Re:Mobilize

very sick and cool and goated

One of the bests mods since it's release, with a lot of creative variety that has continued with the first jam and now the 1.2 update. Amniotic Resurgence was too easy to get stuck on, but the 1.2a update improved that a little, so make sure you get that before starting the map.

I played a lot of CTF online so, obviously, I love the hook.
The new 1.2 update add some great maps worth playing.

My favourite are

'The Cabin' for its story telling and setting. Reminds me of Army of Darkness

'Nascent Myopia' is unique and exploits the new movement-based mechanics to the fullest. It reminds me of Portal w/o the portal gun.

'Station of Minak' for the setting and visuals.

I was already a fan of the early versions of ReMobilize and ReCollections, but the five maps introduced by the 1.2 update truly blew up my mind! One of the best experiences you can have with Quake. I loved every map, especially those ones with a nod to Portal and Rubicon. Oh, and also those which are rich in storytelling. Please don't miss the oportunity to play these! Highly recommended!

Loved the new mechanics and every single map included.

Special mention to "An Excursion to Carcosa" for being such an oddball map, lacking in modern mapping flourishes, but making up in spades with environmental story telling and exploration. Also an overarching book recommendation. Well done!

The ropes and trampolines are a pretty good metaphor for this community: You guys just keep ascending to higher places. Excellent mod, fun maps, *chefs kiss*

Remobilize manages to turn a lot of things around and still keep the Quake vibe. To me it feels like a pinch of Tomb Raider, Indiana Johnes and Portal has been sprinkled over Quake. All the maps here are absolutely world class and I can't wait to see what else is coming based on Remobilize. I'd love to see it move further into adventure and discovery and less into trick jumping. But that's just my personal taste. Echoes of Repercussion was a bit hard for me personally in a lot of places and I pulled my hair out on some of the trampoline parts. But nevertheless, this map is absolutely great, just like all the others. Thank you very much.

Ay, what a great release. I know that EmeraldTiger explored these ideas before in Q3... I think they're a great fit for Q1 singleplayer so I'm glad they got brought over. Reminds me of the best old missionpacks that would introduce some new crazy weapon/mechanic for the base game.

---

Some comments on the three new mobility thingies first.

Trampoline and light hook can be a neat solution for "the door problem" in combat. You can let the player see where they're going, but then the player has to commit. A mapper can abuse this (and some did) e.g. by spawning a bunch of mobs in around the player when they land, but there were some other well-designed fun setups using this potential.

Trampoline:
- Feels great when it's working as intended. Kind of like being able to do the Q3 overbounce bug on demand.
- It's interesting to need to look down to find a route up!
- I'm not a fan of setups that require using arcane air control and precise landing spots... finding a route is more fun for me than retrying execution.

Light hook:
- Tons of fun to have meaningful grapple use in SP!
- Arena fights with lots of big grapple targets were especially good.
- Grapple targets that are small and/or appear for a brief time feel... janky. Several times it seemed like I could get my crosshair on them and click and nothing happens.

Climbing mesh:
- Generally works great, excellent ladder-movement "feel".
- A little finicky when climbing up to the top of a wall and needing to then jump over the edge to get on top.
- Having a wall mesh reach floor-level in a combat arena is bad news. Feels terrible to be running around fighting and then suddenly stuck in glue.

And in general: If player falls, don't make them run a huge route to get back to where they were! I mean obviously I can noclip if this gets too frustrating but yeah, it's not good.

---

I think my favorite maps were Ranger Dynamics, RE:1M8, Waterfront Citadel, and The Yawning Temple. Mostly just because of great integration of the new mechanics into good ol' Quake SP route and combat flow. Extra bonus to RE:1M8 for getting spicy with its remix nostalgia.

Also Swamps of Heretics... I loved the way it opens up. Some jumps-from-pillars felt odd enough that I'm not sure I was doing the expected thing? It all worked out in the end though.

Beneath the Frozen Moon and Peak Memory Usage are good solid entries too. Concrete Substratum and Urn I'd class as great-but-occasionally-frustrating, mostly by being occasionally confusing on where to go. Urn also had the problem of me falling down and having to run a marathon to get back into position.

Echoes of Repercussion has a great aesthetic but several of the puzzles' execution (and a couple instances of "where do I go now?") turned out to be not my cup of tea. They seemed like the retry-over-and-over style gameplay of some kinds of platformers and speedrunning; not what I was looking for.

An Excursion to Carcosa is ... quirky. Pretty neat! but not what I was in the mood for at the time I was working through the pack. Made a save there to come back later though. This was actually the first map I tried so it might be good to return to it now with more of a feel for the mechanics under my belt.

Good job y'all!

