear apart as well. The missions are similar, with keycards and power cubes to find and setpieces to explode. Even the enemy encounters are plenty familiar, right down to gunners secreted behind boxes and centurions railing you down narrow hallways. There are a few new enemies but they're almost all reskins of existing foes. I personally like the new guards a lot for the variety of weapons they carry, but others like the centurion and boss tank reskins are obnoxiously beefy. There's a new mutant enemy as well but it's hardly threatening with its ridiculous sideways lope and neon yellow innards.

The new weapons are more welcome additions, including a vicious laser trap, a ricocheting energy weapon, and a double-barreled explosive rifle. There's also an alternate damage powerup that lets you fire twice as fast that's a lot of fun to mess with, and helps a lot in cutting through the denser enemies. Outside of the reskins and new guns, though, this is very much the same Quake II you know and love. The levels look good and have plenty of interesting encounters but tend to be simpler than the original ones. Most of the fights (including the final boss, I must inform you) are the same as well, with very little in the way of innovation even with the new enemies in the mix. This is by no means a bad thing for anyone who wants more Quake II (which should be everyone), so as long as you don't mind a slightly different version of the same game you'll get exactly what you want.

Quake 2 Mission Pack: The Reckoning is the first official mission pack made for Quake 2, being made by Xatrix and released in 1998. Comes with whole new single-player campaign, new weapons, items and enemies.

And yes, this Steam release is completely screwed up. Just like expected from id software games.
This game will not even launch properly without some work. The simplest way is to open game's folder and edit "reckoning.bat" to delete "+set cddir D:\data\max" line from it. Then launch this .bat file. Steam will count you as launching Quake 2, by the way. Or you can use source port if you don't care about Vanilla experience.

The music once again was not included. You will have to track it down in some way or another. Or find retail copy. Unless you use source port, Quake 2 reads Redbook music from the first disc drive. You also will have to find and learn neat _inmm program to make music loop correctly.

And then there is lack of widescreen support by default, albeit I heard it can easily be edited in config or with source port.
Oh, and it would stutter for me a lot. Unless I would go into Video options in game's menu and then exit, as it got fixed by itself. Strange.
It also doesn't seem to save configuration so you have to redo in-game options tweaks everytime you launch it.

Multiplayer community, well, I didn't check personally. But I think that it uses same stuff as Quake 2 and no one uses expansions packs.

The plot of this game is that you are the "joker" and you don't make a single joke. Now that's a bloody dissapointment!
Oh, and you are also a soldier who has to blow up another Strogg base solo so they can't attack Earth once again.

Main campaign of the game is similar to Quake 2 one, which is a fine thing. You once again will have to rock in linear way, sometimes backtracking for sake of linear progress of finding the key and you will shoot new weapons at new modifications of enemies while listening to new music track which are in same style as Q2 and thus are cool, man. Levels are fairly well done as well. The last ones even have low gravity which is fairly neat. However it also means that the setting is same: boring grey-red tech stuff of generic-ness. But we can blame Q2 itself for that. It also doesn't help that every second room is warehouse, filled with crates, enemies behind crates and crates.

The new arsenal given to player is pretty good. There are two new weapons: Ion Ripper and Phalanx. Ion Ripper uses same cells as Hyperblaster and BFG9000 and shoots arrow-like energy projectiles that ricochet off the walls. It doesn't kill as fast as Hyperblaster, but the projectiles are more damaging and in the end you will save more ammo. Plus, it really feels good to shoot it, with sound and damage that they can do to enemy.
Phalanx on another hand is strange: uses unique ammo and shoots two rocket-like projectiles one after another. No idea what it's good for as Rocket Launcher seems to have bigger DPS and Phalanx can't kill anyobdy with two projectiles where RL does the job with two rockets. The only thing that saves it is that it uses unique ammo, but at that point you will be swimming in it.

You also get to find two new items: Trap and Quad Fire Damage. Trap is just a fancy rare thing that you can throw at the ground and watch it pack the gibs of enemy that got sucked in to be packed into yummy tech-meatball that you can nom for health. Dual Fire Damage quads up fire speed of your weapon so you can not only kill two times faster, but waste ammo two times faster too. So you can combine it with Quad Damage and beat the reused final boss in 15 seconds instead of 30. Yay.

As for enemies, well, he we go. The only truly new enemy is a new kind of mutant, who has shiny yellow parts and more monkey-like. He is slower than Q2 mutants, but jumps pretty nicely, can swim and shoot at you as well. Also seems to be animated very well. There are two levels where you fight nothing but them, yep. As for Stroggs it's a bit more lazy than that. It just modified them to be more threatening. Light Guards were given many new weapons, with one of them being some instant accurate laser that really annoyes. The slow surgery robots with shielf in front were changed from pathetic to overkill, as they can now shoot instant hook at you which will throw you at them and they can shoot accurate instant laser at you too. And for some reason developers decided that it would be just plain fantastic to give even more health to already tough enemy by putting force-shield over them which sucks a lot of damage, at which points it takes a whole minute to destroy them and is just plain boring.
And final boss is reused.

Also, being forced to sometimes jump down because lift below isn't nice enough to raise up to carry you, forcing you to take small damage. Really?

Yea. As you see, The Reckoning is fairly decent for expansion pack, but it does have some flaws in that it annoyes you more or being more tedius. Still fun overall.

I am talk about the new things of this mission pack. So, my main[QUAKE 2] review is here!

The new maps and the different sort of character story is still good as it was the main [QUAKE 2].
The new weapons was not so. I felt those too much different from the [QUAKE 2] style, but not bad.

Good things:
-Strange good atmosphere.
-Low hardware requirements and runs well.
-Seems like hack-and-slash.

Bad thing:
-Must install the [Ultimate Quake II Patch] for the original-full experience.
-Can not disable the mouse accelerate. (I used to it)
-Steam overlay does not work yet.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=113174182

I recommend this game those who like the FPS style, old games, sci-fi stories and the less details story.
P.S. I suggest play 'Hard' difficulty for more fun. This 'Hard' not like hard as you expected. If you use the [Energy Shield] item then it becomes more easy.

My other reviews about the Mission Packs:
QUAKE II Mission Pack: Ground Zero
QUAKE II

Another expansion that doesnt let the quake series down.

7.5/10

Download the Ultimate Quake II Patch here or this game will not work:

http://www.mediafire.com/download/c74al2ehnh0ocl0/Ultimate+Quake+2+Patch.exe



Quake II: The Reckoning

As expected, this is almost the exact same game as Quake II; it just includes additional missions. Despite some cool new mobs, this game is dogs***.

First 80% of the game is great. However, in the final levels, you just run around in circles firing 15 to 20 rockets at each of what seems like 100 enemies. It's boring and a waste of time, especially since id didn't center the aim at all, so good luck not fragging yourself. Maybe if the mobs had a variety of skills it would be one thing. But no, you fight the same stupid mob over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over...

Also, the laser-gunner mobs are absolutely stupid. They have 100% accuracy, attack instantly, and cause near-blindness. What an obnoxious addition to Quake II.

Don't waste your time with the Quake II mission packs unless you're a completionist. The final levels are awful and a f***ing waste of time.