Quake Wars is a game that I have been looking forward to for awhile. Probably cause I enjoyed Quake 4 despite its small flaw of slow down. Is the id property something to get excited over again?






Trailer


Platform(s): PC/Mac, Xbox 360 (Reviewed), Playstation 3
Developer: Splash/id Software/Aspyr/Nerve Software/Underground Development
Publisher: Activision
Players: 1-16(?) online
Price: $59.99


Plot: The Strogg have invaded Earth, be either the Strogg or the GDF (Global Defense Force) and stop the opposing team or kill them with five different classes and team objectives.


My Review: The game opens with an awesome cinematic trailer that gets you in the mood to shoot some Strogg, or take over Earth. The video creates such a feeling of an immense story and experience but then it goes undelivered. There is no redemption to be had. Why, oh why?!

There is a reason why I picked that trailer to show off. Just the sheer ludacrisness of it all. They pump the game up so much and hope to grab some of the GTA4 fans with the word "sandbox" but it is a bit misleading. I mean I suppose it is a box and there is sand there and theoretically you can go anywhere inside and do just about anything you want, but what multiplayer game can't do that? That is essentially what this is.




That's right, through and through, this is a multiplayer game. And one of the biggest follies this title has, they don't tell you that you can play CO-OP. Seriously, what the monkey? Co-op mode alone will sell you a good number of copies, why hide it? Unless they didn't hide it and I am just oblivious to the fact. The problem with finding out about co-op is that you can't just click "Campaign" from the main menu. You have to select "XBox Live" and then in the Lobby switch the game type to "Campaign." I didn't try it out but it appears you can even play the campaign with players on both sides as if it is a multiplayer game further stressing the point of "multiplayer game."

Nobody should try to fool themselves into thinking this will have any sort of single player experience. There is nothing here that connotates it besides the opening trailer. If you beat one of the 12 levels, you are taken to a "stats" screen that shows who the best people were and then moves to the selection menu after the timer counts down. You can play one of the four sections (which have three levels to them) in any order. After you beat it you would think there would be an end video or something but there isn't. It just ends like a regular multiplayer match. It's like getting an Asian Massage without a happy ending.




I honestly felt like I wasted my time playing "campaign." For the most part the computer AI are decent enough for support but when you need a medic things can just get stupid. My time was doubly wasted when I played through the campaign a second time as the Strogg. Not that there is anything wrong with that side, but I just prefer humans. If you beat it once there is no advantage to beating it again unless it is on a different difficulty.

And if you think it is an achievement whorin' game, think again. By beating the game I got a 7 achievements out of 50 for a total of 155 points. And this is one of those games where you have to beat it on each difficulty to receive the separate awards. The rest of the awards get downright stupid. Take the "Commando: Expert" achievement. "Achieve Rank 3 10 Times as a Soldier/Aggressor" and there are two others with ranks 2 and 1. You get more points for getting a lower rank. Unless I am reading/understanding it wrong, why would you spend so much time trying to suck enough to get third place ten times? And these are for all the classes. There are also a bunch of other achievements that just just beg you to spend too much time on this game.




Speaking of classes, what were they thinking when designing them? Maybe it is from playing too much Team Fortress 2[/url] but they all look alike. The only way to differentiate between classes is to look for icons on peoples head (there is one Strogg character that has wings, but I am not 100% sure which class he is). I guess I'm spoiled with TF2's richness and expected some diversity here. Each class can only hold certain weapons and I feel this seemed to be lacking as well. If a certain class can only choose between one gun, why not make it a unique gun instead of a standard assault rifle? Regardless there is a Soldier for action (with an uber-killing gun), a Medic for healing, an Engineer to build/fix stuff, and a Field Ops/Covert Ops guys for ummmm, stuff. These last two classes seemed to blend together. I always got them confused but one was used for stealth/radar/recon stuff and the other for stealth/air strike/artillery attacks. They are the same on the Strogg side but the latter two seem to be still similar.

Regardless all the classes serve a purpose and without some of each one, you could fail big time, well except for the Field/Covert Ops guys. Besides hacking objectives that required them to be used, they felt pointless.

