I’m feeling that I’m getting only dumber with age. I can remember than around 2003 I managed to get to the 3rd episode, which is Egypt. Then I had stumbled on a bug though, since this was a game rip, and dropped the game. Although looking back, I’m not sure anymore it was a bug, and not just some puzzles in this game being quite incomprehensible.
Anyway, locations that in other games would be considered a very secretive secret, in Hexen 2 are the only legitimate way to advance the plot. To make any progress in the first episode, you’ll have to crush furniture, break stained glass windows and find hidden rooms behind rotating book cases.
First episode is done very nicely, with medieval aesthetics only Quake engine provides. It is a big boring, though, since you have only two weapons for the entire episode, one of those being your “fists”.
Things I didn’t remember: every character has a passive skill. Assassin’s skill is completely useless, though. She can become invisible when standing still.
As in the first game, every character has their own set of weapons.
The snag of this is that for assassin the second weapon she acquires are completely useless grenades. And you won’t know that you’ve chosen a character with a completely useless second weapon until you spent a few hours completing the first episode. Grenades in Quake were awful. And here they are even worse: flying in wrong directions, passing through enemies. The funniest part is that scorpions, new enemies in the second episode, are able to strafe grenades.
The second episode is a very boring set of Aztec temples full of lava. But at least I managed to complete it without a guide, something I couldn’t say about the first episode.
Like the first game, you have to combine your final weapon from multiple pieces. There are just two pieces, though, and they are very easy to find. You also get more chances if you somehow managed to miss them. Scarab Staff, final Assassin’s weapon, is something between Railgun and Rocket Launcher. It is able to compensate for the uselessness of her grenades. You get it in the second episode, and will spend the next three episodes switching from it only when you run out of mana.
Not sure if this is due to some bugs in even the latest official version of the game, or something to do with running the game on newer machines, but Death, the second boss, gave me a lot of trouble. Scarab Staff had almost zero effect on it. My guess this is because bosses have higher resistance to splash damage. When I tried to use the crossbow combined with Tome of Power, the game simply crashed on me due to “too many explosions”. Had to fly after it (you get infinite flight in this boss battle, which was cool) continuously healing and backstabbing.
If I considered the first episode puzzles to be slightly illogical, the third episode, Egypt, is even worse. At some point I thought that I have struck another bug, since my character wouldn’t step on a button, jumping over it instead. Turns out its another “puzzle”, and to solve it, you need to exit the room, and enter it again through another door. By the way, stepping on that button opens a secret door in a completely different part of the level. And the game won’t tell you where.
The fourth episode, Rome, is slightly easier. It’s boring, but at least you don’t need to look for secrets to progress. The fourth boss, though, War, is a complete bullet sponge. And it also has homing throwing axes, that are almost impossible to avoid.
Final boss is easier than most of the other Four Horsemen. At least it doesn’t have homing projectiles. But is still a bullet sponge, even on the lowest difficult. The animation of the boss growing is impressive for its time, but the effect is diminished by the game not being able to handle the lighting properly.
Other than that, there are some troubles with water physics as well. Sometimes the character won’t be able to jump out even from a shallowest pool. I had to load my game multiple times due to being stuck in a puddle.
Having said all that, I’m glad I finished what I started some 19 years ago, but wouldn’t recommend doing that to anyone else.
