End of an Era 3: The Bestiary

 I was going to do a post on the Reckoning, but I can't really talk about those monsters without talking about the base monsters, so here we go:

The Guards: Returning from Doom, the "light" (blaster-pistol), shotgun, and machine gun former humans. All have the same HP, putting them roughly in line w/ the pistol and shotty zombies from Doom, with no HP boost for the chaingunner. That goes to...

The Enforcer: Not much more dangerous than the guards, but with triple the health, so they can at least soak a couple shots. Sometimes works gun turrets, in a first for id.

Gunner: The Ogre (Q1) upgrade, with grenades and a machine gun. It's a good filler setup. Enough health to take two super shotty blasts. Most common enemy in the game. 

Berserker: A bit tougher, but limited to melee. Gained a jump attack in the remaster. Mostly just a bullet sponge that gets in your face to disrupt combat.

Iron Maiden: Rounds out the generic mid-tier trio. You'd think a rocket launcher would be an upgrade to grenades, but they're actually pretty meh. One shot at a time, and real slow. Easy to dodge and blast.

Barracuda: The rotfish from Quake 1 buffed up a bit. Never really cared for the art design here, and they generally feel like filler.

Mutant: It's just the Fiend from Quake. Same stats and everything. Together, they form a much more dangerous counterpart to the Pinky with their jump attack. They show up like twice?

Flyer: Squish together Doom's Lost Soul and Quake's Scrag, and you get a very annoying flyer. They cut their health a bit, and it works really well. 

Parasite: My least favorite on the list. It's a dog that shoots a giant tongue out of its back. The Remaster nerfs them to the point of near irrelevance, so I guess they also found them annoying. 

Brains: In the original, this is melee-bullet-sponge #2. The Remaster upgrades them to the "Beta Brains" from the Reckoning by adding a laser attack and upping the tentacle range. Like the Mutants, they're pretty rare. Probably would've been better off combining a couple of these super rare guys into one.

Medic: Moderately durable, crappy gun, but they can revive dead guys. Arch-vile could eat them for lunch. Would've liked to see a few more, there's about a dozen in the whole game.

Icarus: The primary flying enemy. Mid-tier HP, low damage, not very agile. The filler of the skies.

Technician: I think these had their names switched with the Brains, since this is a floating head in a jar. The most interesting of the flyers, with both ranged and melee attacks. They're no Cacos, but the closest we get.

Gladiator: The biggest thing id feels comfortable just throwing at you willy nilly. That rail gun hurts, and is harder to dodge than most other projectiles. You can try to melee dance them, with worse results in the Remaster. Good candidate for hiding around a corner and grenading.

Tank: Not quite a boss, but they get a rocket launcher, a machine gun, and a laser, as well as decent HP. Cool death animation.

Tank Commander: Like the Baron of Hell, straddling the boss/non-boss line. Only about a dozen in the whole game. Basically just a beefier tank.

Super Tank: It's got treads, more health, and less offense than a Tank Commander. Kind of a let down, like the Spidermastermind to the Cyberdemon.

Hornet: A bit more of a proper boss. Tankier, and with the ability to fly to make cover harder to use. 

Jorg/Makron: The two stage final boss. This is the first time a BFG gets used against a player in any of id's games. And he has a railgun for a head!

In the end, all three bosses are victims of the inventory system. As long as you can keep a quad damage on hand, the chaingun can burn through them in about 30 seconds, which is also how long the invulnerability lasts.

It's cool to see how many of the enemies are the final evolution of concepts that stretched back to the first Doom and, in some cases, appeared in Quake as well.