Quake Champions: Doom Edition

Quake Champions: Doom Edition is a full-scale reimagining of the classic shooter. The mod is completely self-contained (it runs on the resources of the Freedoom project) and comes with its own launcher, allowing flexible addon configuration and gameplay customization.

The project is built on the Q-Zandronum port, which delivers excellent netcode and adds advanced movement mechanics — from classic bunny-hopping to strafe-jumping and rocket-jumping — bringing back that same insane arena-shooter speed and dynamics of the early 2000s.

Champion System and Classes

The mod's main feature is its 33 unique playable characters, drawn from Quake, Wolfenstein, Half-Life, Serious Sam, Duke Nukem, and other universes. They're divided into three weight classes, which determine hitbox size, maximum health/armor pool, and speed:

• Lightweight: Fragile but very fast heroes with specific survival and healing skills (for example, Caine with a slide and a syringe, or Nyx with invisibility).

• Medium weight: Balanced characters (the Ranger, Doom Slayer, Gordon Freeman). Recommended as the standard for playing through PvE campaigns.

• Heavyweight: True tanks with a huge health pool but a larger hitbox (the Terminator, Serious Sam). Playing as them in single-player makes the game noticeably easier.

Each champion has a vivid set of abilities. For example, Blazkowicz can temporarily dual-wield powerful lasers, while Duke Nukem can freeze enemies. The abilities themselves automatically adapt to the game format — for instance, in PvE they're more powerful than in PvP, but have a long cooldown that's reduced by collecting special hourglasses.

Variety of Game Modes

QC:DE offers a colossal amount of content for both single-player and online battles. The mod includes an official pack of 50 maps for multiplayer matches, most of which are remakes of iconic arenas from Quake III and Unreal Tournament.

• PvP: All the classic modes are supported (Deathmatch, team battles, duels, capture the flag), along with unique additions like Elder's Soul (a Terminator-style mode) and year-round tournaments with live commentators. For fans of solo PvP, there's the QC:DE Arena campaign with Quake III-style bots.

• PvE: The mod is perfectly balanced for co-op playthroughs of any megawads. An Invasion mode is available, where players fend off waves of monsters. The gameplay is enhanced with popping damage numbers and beautiful 3D voxel item models.

Monsters and Customization

The mod's bestiary is incredibly flexible. You can activate monster sets from different parts of the Doom series (including Doom 2016) and Quake. The system allows you to mix them — for example, combining enemies from Quake 2 and Quake 4 lets you create a unified Strogg army. Thanks to an open API, the community has created more than 40 third-party packs (including monsters from Half-Life and Heretic).

The visual and audio customization deserves special mention. Weapons have numerous skins that change their appearance to match the style of old shooters. For perfect map completion (killing all enemies and finding secrets), the game rewards players with free loot boxes of varying rarity, containing useful bonuses, weapons, and permanent upgrades for the current run. All of this is accompanied by a teeth-rattling original metal soundtrack by Markie Music.