Speaking of objectives, that's what this game is based on. It is all about going to point Triangle and looking at an object while you hold the X button. That's really it. On some maps you are required to stop anyone from pressing X button on objects. There are even times when you can press X button after they set up their X button to stop their X button from doing its Xness. But you could just run around and shoot everyone and let the computer/others worry about it. Hey, it worked for me.




Yes, bots can accomplish objectives and sometimes do it without you knowing which seems odd. It almost creates a feeling that your playing of the game is pointless. If they are going to beat the game for you then why bother playing? I did have the computer finish a level for me on a few occasions. It was unintentional but did happen. On occasion, I did make them do stuff intentionally though. You can tell them to do stuff if you don't want to switch classes to gain stars for a certain class.

I don't know how to mention stars in this review. If you play enough, kill or use your "tools" in certain ways you get "upgrades" that do not much? I think they might make you do specialty stuff faster but I couldn't tell any difference. And there was times when I was walking down a road and got an upgrade. How? No clue. Maybe the computer did something for me cause they are nice?

The computer AI is courteous and if they are ever driving a vehicle near you, they will drive up to you, honk their horn, and proceed to ask if you want a ride. At that point, if you choose to accept it you will most likely kick them out of the vehicle.




Maybe it is more like a sandbox then I thought with being able to "steal" vehicles from your own team. Some of the vehicles you might not want since they are a pain to drive. ATV's/Jet Packs are quick uses to jump to control points. Other vehilces I didn't spend much time in like the APC/Hogger or Tank/wierd hover thing. Well I did try the wierd hover thing and it had horrible controls. These were only second to any flying vehicles in the game. The left trigger makes you fly/accerlate/move? There is no tutorial on it and I think you need the instructions and a license to fly them. After attempting to fly the copter/alien thing and spending my whole session in the air on its side, I never touched them again.

What else can I say about this game? I did play some multiplayer but it was interrupted by two important factors. 1) Not many people were online playing it. At most we had five on one team and then three on the other cause people jumped teams last minute. What sucks about playing online is you can't tell which player is talking unless you memorize names and voices. The last round we played was a 16 player match but there were only four humans playing and the rest bots. Not too bad with bots but that is single player all over again.

The other more impotant factor, 2) An idiot. Shocked, right? An idiot on XBL, no way! The sheer fact that there was an enemy tank driving right towards me and three others and we were all shooting at it and my bullet was the one to finish it off, I got some screaming douche in my ear. "Oh you big --deleted profanity--, you must have a poor life because you just stand around all day in a video game waiting to take other people's kills cause you are so sad and pathetic. You are such a --deleted content cause it is just stupid to repeat what he said--!" It was more or less him ranting about how horrible of a person/gamer I was for taking a kill of his. It went on for a few minutes until someone else had the decency to tell him to shut up. I was laughing at him for the meree fact that I was playing as the weak ole Medic and was doing fine in points with a well in the lead first place position without "stealing" his kill.




One last disappointing thing about this game is the weapons. I touched on it before with classes only using certain weapons but only certain sides can use certain weapons. This isn't too big of an issue but when the game series is known for guns like the Nail Gun which is only accessible by the Strogg, it seems wierd. It was like they were trying oh so very hard to fit Quake into a mold that at a certain point they said, "Screw it! The integrity of Quake is nothing to be concerned about." I want a Nail Gun as a human...man now I think I'm going to have to go buy Quake 4 on the cheap. At least they fixed the slow-downs in this game.


Conclusion: This is a definitely a multiplayer game a la Unreal Tournament (probably, I haven't played that so I wouldn't know). It wasn't too bad for what it was as long as you can find non-idiots to play with online. It doesn't have the ub3r-3st of gr4fx but it is done t his way so it can run smoothly online which it does oh so well.

So if you do decide to RENT or BUY CHEAPLY for multiplayer, don't you dare play it single player or your mom will look sadly upon you.


My Rating: 7.5 - Could be fun online, if you can find anyone.