I love Quake. It’s undeniably one of my favorite games of all time. I love it because it’s the textbook definition of a surreal FPS to me: You’re fighting marines, ogres, knights and Lovecraftian horrors with shotguns, nailguns, and a lightning gun through marine bases and castles. If you think about it for more than five seconds, you realize how dumb it all is, that it shouldn’t work.
Yet somehow, in spite of all the turmoil going on internally at id Software – this would be John Romero’s last game with the studio before jumping ship to form Ion Storm and making the abysmal Daikatana, something I previously wrote about – everything fell into place perfectly and Quake became an absolute classic. There are very few games that I think nail this formula, and Quake nails it in spades. (I wonder if there’s any other surreal/absurdist first-person shooters that fit this example. Rise of the Triad is another example I can think of, but I’d love to hear your suggestions!)
I’ve written about countless Quake mods and expansions over the years, I still play it every now and then, I check out the mods made for it, and so on. This time around, there’s a new big Quake mod that was getting a lot of attention at the start of 2026, and naturally I had to check it out. Turns out it’s worth the hype.
Quake Brutalist Jam III is a mod for Quake that’s inspired by Brutalist architecture introduced way back in the 1950s. Based on the existing Copper mod, this mod not only introduces a bunch of new textures for mappers to use, but a new rogue’s gallery of monsters and weapons to make it unique from vanilla Quake. Done as a map jam from October-November 2025 where members worked together to make maps for the mod using the aforementioned new weapons and enemies, the final collection was released in early January 2026.
The Jam is split between three sections: A section for new/inexperienced Quake mappers called “New Faces,” a set of remastered levels from the two previous Quake Brutalist Jams called “QBJ Resurfaced,” and the main set of levels made specifically for this collection.
The maps are made by veterans and newbies from the Quake mapping community, alongside Twitch streamer/boomer shooter enthusiast DraQu, and Robert Yang, famous for Radiator 2 (NSFW), a series of small games with severe homoerotic overtones. And that’s just the ones I recognize. The rest seem to be a cavalcade of various mappers from the community, all with their own style.
Gameplay is similar in nature to classic Quake: kill monsters, hit switches, find keys to open doors, get to the exit. The big changes involve the arsenal and the monsters. A wrench replaces the axe, your starter shotgun is replaced with a Stechkin ApS pistol with infinite ammo (and a reload sequence!), the super shotgun is now the KS-23 Flak which allows the shots to bounce between walls (this became my favorite as I always loved the Flak Cannon in Unreal Tournament for that same ricochet properties), the nailguns are now akimbo, the super nailgun is now a rebar crossbow, the rocket launcher now fires a volley of eight rockets for four shots (wasn’t a big fan of this because it reminded me of Daikatana’s Shotcycler and how wasteful of a weapon that was), and the lightning gun is replaced by the powerful Invoker, which is the BFG-9000 equivalent in that it will kill any enemy in a single hit in a 3×3 grid pattern. Works great when you have to deal with several Shamblers at once.
The bestiary for QBJIII hasn’t been drastically changed. The main Quake rogues gallery is still here, just reskinned and renamed, using the Copper mod’s rebalancing as a base. There’s a few new grunt types like pistol grunts, a rocket launcher grunt who’s basically a glass cannon, often seen alongside the Grenadiers (reskinned Ogres) and Plasma Trenchknights (reskinned Enforcers).
There’s also more horror monsters, like the annoying Amalgams that drop caltrops that do damage to the player if stepped on, as well as the swarmers and blisters, small enemies that often appear in groups that can overwhelm you. I swear a good chunk of my deaths were because I got swarmed by a bunch of swarmers only to be blown up by a blister not long after.
Even the powerups got a few new friends. Alongside the standard Quad Damage and Pentagram of Protection, there’s now a Vampirism powerup where kills give orbs that heal 5HP a piece; and my personal favorite, Berserk, where the player has powerful fists that can 1-2 shot even the biggest foes and take half the normal damage. Often times these four power ups would be grouped together in some maps, giving the ultimate power fantasy of destroying everything in a single shot and healing at the same time. It’s like the equivalent of ripping and tearing in modern Doom games but without the fancy finishing moves. It’s great.
While the mod is still quintessentially Quake in nature, I definitely saw inspirations from later games from the genre like Half-Life and Quake II, to areas that would seem right at home in Remedy’s Extended Universe like Control. One level, “Das Brut,” would’ve felt right at home during the days of WWII shooters like Medal of Honor or Return to Castle Wolfenstein.
