Jam Quake Brutalist Jam 2

Much like the first Brutalist Jam this second one gives a lot of good content to play for the same amount as it takes to beat a decently lengthy videogame. There are only couple maps that are difficult to recommend playing, but tons of maps that are absolutely great.

Highlights for me were definitely maps by DraQu, Nickster, Apterous, sze, recycledOJ, JoyModulo and ZetaByt. If I kept going I would just list 90% of the maps in the pack though as my next favorite. Grue, mrtaufner and Spootnik with some great standard Quake map experiences for example.

Annihilator with the cityscape award for sure.

Special mention for the Start map by Makkon which looks absolutely amazing with some cool optional exploration as well.

What an outing! Hats off to Makkon for once again rallying the community to an instantly iconic tradition. And what an incredible hub map! Real 'is this Quake?' moments.

There are 3 maps here that deserve special mention as being epic adventures in their own right, and neatly fit a podium of excellence:

Joy Modulos "In the Shadow of the Weapon"
DraQus "Corridors of Concrete"
Nicksters "Pollinator"

Map by map review follows:

# AlexUnder

Love the block dynamics, make combat very exciting. I don't feel like I'm cheesing things by running away, because the platforming is so good. The multiple layers of verticality are very rewarding, excellent use of 3D space.

# Amperz

Lovely long corridors and Valve-esque colossal industrial voids

# Andicraft

Excellent architecture, fog and lighting. Gorgeous atmosphere.

# Annihilator

I loved the yellow armour acting as a constant optional background goal while figuring out the rest. Wish I lived here

# Apterous

INCREDIBLE! Adored the story-telling — perfectly executed. Best on-rails start in ages. Loved the feel of the place, especially the consummately detailed opening sequence in through to the entry train ticket office. But the combat was brilliant: I've never had a sense of tactical immersive urban shooter like this — the use of space and in particular obstacles was incredible. Also liked the use of Fiends in places where their leap wouldn't come into play, very different feel.

# CC

Short & sweet. Liked the reservoir setting and the climactic arena was neat.

# ChadQuad

That opening combat was so challenging! Fantastic smooth hectic flow, not a dull moment. Rising lava trap was

# Chuma CC

This was a great little experience for my instinctive play style: run & gun! Got half the secrets and half the kills, never stopped for breath.

# DraQu

Legendary! Colossal space that never gets boring, the DwellE1 twist was *awesome* (I spotted that foreshadowing with the texture in that odd Fiend hidey-hole and thought oooh), AND the best Cthon remix I've ever played. So many classic traditions expertly blended into one.

# Entsoy

I pick up the grenade launcher, end up on the platform overlooking the area I first came up into, and I can't figure out where to go next.

# Erysdren

Beautifully done, the aesthetic is pitch-perfect.

# Euclidius

All felt a bit arbitrary, I'm afraid. Enemy placement, architecture, fetch-questing all felt like filler. I never felt like there was a reason or motivation or particular feeling I was meant to be getting from anything.

# Fifthskip

Loved the main hall. Extremely judicious minimal lighting / fog to make the place work from all angles and scales. Felt a bit cruel to find a "find all secrets!" hidden place after closing off the route back. Loved the final carnage, ended with a screen of a solitary zombie plodding through the entryway while watching the kill count go up

# Grue

Great gauntlet. Kept me on my toes for evading enemies as long as I could put them off. The first really oppressive space in the sequence, strong dread aesthetic.

# Hardcore Mazu

Really enjoyed planting those explosives, gonna have a fun time finding those cool extended secrets

# Jan Vanderweg

Gorgeous style throughout — excellent 'cute' factor!

# Jay Modulo

I got the orb! A couple significant bugs: the platform that's meant to take me to the final ascent gives me a mysterious squashed pain and backs down when we it gets to the level where the arms of the structure angle in. It repeats this manoeuvre over and over, reaching a progressively lower zenith, until the distance travelled is infinitesimal, then loops. If I step on then step off, it goes up to the top fine, then goes back down. No amount of repositioning could address this , I had to noclip up to the windtunnel. Also the place you need to get to to grab the invisibility secret has clipping geometry from the sky: you'll bump your head trying to walk outwards and venturing out to the further points and looking to the sides will cause the sky brush to obscure the structure geometry.