This was a real treat. Insanely fun new mechanics to play with that all enhance Quake's movement tech. There are still a lot unique and interesting ideas that can be done with these additions. My favorite thing is how every mechanic supports each in fantastic ways. Climbing up higher on wire mesh and jumping down on trampoline in an angle that allows you to hit your light hook properly. It is just perfect.

Maps itself in the pack are great homages to older maps with unique twitsts or completely new unique experiences. This is easily the most fun I've had with Quake in a while. There are few issues here and there like some maps being insanely dark or have a confusing progression, but even with some issues this is near perfection.

Hope we will see more Re:Mobilize maps in the near future.

Probably the most innovative Quake release in a while. The new movement techniques take a bit to get used to and they are certainly not without flaws, but in those cases where it all "clicks" together, zooming around with the light hook during combat or using a trampoline to escape a monster ambush feels amazing. The climbing surfaces are a bit of a double-edged sword to me. As a pure traversal tool or a part of jumping puzzles, they work just fine. The moment a map forces you into combat while hanging from a wall or ceiling is where it starts becoming a bit of an annoyance: your dodging options are quite limited while climbing, so when monsters show up around you, you're pretty much guaranteed to either take damage, lose a bunch of progress jumping off of the surface, or just straight up fall to your death.

Nonetheless, the concept behind this mod is a breath of fresh air and the implementation is probably about as good as it can be within the Q1engine limitations.

As far as individual maps go, my favorites were:

Swamps of Heretics by Heresy
I don't think much needs to be said about Heresy's mapping skills. He has made some of the most beautiful Quake maps ever and this one continues that tradition seamlessly. Combat is a bit more incidental than usual due to the fairly open layout of the map, but with some planning you can still get a couple nice Quad runs going (if you can find them). As I already mentioned above, not a huge fan of basically having to tank Scrag projectiles while climbing the stone pillars, but the rest of this map is so good that this one flaw is negligible in comparison.

The Yawning Temple by DragonsForLunch
This and nickster's map are probably the best examples of using Re:Mobilize's movement skills to their full potential without going overboard. Trampolines and light hook surfaces are cleverly used for progression, combat and finding secrets, sometimes all three in one. I was especially impressed by the repeated use of the same trampoline that had the player jump off from different heights and angles to reach new platforms. Great map!

Urn by nickster
Urn's lighting is the first thing that comes to mind when thinking back to my playthroughs of it. It's fantastically atmospheric and gloomy and, together with the great detailing, makes this an absolute visual treat. In terms of gameplay, I said it before when talking about DFL's Yawning Temple, but it bears repeating that this kind of map is what I would love to see more of in future Re:Mobilize releases: smart usage of the mod's new capabilities without losing focus on Quake's core gameplay. My only criticism is that Urn's ending felt a bit abrupt. A nice big fight to cap it off would have made an already great map even better.

A good map pack all in all and a mod with huge potential for the future.

This is hard to rate because it's both a set of new mechanics for maps... and some maps that use them.

It's always nice to have more mechanics for maps in Quake - and these are well implemented and solid tools indeed. (It's tempting to say that they're a little inspired by Doom Eternal... but grappling hooks have been Quake mod staples since about 1997, so at least one of them is very much a Quake thing first).
I especially like the fact that many of them are toggleable - allowing you to do metroid-ish maps where progression opens up as you enable new routes or tools.


I also played through a few of the maps, which I found a little variable.
I tend to play Quake community maps on skill 0 / easy because I'm not that good at traversal, amongst other things. Some of the maps here make traversal *more* difficult by introducing the new "movement verbs" that the tools here enable with additional precision requirements - requiring you to, say, bounce off a small trampoline pad to get to a platform on the other side. (Swamps of Heretics does this right at the start, with a tiny bounce pad surrounded by slime, and honestly I just couldn't be bothered after 10 or so goes at it.)
Some of the maps are pretty fun and run with the puzzles (and even add new things beyond those listed on the Re:Mobilize page...) - of the maps I tried, An Excursion to Carcosa was definitely my favourite (it works better, as Inky's notes note, if you've read The King in Yellow), as it's mostly fun to explore and has a lot of interesting "texture" to it as well, and a number of interesting puzzles and setpieces. (The insecty enemies were pretty annoying, though - and there's a jump off of a tree that has very slippy branches that I did not enjoy retrying many times).

That said, I worry about maps using Re:Mobilize being too subtle with their textures for the various effect surfaces - I missed a climbable wall in Carcosa because the vine texture is pretty subtle against some of the wall textures in general; and in general I really appreciated the very obvious textures that (say) Urn uses - neon-blue lightpads are hard to miss!

I think I'm going to give a slightly cautious 4/5 to this overall - not 5/5 because I do worry about the potential for making maps that restrict the player on precision more than they expand the player's options.

This is something new. You have to get used to mechanics. But when the tropes are learned then everything becomes total fun in a very unique way