And it’s not even just games. Of course there’s one map that’s has references to 420, 6-7 and other silly memes; another is a recreation of the Griffin house from Family Guy, one is even just an homage to Doom II’s Entryway. A good chunk of these maps would’ve felt right at home on a cheapo Geocities website or a PC Gamer demo disc from the late 90s, they get the aesthetics down pat.
Other things I noticed included a map that had art of furries and the therian symbol, a handful of maps that mentioning countering imprisonment, one with rainbow patterns everywhere, the works. One particular map references the late great Rebecca Heineman, a transgender pioneer of game development. In spite of Brutalist architecture often being associated with more totalitarian movements, this collection of maps is often queer as hell. It’s optimism in spite of its more pessimistic looks.
I have to highlight one of the big maps. Escape from KOE-37 by mapper Mazu, is so big and ambitious that it towers over the rest of them in the Main Gallery, with a 3 hour average playtime, a story with branching paths, and even items that expand on the map’s lore. It’s big, ambitious, and sometimes annoying to get through; but I was incredibly impressed at the scale and ambition of this map alone. If this map was expanded to a full game, paid or free, I’d totally get it. It’s that good.
I started with the QBJ Remastered section as I didn’t play the previous two Quake Brutalist Jams, and the map selection there was pretty nice. From there I switched over to the newbies section before hitting the main event, often playing the smaller, quicker maps before finishing off with the larger, more ambitious maps. The average finish time for these maps varied from something that could be finished in a few short minutes to just over an hour. I tend to play Quake with a frenetic, fast-paced approach, so often times I was under the average playtime. This strategy didn’t often work, as I would rush to certain areas, get overwhelmed, and die quickly.
Since it’s a map jam, the challenge of the levels can vary immensely. Some can be fairly generous and give the player a fair fight, which is fun. Others feel like they were not really fine-tuned enough, leaving me often running around with less than 25HP, no medkits, and not enough ammo to fight the 7-8 Shamblers in front of me, because I likely missed a secret or a path that would’ve given me the power to take these enemies out. Thankfully these moments were few and far between, most mappers were happy to give all the powerups, fulfilling any and all power fantasies you may have.
The biggest thing that I don’t like about this mod is the hub system. Popularized by the Arcane Dimensions mod for Quake, it gives the player the option to play whatever levels of their choosing. I’m not a fan of this, as it gives no sense of progression, just making it feel no different than me typing “map mapname” in the game’s console. I didn’t like it in Arcane Dimensions, I didn’t like when MachineGames did it for the Quake II remaster episode Call of the Machine, and I don’t like it here.
I get it, the original Quake gave the player the choice in which episodes to do. Plus putting 77 maps into distinct “episodes” would be tough to do, especially with the nature of a map jam being very spur of the moment. I just think it would’ve been a nice bonus to arrange these maps in a set order or theme to play through, rather than just a bunch of maps to choose from. It’s not a deal breaker, though.
Despite that, I thoroughly enjoyed playing through Quake Brutalist Jam III. It was really interesting to see how each mapper tackled the assignment, with some being similar to classic Quake maps, to outright slaughterfests, to taking inspiration from more modern action shooters like Doom Eternal. The varied nature made going through those 77 maps less of a chore, because while I was technically still gunning down the same grunts with the same weapons, the environments were different enough each time to not feel too boring.
Quake Brutalist Jam III is not just a culmination of 30 years of Quake mapping, I dare say it’s a culmination of 30 years of shooters as a whole. Through this mod alone we see references and inspirations from games that were contemporaneous with Quake, but the myriad of games that came after it. It’s a celebration of Quake and everything after it, and that’s pretty great. I love Quake and the myriad of mods for it, and this is definitely become a favorite of mine. I highly recommend playing this.
You can get Quake Brutalist Jam III here. Be warned it’s a big download for a Quake mod – 2.5GB for just the mod version! – and it took me a while to download even with my good internet. Compared to most other mods that require the original game and a source port, they also bundled a standalone version that uses the open-source LibreQuake for those who have no experience with installing Quake mods and just wanna jump in and play. Which you should do, by the way.
I don’t expect id/Bethesda/Microsoft to really celebrate Quake’s 30th anniversary beyond a simple celebration, so this map pack is a good enough substitute. But if they somehow do, all I ask is this: Please let MachineGames make a modern Quake. The expansion episodes for the Quake and Quake II remasters were pretty good, and their track record games-wise has been more hit than miss. I just think it’d be neat to have a single player Quake game again. Bonus if they somehow decide to merge all the Quake games into a weird slipgate traveling adventure like TimeSplitters or something.
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