Divine machinery: I especially adored the red particles, which echo the pixel parralax sky beautifully. I thought the way you did interface panels beats everything else I've seen in that domain.

# Lincent

Great fun. The box puzzle took me ages but I persevered thanks to the motivating music . I really liked the way the geometry and flow weren't infinitely optimised to conventional norms — kept me second guessing and everything engaging.

# Magnetbox

Impecable vibes.

# Mr Taufner

Intense fights, loved the lightning gun room

# Mr M

Very rude of the brutalist regime to once again fill our grandiose civic spaces with obstructive shipping containers. But I would love more giant animal sculptures in my urban environment, ngl. I really liked that ledge walk just before the penultimate teleport where I had to run to evade the Enforcer firing squad and then just ploughed into them with the Perforator, very satisfying.

# Mtsch

Solid, lovely foggy grandeur effect. Palette felt too constrained and washed out though, I feel those particular textures of Makkons need special localised lighting not to look kind of uncannily drab.

# Newhouse

I can never get to grips with Q1 low grav — maybe the air control is too much & too little — but I really loved the way it played here with floating platforms and the simple translucent light volumes. Reminded me of those Q3 space levels.

I loved the ending cinematic!

# Nickster

Gorgeous, perfectly executed Bungie vibes. The palette is The way you used a fog colour which worked with the skybox is such a nice touch, I wish more people thought about how those things intersected. Also the lighting — perfect blinding sunrise/set light. The bridge with the air current was very odd. In the end I figured I had just enough health after the previous battle to rocket jump to an acceptable height — without this the current takes you slightly to the right of the bridge, slightly too low such that you clip the floor for a second or two, then drops you into the bottomless pit. It feels like a bug but I can't figure out what the intended behaviour is either.

# PixelDud



# Recycled OJ

Nice, just a couple of minor complaints: Relying on the player to backtrack down through lifts that rise on proximity is bad form; a priori I'm going to think oh this isn't the intended path, but then when I figure it must be I have to trigger the lift to come up, wait, then drop down with judicious timing that requires expertise; the exit messages were cool but they were triggered in very quick succession during a pitched firefight, so they kind of screwed up the climax, and distracted me while I got shot to death. Second time round I knew to kill everyone before going into the space but I still had to pull the console down to read them. But I am glad of more concrete

# Spoot

This really makes Makkons textures shine IMO. Masterful use of subtle detail which emphasises the brutalist minimalism all the more. Daylight from vasty heights and occasional candles, excellent. Couple of minor nits: there's a point where you get given the grenade launcher and a platform descends with Enforcers on it. I fell but just about managed to crawl out of the slime onto a platform. There's health in the slime and on the climbable platform, which indicates player falling down there is planned for, perhaps navigating through the slime? But try as I might, I kept drowning and eventually noclipped back; when unlocking the 1st gold key, there are two concurrent 'there are X more to go' puzzles, a bit confusing: "there are 3 more to go, there are 2 more to go, there are 3 more to go"

I loved the tense final encounters and finished with 1 health: perfect.

# SZE

That exit teleporter is cool as hell. The moment you get outside is fantastic, skybox suits the map so well. I also especially liked that cylinder around which you fight all the knights — great lighting on curved brushes. The vanishing void effect is ruined somewhat by having the fog a different tone to the internal sky, so rather than wondering at the infinite depths your eye gets stuck on the weird highlighted brush edges, which aren't as far away as you might hope. Similarly, the bottomless floor is weirdly close and buggily untextured (black) in the perforator wave arena.

# Zetabyt 1

Got pleasant late 90s nostalgia with this, also a dose of 00s Russian realism. The big arena with respawning pickups exhibts this very common, very odd Quake bug: on the higher platform edge gives directly onto a slope but if the player attempts to walk down it they will clip. You need to jump down. So weird.

