It's not often you see gameplay mods for quake 1. Usually gameplay mods are for games that have insanely good features in their ports that allow for gameplay mods to be made, such as decorate scripting in zdoom. Without features like decorate, it's impossible to make a very good gameplay mod. Yet the author(s) of EXQ managed to do so.
Execution (which I will call exq from now on) is a randomizer mod for Quake 1. Yes that's right, Quake finally has a randomizer mod. It's not the first technically, as the excellent mod Quake 1.5 had randomizer gameplay too, but it's the first one that is well balanced and doesn't require a monster sourceport like dark places. That means a lot for me, as I cannot even run opengl games anymore without breaking my system. And since my Randomizer mod that I made was made was so unbalanced that it could not be beaten on easy, it doesn't count.
Execution has 2 difficulty settings. On easy no enemies but dogs get replaced by enemies, which makes it useless. Hard makes every enemy get replaced by the hardest enemy it can possibly be replaced by in all instances, making it insanely hard (we're talking about hordes of mega enforcers in e1m1 here). That means medium is the only difficulty you should play in this, as it has the most fair replacers put in.
Throughout the game enemies will get replaced by new enemy types randomly. Some are common, some are not. Each Enemy can be replaced by at least 2 new enemies. Grunts get replaced by enforcers and fast moving grenade grunts, enforcers get replaced by mega enforcers from Zerstorer, Scrags get replaced by green scrags taken from Soul of Evil and super OP versions of them that shoot spike mines at you (!), Ogres get replaced by super OP cluster grenade shooting flaming ogres, Knights get replaced by very OP statue knights that require nails to kill and are totally impervious to shotguns, that makes this mod harder than normal quake by far. You end up saving up a lot more nail ammo due to it. Death Knights get replaced by this super OP death knight varient that shoots nails at you. So far that's all I have seen in the mod. I have not seen the new fiend variant, or the new shambler yet. Nor have I seen the cyberdemon that shows up.
The mod has a very quirky weapon system. The default shotgun is replaced by an infinite ammo super shotgun, and the nailgun wastes no ammo until you upgrade it. I don't know how to find such upgrades but I assume picking up weapon pickups MIGHT trigger the upgrades, as picking up the Riot Controller (Super Shotgun Replacement) might gave me an upgrade before. Once you get an upgrade for either one of these weapons it does more damage, but starts to waste ammo too. Other guns get upgrades as well. Many Guns are replaced with new ones in this mod. The supernailgun is gone and replaced with a plasma rifle that looks kind of like the thunderbolt. There ia a chaingun you can get when you pick up the nailgun that looks like the zerstorer one but fires less accurately and fires exploding rounds. The supershotgun can shoot explosive shells with an upgrade too. The rocket launcher has an upgrade to turn into a multi rocket launcher, the grenade launcher has a cluster grenade upgrade, and there is a super bad looking "FAT" Lightning gun ripoff that shoots what looks like a big ball of light. I think that is supposed to be a BFG as it's fireballs death frame looks like a bfg hit from doom. Besides that one gun the rest are fine. I like how you can upgrade guns.
The one flaw this mod has is difficulty. It's balanced well but it's balanced like Complex Doom for Doom. It's hard as hell. Even on medium you will take TONS of damage. It feels like complex doom done in quake. It's hard as hell and I had to use cheats to beat several maps because I could not handle the difficulty. If the easy skill would allow for enemy replacement, this mod would be better, but as it stands it needs to be improved a little in the balance department.
There are some bugs with this mod however. Gibbing enemies can sometimes prevent them from triggering death targets that must be triggered to progress, like the enforcer in that little room just beyond the gold key door in e2m1 that has a death target that opens the way to the silver key door. In that map, I accidentally blew him up and the death target didn't fire right. Also in IKSPQ5 the death targets for at least one enforcer didn't fire right in the room that requires a group of grunts to be killed to progress to the exit teleporter. That one however seems more like a map bug as it also happened in my Ill-fated randomizer mod too. That is a pretty serious bug and can leave levels broken bad. But besides that I could not find a bug with the mod at all. It's worth playing. Just make sure to use a fitzquake variant like MarkV or quakespasm to play this as winquake is not good enough, and dark places might run it but I can't test that now.
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