Art direction is shit (arguable, btw)
Still more than can be said of Q2 which barely had any.
This seems to be the general problem people have with Q2. Apparently, the game fails at proper emotional engagement, so it must be shit!
Umm, no. It fails at proper gameplay and is awfully repetitive, therefore boring. Salvage the gameplay by either fixing individual enemies or throwing much more of them at once at player (also give the fucking armor plated cyborgs fucking armor), salvage environments by providing something more than techcorridors full of crates and you will have salvaged the game.
And you don't fucking use the word "at least" with Daikatana, ever. That game was an irredeemable piece of shit, and the so called "art direction" was actually worse than that of Q2. The whole game felt like a second rate Q2 total conversion made by a bunch of hack modders.
It seems I will need to dig up and try to play Dajkaszana CD I got from a magazine all the way through, after all.
The warehouses in Quake 2 looked a million times better than any of the shit in Daikatana.
Crates intensify.
Bland and useless weapons? You could probably finish the whole game just with the super shotgun if you had enough bullets. How the fuck is that useless?
So everything else was useless? Being able to ignore 90% of game's arsenal usually isn't a good thing.
Although TBH I wouldn't consider most of Q2 arsenal bad, although it was pretty bland and shitty enemies prevented any interesting gameplay arising from individual weapons' quirks.
You had regular shotgun to take out grunts on long distance (same use as regular shotgun in Quake. Actually, you could take out anything with the single barrel shotgun in Quake, which made it a bit too useful).
Actually, weapons in Quake 1 sucked. Ok, apart from RL and Thunderbolt.
Chain Gun to clear out room full of enemies.
Actually it sucks at that. Partially because of very poor fire control, but mostly because you never have rooms full of enemies in Q2.
It's great at mincing tanks and other boss-grade enemies before they even get to shoot at you which it shouldn't be because they look like they have tons of armor which should make low shot damage but obscene rate of fire weapons ineffective against them.
Except, you know, armor as such doesn't exist in Quake 2. At least for numerous
armor plated cyborgs forming 99% of your opposition. It does exist for the player and is quite involved systemically too so there isn't even an excuse of particular mechanics not being implemented in game. It is implemented, just not used where it's needed the most (because even with bare ass player needs to sit still a long while getting shot at to die).
(Of course tanks could be perfectly well taken out with basic blaster with no risk to the player apart from guarantee of particularly nasty case of carpal tunnel syndrome, but I digress).
Rocket launcher was just about as powerful as that of Quake, just not as fun to use. Took as many rockets to take down a Tank as it did to take down a Shambler in Quake 1.
Shamblers in Q1 were specifically resistant to explosives, IIRC, so that's not a good start.
Q2 RL was exactly as powerful as SSG, which wasn't very good given that vast majority of enemies didn't go down even when shot point blank with the mighty SSG. Additionally you didn't really have much opportunity to utilize splash damage on clustered foes so in the end Rocket Launcher boiled down to a SSG you could miss with at medium to long range and damage yourself with up close. And it produced awfully wimpy looking explosions.
And then came RG that was basically a more powerful hitscan RL you could use at any range, completely superseding whatever utility RL had left. There were more opportunities to use its overpenetration than RL's splash too.
And the Rail Gun which is just about one of the best weapons ever made in an FPS, but i'm sure you think it was useless merely because you have no skill with it.
Hardly the best, because it was rather boring. It was very useful though, arguably more than SSG, as it worked at all ranges, dealt even more damage and was incredibly economic as far as ammo was concerned.
It was really pathetic in a way.
A running joke in Q2.
i can and i will, look: at least daikatana had levels that were not warehouses with red-brownish coloured lighting.
It was puke colored most of the time. A bit like DX:HR's piss filter but more bile-like and far more nauseating.
the machine gun and shotgun are both weak as shit and, worst of all, unsatisfying to shoot.
Actually, I liked MG. You had to counter the recoil and was better off firing in short bursts. Pretty versatile too - great against shit tier enemies and still potent against anything from mid-tier, without SSG's range limitation. Piss poor accuracy, though.
the grenade launcher is basically a supershotgun that is a pain in the ass to aim
It's better than RL because you can bounce grenades around the corners for some extra cheese. Also a showoff weapon for taking out swarms of fliers (you had to score a direct hit for it to work).
Extracting any form of fun from Q2 pretty much requires self-imposed challenges, you see.
P.S. I'm not arguing that Dajkaszana is any good or even better than Q2, but being entertainingly bad is also a quality of sort - one than a merely mediocre but bland game doesn't have.