Considering how powerful many of this game's foes are, it's no wonder you have plenty of equally powerful toys to take them down.
Weapons
- The Railgun is a futuristic, scopeless Sniper Rifle. It has a base damage of 150 in the original game, 125 in the remastered version, and 100 in Deathmatch. In all three cases, enough to kill most enemies, including unarmored, respawned players in MP, in one shot. The Railgun also has a ridiculously high ammo limit of 50 slugs without any upgrades (and it benefits from the Bandolier, unlike explosive weapons of similar tier), works as a substitute to the Super Shotgun at any range, is perfectly accurate and the slugs punch through as many enemies as there are in its path, dealing the same damage to every single one of them. Its dominating capabilities are very comparable to the Rocket Launcher from the previous game, trading Splash Damage with hitscan projectiles.
- The BFG10K is a cousin to Doom's BFG9000; fire it into a room full of enemies, be it in PvE or PvP, and watch as the giant green ball and its tracer lasers reduce practically everything in that room to chunky piles of gore. Its extreme lethality is enough to make whole hordes of enemies and even bosses a joke, allowing you to conserve on using the game's several damage multiplier power-ups (though nothing's stopping you from using the BFG with one and watching as it slices through everything like a red-hot knife through butter). It's telling of the difficulty of Ground Zero that you're given the weapon as a secret in the second level of the second unit. The late appearance of the Power Shield (mentioned below) frees the cells to be used for the weapon, and the presence of the Medic Commander justifies completely its use.
- Just to drive home about how powerful the weapon is, Call of the Machine introduces the BFG as the first weapon of the first level of Operation: Corpse Run. Just picking up the weapon summons nearly 40 Machinegun Guards. A single, well-placed shot clears the room. And you get to keep the weapon for the rest of the mission, plus you don't have to worry about saving cells for the Power Shield since said item is absent across the mission. Having to pick this weapon early and in a mandatory way is part of the reason why the Secret Level "The Casali Effect" is So. Damn. Hard.
- The Reckoning introduces the Trap, a powerful item that makes Health Cubes out of a lot of enemies. Tempering its power, however, is the fact that said trap a) doesn't work on heavier enemies (such as Gladiators, Tanks and Bosses) and that b) the user themself can be turned into a health cube. Used correctly and on the right enemies such as Gunners and Berserkers, though, you can get beefy health packs for free, the health from these packs overstacks without the degeneration of Megahealth, and unlike Quad and Double Damage, it counts as a weapon rather than an item, so you can carry plenty of them in any difficulty level.
- With the 2023 remaster adjusting power screens/shields to take additional damage from energy weapons, the Plasma Beam from Ground Zero has emerged as the most potent weapon against shielded enemies. Whereas the other energy weapons (Blaster, Hyperblaster, Ion Ripper and Phalanx Particle Cannon) are projectile-based, the Plasma Beam is a hitscan tracking weapon à la the Thunderbolt; guaranteed, pinpoint-accurate damage with zero travel time so long as you keep your cross-hairs on an enemy. Being a non-projectile attack means that enemies also cannot sidestep or duck beneath any incoming fire, further enhancing its potential damage output. Couple it with a Double or Quad Damage and those pesky Brains, Daedali and Gunner Commanders can kiss their shields goodbye.
- The sole exception is the BFG10K; the tracer lasers fired by the BFG ball allow it to damage targets that are simply within close proximity to it, making accuracy largely a non-issue against shielded foes. The obvious drawback is that the weapon’s massive cell ammo expenditure per shot makes it extremely wasteful to use against anything besides large groups or particularly durable foes; Medic Commanders are a prime target for this gun.
Items
- Some of the timed powerups have the very obvious Achilles' Heel of their limited duration and how many of a particular class can a player carry with themnote , however, they can stack, and some of them complement each other quite nicely. To boot:
- Quad Damage, even more so than in the first game, as this game has an inventory system, meaning you can save it up for a rainy day. It complements nicely with most powerups, among them Invulnerability, The Reckoning's Dualfire Damage and Ground Zero's Double Damage.
- Ground Zero introduced the Double Damage, first found as a secret in the very first room of the very first level. Doesn't sound much impressive, until you figure out that it's still a power amplifier, and its effect stacks with the Quad Damage for an obscene damage multiplier of eight times. It's telling of the difficulty of Ground Zero that the Final Boss acquires immunity to both damage multipliers.
- The Reckoning has Dualfire Damage, a power-up that makes every weapon fire twice as fast. This also stacks with Quad Damage and effectively gives you octuple damage when using both, if not as ammo-efficient as Ground Zero's Double Damage.
- Since it features the item pools from both expansion packs, the 2023 remaster's Call of the Machine makes it possible to have Quad, Double and Dualfire Damage all active at the same time, allowing you to go an awe-inspiring (close approximation to a) Sexdecuple Damage rampage! Case in point: Operation: Corpse Run, should you keep the Dualfire Damage from "Give Me Back My Moon". The next level, "Strogg Jammers" has a Double Damage in the first Makron area and a Quad Damage in the Sons of Makron area.
- The Power Shield, a piece of equipment that adds another protection layer on top of your armor, even more so when playing Deathmatch. It has a tradeoff that it uses cells as power, so the Hyperblaster, the BFG10K, The Reckoning's Ion Ripper and Ground Zero's Plasma Beam can't be used as freely, but as long as the power cells are kept stocked, the user is very difficult to kill unless their opponent is a crack shot and happens to have a Railgun and Quad Damage handy. If they have an armor vest on top of that, then the opponent is in for a long slog. It's of little surprise that the Power Shield appears quite late in The Reckoning and becomes an 11th-Hour Superpower in Ground Zero.
- In Ground Zero's Deathmatch mode, the A-M Bomb becomes a portable bomb that takes a lot of time to respawn and it's located in EXTREMELY dangerous areas (such as deadends or Death Traps) for a reason. It must be deployed manually, but once done, a countdown takes place, after which everyone must clear the area, lest the wall explosion take all of the present players in its surrounding area. The bomb is susceptible to trapsnote and weapon fire, but even as a Suicide Attack its carrier can rack a notable amount of frags, provided there are more than two players on the server. Knowing where the bomb is located increases the chance of finding it and deploying it, reducing Ground Zero Deathmatches (unless server admins activate the required setting) to races about who gets the bomb first.
- The 2023 remastered version of the game has Threewave CTF as an integrated gamemode, much like its predecessor did. Sounds good, right? Well, there are two maps ("Q2KCTF1: Capture Reckoning" and "Q2KCTF2: Nexus CTF") which show the pure obscenity that results from combining the item pools of the base game and the two mission packs with the TECH power-ups from TWCTF. From combining the Quad and Double Damage with the Power Amplifier for a literal Sexdecuple Damage rampage, to activating all sphere varieties (Hunter/Vengeance/Defence) alongside AutoDoc to become a Nigh-Invulnerable juggernaut.
