Nothing feels more satisfying than to come home after a long day at work, kick back on your comfortable gaming chair and spill your enemies guts all across the arena in Quake Champions. There’s just something so endearing about that because in a way, it’s a nice therapy to just let go of all your daily stresses and unload an entire magazine into the opponent. Quake Champions is just the right amount of pace, the right amount of guts, and the perfect amount of thrill because that’s exactly what you’ll feel while playing. If you’re a fan of Quake or just FPS games in general, then we highly recommend hopping on the closed beta before May 21st. With an introduction to new champions as well as familiar faces, Quake Champions is a blazing fast action packed title that is heart pumping and an absolute thrill to play.

If blowing your opponent’s head off wasn’t rewarding enough then Quake Champions provides more in the area of loot crates that you can use to upgrade your champions appearance, and much more. There’s a lot more variety this time around which allows for a more versatile approach to playing Quake, and because of this variety it adds an extra layer of replay value that keeps you hooked for hours. We like the loot crate system because it reminds of Hearthstone’s card pack or similarly, Overwatch’s loot crate bonuses. Expect there to be a lot grinding to rank up but also a lot of salt along the way because, let’s be real, Quake has never been a game that’s about forgiving. Enemies will spawn out of the blue and hunt you down to get that final kill in Team Deathmatch, or in the more aggressive free-for-all (Deathmatch) where you’re a one man (or girl) machine doing whatever it takes to take the top spot. Quake Champions uses in game currency called Favor that you can use to rent champions, along with the latest game mode addition called Sacrifice Mode where players must obtain the soul as it spawns, return back to the obelisk and defend it to score big points. With so much in this closed beta package, we’re honestly so stoked to see what the final version will turn out like once it all releases.

So this is of course the reason why we love playing Quake Champions, because the gameplay is competitive, the action is intense, and there’s never a guarantee of your survival no matter how adept of a player you are. Some first person shooters almost give off this vibe of being too forgiving at times, allowing players to find easy solutions instead of really providing a gripping challenge. This isn’t the case in Quake Champions as kills don’t come very easily, and you literally have to work for them since everyone is moving at such an incredibly rapid pace. Each champion comes with their own special perk which allows them to approach the match in various ways. One example is Scalebearer, the Galactic Warlord who possesses unimaginable strength in battle and can crush an enemy with his special dash tackle attack. If you get in his way, all that’s left after is a pile of guts and blood dispersed all across the floor. Other champions like Nyx can escape very strenuous situations, with Nyx being able to use Ghostwalk to teleport away from the opponent which allows for a clean getaway.

Use the daily challenges to save up Favor and make use of the Shards you collect in order to create better weapon parts too. Quake Champions takes all of the perks from the more popular titles at the moment, and throws them all into one neat package for fans to enjoy. While the action is wild and frantic we did happen to run into some hiccups along the way, one of which was running into walls and being stuck in them. This of course is a beta so bugs of this nature are to be expected, and to be quite honest it didn’t really take the fun out of playing. The game is already crazy enough that most of the time your main focus is just trying to race to grab the best weapon so you can unleash maximum damage. There weren’t too many options in weapons during the beta but the ones that were available were fantastic to use, especially the notorious Rocket Launcher to get those epic kills.

Visually Quake Champions, even at the highest quality still seemed to suffer in the texturing area. The level textures looked a bit flat at times, with some clipping happening if you got too close to the wall. We expect these issues to be ironed out perhaps in the next beta that Bethesda releases, or perhaps when full release approaches so again it wasn’t a game changing matter. One other perk that we found enticing was the global chat, since you could communicate with just about anyone across the world and that felt great because it really made the community feel larger. At the moment there are only three arenas to play in, Blood Covenant, Ruins of Sarnath and Burial Chamber. We played quite frequently on Ruins of Sarnath which had a pretty solid layout for spawn points, and some places to hide to catch unsuspecting players off guard. Burial Chamber’s overall level design was just incredible to look at and it played such a good role for faster champions because, at the Bridge of Retribution area if you play a much slower champion there’s nowhere to hide so it’s easy to snipe them down. It becomes a strategy of which champion to use for what stage because each arena comes with their perks, and it could potentially change the tide of the game so quickly.

With a plethora of game modes to choose from along with daily challenges to keep you coming back for more, Quake Champions is shaping up to be a very promising title from the team at Bethesda Softworks. We only hope that more content be added in along with the bug fixes to help keep this game healthy in the long run. We really love when companies allow the community to take part in shaping the game into what it should be, so we’d like to say a huge thanks to Bethesda Softworks and iD Software for allowing us to participate in this. It was a total blast to run a muck in Team Deathmatch and totally destroy the opposition. Since this is just our impression of the current build, we don’t want to go too far into details since a lot can potentially change from now until the next patch update. For now, new players who do come into the game will receive a nice big chunk of Favor (10,000 to be exact) which you can use to grab some champions and take to the arena for some intense in-your-face action!

Since this isn’t the full version we don’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves and say things that may not potentially exist in later versions. For now, we think that Quake Champions is certainly headed in the right direction and if the development team continue to take the critique from the community, this game could potentially rise above the current FPS titles on the market. Quake Champions has what it takes to be at the top but it’s going to require a lot of adjustments over time to ensure that it stays at the top, just like it did back in good old days. Did you get a chance to hop into the closed beta? If so let us know your thoughts in the comments section below, and of course voice your opinions at the official Quake Champions forums.

As always, for all things sweet, with news straight from Japan, be sure to keep it locked here on Honey’s Anime.