Hexen 2

by ACTIVISION

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B0000296Z4
• Media: CD-ROM
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #34,056 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

GameSpot Review

The first of the highly scrutinized "Quake killers" to hit the shelves, Hexen II delivers a mighty blow, but ultimately fails to knock the king off his throne. Make no mistake: Hexen II is a game with many strengths - its design is superior to the original Hexen, it has a significant payoff for single players winding through its twisted corridors, and visually it is without equal in the action genre. But the game's attempt to break from the standard first-person shooter mold has some nasty side effects, and the end result is a confusing and often frustratingly difficult experience.

You choose your character from one of four character classes - assassin, necromancer, crusader and paladin - and set out on a quest to destroy the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Following their demise, you must combat the third Serpent Rider, Eidolon (his two siblings having been vanquished in Heretic and Hexen). There's a thread of a story tying the whole premise together, but it really just serves as a means of dropping you into the lush, graphically rich environments. Which isn't necessarily a criticism - the environments are the best thing about Hexen II, especially when playing the GL version. You'll explore five beautifully texture-mapped realms - a medieval village, a Meso-American temple, an Egyptian tomb, a Greco-Roman palace, and a gloomy cathedral. The visual detail - with tiled mosaics at the bottoms of pools and hieroglyphics on the walls of tombs - is like nothing ever seen in the action genre. In fact, it is not an overstatement to say that Hexen II is one of the most beautiful games ever made.

But while the artistic design is truly spectacular, the level design is often confusing. Like Hexen, Hexen II is divided into "hubs," groups of interconnected levels that are intended to break up the monotonous "kill monsters, find key, open door, kill some more" design of typical first-person shooters. You must traverse back and forth through the various levels in each of the game's five hubs, finding objects and solving puzzles to gain entrance to new areas. This concept is sound, and indeed generally does succeed in giving you the feeling that you are in an environment, rather than a loosely connected series of passageways. But as you descend further and further into the game, a number of frustrating problems arise.

For one, the secret areas that are common to the genre are not simply rewards for the stalwart wall-hitter; in Hexen II you must find the majority of them in order to proceed. This leads to much backtracking though levels, searching every nook and cranny for some overlooked chink in the wall that may lead to a new area, bashing every bookcase in hopes of finding some means of continuing. The backtracking can be especially frustrating once you've killed all of the monsters in the available areas.

The second problem is that the puzzles in Hexen II are of the "push some buttons in the right order" variety. For example, at one point in the Roman hub, you must press four buttons - each embossed with an elemental symbol - in a particular order. The clues for solving these stumpers are sometimes vague (as in the case of the constellation puzzle in the Egyptian hub) and, in worst cases, nonexistent. Often the clues, such as notes on tables, are indistinguishable from decorative objects and the fear that you may have missed some important tidbit makes you feel the need to walk up to every piece of furniture in every room from every possible angle.

These types of design problems almost hobble the game, but Hexen II has enough payoff to make struggling through the difficult areas worth the hassle. At the end of each hub waits one of the four Horsemen, animated with astonishing detail; and Eidolon, the final boss, looks unbelievable. Go ahead and use a stone of summoning when fighting Death and watch as your demon and the Winged Reaper fight it out against a blood-red sky. It's really amazing.

As for the more common monsters you'll encounter, there are some nice innovations, despite the lack of variety (there are only eleven basic types). Monsters will duck to avoid your attacks, and there are area-specific monsters to match the various environments, such as the Roman medusa and the Egyptian mummy. The weapons also sacrifice quantity for quality - the character-specific art and effects are nice, but there are only four weapons per class. And the classes themselves have some subtle differences - attack ability, special powers - but not enough to make a significant change to the experience.

Of course, most of the aforementioned problems dissipate when playing multiplayer, and it proves a much better game against human opponents; even the differences between character classes are more interesting when fighting one another. But Hexen II's deathmatches aren't as purely visceral as Quake's - the assortment of power-ups and magical items often results in simply unloading all of your stuff on an opponent, and it becomes a case of "he who has the most toys wins."

A lot of work went into Hexen II, and it shows. But that doesn't stop the feeling that the game was rushed in the latter days of completion. It crashes as a result of simple commands (such as accidentally "quickloading" when you haven't "quicksaved"), level load times are unbearable (we're talking sometimes over a minute), and each of the hubs concludes with the slow-scrolling text that has seemed like a sick joke since Doom II.

In the end, Hexen II has a lot of rewards, but the curious should be warned: It takes a great deal of perseverance to find them.--Ron Dulin
--Copyright ©1998 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of GameSpot is prohibited.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a classic, April 9, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Hexen 2 (CD-ROM)

If you like action games like Quake, Blood, and Half Life, then Hexen 2 is a must. I played the first set of games called Heretic and Hexen. Hexen two is just fantastic though, it crosses several interesting worlds ranging from egypt to medieval. Great game.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hexen II, February 20, 2002

By 

Knewace (The other side) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hexen 2 (CD-ROM)

Hexen II is an first person shooter and the third sequel in the heretic hexen serries. The story three serpant riders were creating havok in the strange medieval world of Thyrion. The first was killed in the game heretic, second in its sequel hexen beyond heretic, here you take over the last of them. Hexen2's gameplay and length is good, There are more than thirty levels in five large hub layouts. The hubs are different from each other, they vary from a medieval hub, meso american hub, roman hub and finally the serpant rider hub. You need to do a lot of backtracking to complete a hub but though the hubs are vast they are not confusing like the first hexen. The level design is good and there are very nice puzzles to be solved but some of them are quite hard, i did not understand the steps puzzle in the egyptian hub to get the first canopic jar and i used the no clip cheat to get it. There are four different charecter for the player to choose from. I played as pladdin, others are crusader, necromancer and assasin and each of them have four different weapons. This is a bad idea, one charecter with all sixteen weapons would have been a better idea. Just four weapons is not enough and sometimes two or more weapons use the same mana (ammo) and also the weapons should have been a little more powerfull than they are. Players get experiance points and with it you can take more damage, cause more damage ect but unfortunatly you cannot decide what you want like jedi knight. There are also lots of inventory items some of them are bad and some very good, one item would bring you back to life if you were killed and another would make the weapons little more powerfull.

Hexen2 is build on the quake engine, i played glhexen2 which is the opengl version of hexen2, it runs very smmoothly, saves and load data verg quickly. If your video card is not 3dfx voodoo but supports full opengl it will still give an error message when you run glhexen, it does not mean you cannout run it, read the manual it is written what you should do. Also if your version is not 1.11 install the patch as the latest version runs very well. The graphics and sound are great and there are many breakable textures which was a lot of fun, but today they are very much dated and look cartoony. The bad things are hexen2 is quite hard as the weapons are not very powefull, the damages the villans cause are a bit too much, the five boss levels were very hard to complete. But still hexen2 is a great sequel in the heretic hexen serries and much better than the first hexen.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars They do it again, January 10, 2003

By 

Mark Jackson "markis97" (Albany, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Hexen 2 (CD-ROM)

The second installment in the Hexen series is definitely well done. Like the first one you are allowed to choose from different characters to play with. Allowing a different twist to the game with each one you play.

Built using the Quake engine it actually takes graphics a step further. We've come a long way since Heretic, and it's been quite a fun path. The puzzles aren't overly difficult or thought provoking, but the main point of this game is action anyway.