Cult Classic Shooter/RPG Kingpin Is Getting A Remastering

Rating: 0
Author: Ted Hentschke

Ted Hentschke |

Jan 18, 2020

Fun Fact: I got Kingpin as a joke. My best friend and I used to trade buying each other terrible games on Steam, which is why we have collections full of shit like Bad Rats. I think I had just bought him Postal 3, and in a pinch, he fired back with Kingpin. I played it for a laugh, and was surprised to find that Kingpin is actually a deep and challenging RPG. It’s like Deus Ex a year before Deus Ex, except the plot makes sense. To be fair to my friend, Kingpin is made using the Quake II engine. Everything looks goofy on the Quake II engine.

I can’t take you seriously when your face looks like I stubbed my toe so bad the nail might fall off

With its new remastering, Kingpin: Reloaded shows us just how polished the Quake II engine can look. And the answer is… well not that polished. But hey, that’s part of the charm. It wouldn’t be Kingpin if two giant boulders didn’t scream profanity at each other. This comes as another addition to the new “I thought they were dead” 3D Realms lineup. They’re a studio doing their best to bring the Quake II engine back to its glory days. The recent Wrath: Aeon of Strife was great, so maybe all we need is one more hit before we cast off the shackles of AAA budgets and return to the promised land of polygons.

For you old folks wondering what’s new in Kingpin: Reloaded, there’s a whole host of stuff. Visual upgrades include 4k resolution, ultrawide support, and polished textures. More importantly, some new gameplay features to smooth out the brutal difficulty. There’s a new dialogue system, new quests, and a generalized rebalancing. None of this stuff really fundamentally changes Kingpin: Reloaded. It’s a remastering, not a remake.