# Zetabyt 2

Fog that looks like fog! Things looming out of it! Fantastic.

I left a mixed review for the first QBJ, I think because there were a number of maps I just couldn't get into despite their artistic flair.
QBJ2 fares rather better for me - there were only 4 maps that I really had significant issues with (sometimes due to tediously high difficulty destroying my interest in the otherwise interesting artistic design - or in one case partly because of that music choice), and one (unfinished) map I thought was good as it was, but clearly had potential to be more if it had been completed.

So, a 12.9% "bad" rate is pretty good, to be honest - and the remaining 27 maps are very varied in their approach. Some of them are still a little hard on skill 0 (but I'm giving Spoot a break because he's going to rebalance when he re-releases his map pack), and I found the lava puzzle in Elemental, My Dear Ranger to be almost infuriatingly difficult - but those maps also have really good high points to balance them out.
I enjoyed that there are three maps which have zero combat on Easy - Towers of Doom, Trespasser and Bleak City - and they were fun to explore (Trespasser has some *tremendous* sense of dread from the music choice!). Edging in here is the low-combat The Cut, which deserves a shout-out for design and atmosphere.
But I also enjoyed some of the more expansive and challenging maps - shout out to Mazu for making one of the largest maps that I've not found exhausting or overly difficult on skill 0 [although I did take ages to remember where the silver key door was], but also In The Shadow of the Weapon - and there's some good artistic vision maps with combat (Pollinator, Blood Vapor for example - both of which, like Site Z374, also do the thing of opening out in unexpected ways at points), and puzzle maps (Firdaws-i Bareen and the aforementioned Elemental...)
I also really liked the dynamism of some of the maps, some already mentioned, but also Elude Tranquillity's nail-shaped moving platforms.

Finally, I have to make a mention of Brutalism in Space for being a low-grav map that no-one seems to dislike, and having a super fun horde fight...

Much like QBJ1, QBJ2 returns full swing with a surprising variety of maps both in regards to gameplay and exploration despite all maps being united under the brutalist theme.

Immediate highlights for challenging but fair encounters with a lot of ground to cover that did not reach a lull state include Draqu's, possibly the most ambitious, alongside Mazu's, RecycledOJ's, Spootnik's, NewHouse's, Nickster's, SZE's and Zetabyte's map 1.

A lot of artistry on display too from returning and new mappers, either with just the jawdropping Nickster, Joymodulo's incredible high tech withering brutalism and Erysdren's + MrTaufner's lights (and wobbles). Makkon's start map and Annihilator's more pedestrian and "down to earth" maps are a joy to look at and walk through as well.

A good amount of creative maps too, putting an emphasis on the importance of good traversal skills like in AlexUnder's moving slabs of concrete and traps, Apterous' ankle breaking drops into a concrete hell and Andicraft's, felt like Ranger was transformed into a platformer world. Brutalist Remobilize when?

Lastly the zany and otheworldly, featuring both short & compact but also slightly more drawn out key hunts - among these highlights include Zetabyte's 2nd map, Magnetbox, Lincent's claustrophobic key hunt (that music choice though), Grue's and Jan Van Der Weg's. Some maps went for a more atmospheric approach, and while I personally thought they were too linear and short (Amperz', Entsoy's and Pixeldud's), bitesize maps are welcome.

Top shelf, a clear iteration over QBJ1 (QJB1 still being great). Starting map is wonderful and haunting ***and it tracks completed maps this time*** which is greatly appreciated.

Personal highlights for me were In The Shadow Of The Weapon which was my best in show and Towers of Doom as a runner up, with shoutouts to Blood Vapor, The Nullspace, and of course Mazu's latest creation.

I wrote a lot more *words* in the discussion page, but outside of one map I didn't vibe with, a couple iffy ending fights, and some minor bugs this fucked. Did 29 maps in a row and saved Mazu for today. There's even a rare low-gravity map I greatly enjoyed.

Go play this, it's great, and RPS even did an article on it https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/qu...in-another-free-map-pack-celebrating-concrete

Wow! Very cool maps. The Cut is especially eerie