	Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
	Developer: Nerve Publisher: Activision Release Date: Out Now Players: 1-16	Words By:
360 owners have been inundated since launch with a wealth of FPS and racing games, and it's hard to choose between them sometimes. With established franchises receiving luke-warm responses (Medal of Honor) and criticised for becoming stale, a new period of re-invention has dawned. But, as Elizabeth Taylor's cosmetic surgery shows, that change is not necessarily pretty. The first thing to ask, and it is a reasonable question: Where is the Quake in this game? Sure, it's right there in the title but that means absolutely nothing – if I called a turd ice-cream you still wouldn't eat it. The environments feel nothing like a Quake game; gone are the dark, techno steampunk corridors teeming with Strogg, only to be replaced by large expansive desert plains and dam levels that look like they've all been coloured the same shade of brown with a broken crayola. The quick-trigger close-quarters gameplay has been replaced by hurling missiles at enemies 1 mile down the road and spraying a hail of bullets all over the place until the auto-aim kicks in. The humans (GDI) and the Strogg do fight against each other but despite the best efforts of the intro movie to make the evil Borg-like invaders look all merciless and nasty, on the battlefield there's little or no atmosphere and since everything is moving so fast you could be fighting off an invasion by an army of Jamie Olivers and you wouldn't even know. But it would be a lot scarier. But if you detach Quake from the title then you'll be a lot less disappointed and find that it plays in a very similar way to the huge squad-based FPS Frontlines: Fuel of War, which played almost identically to games in the Battlefield series, which have also recently undergone an image treatment and are about to receive a new addition called Bad Company. Anyway, back to Quake Wars... you move across the map in teams of up to eight players completing multiple objectives one at a time while the other team tries to protect these objectives. They are nicely varied so that you have to make use of the different soldier types and not just run around with the biggest gun in the armoury. These vary from fixing bridges and escorting the mobile command centres to forward bases to hacking data and destroying generators. The classes are nicely balanced, as the soldier can plant bombs but the engineer can defuse them. The medic can instantly revive any team-mate recently killed and field ops can call in airstrikes on positions. In addition, the engineer and field ops classes can install structures in held territory. The engineer's anti-infantry and vehicle turrets are invaluable when defending objectives. The attack/defend system of play is different to the objectives in games like Frontlines, where both sides are often scrambling to take the same objectives, or win them back. Because only one objective can be taken at a time, the defenders install defensive turrets which when combined can only be destroyed by artillery or throwing endless waves of troops and vehicles at them. Inside the installations the walls and floors are covered in proximity mines and defenders camping in the corners, with lots of medics to quickly resurrect the whole team, if necessary. Because there is only one option for both sides it quickly degenerates into a war of attrition and feels more like the Battle of the Somme than modern warfare. In addition to the foot classes both sides have a wide array of vehicles to use on all terrains, although land vehicles are used the most. The GDI use contemporary Humvees, battle tanks and ATVs to get to the front but the Strogg vehicles are by far the most fun and unique. Their scout vehicle is an armoured jetpack which drops grenades from above, their tank is a massive walking armoured vehicle and the aerial vehicle looks scarily insect-like in appearance. However, the handling is twitchy and awkward with the faster vehicles and are not very responsive with others. Someone must have been on crack when they mapped the controls for the aerial vehicles, as keeping them steady and actually hitting something is harder than sitting through a full episode of Big Brother. Quake Wars is obviously built for online play and doesn't expect anyone to be playing this on their own. So it's not surprising that the single player mode is exactly the same as the online modes but with bots instead of real people. Complete the 12 'missions' and your reward is to do the same but from the Strogg perspective. After that, you've got 'instant action', which is the same but with a few very limited customisation options. Excuse me if I don't do a backflip and throw confetti around! Maybe back in the days of Battlefield we'd be happy with an essentially online-only game, but in times where FPS have great stories and also extensive online modes to back them up (Halo 3, Call of Duty 4) you can't help but feel short-changed here. Frontlines is also almost online-only but the single-player missions had a story, cut-scenes and a real atmosphere. Quake Wars all feels like a step backwards, or at best sideways, from Quake 4. The biggest kicker of all is that when you do actually go online to play what is the bulk of the game there's no-one around! My first expperience went like this: after sitting in the only open lobby, which was half-full, the game starts only to judder around and crash after only a few minutes. Then the lobby closes as a new host can't be found. Not a good start. After ten minutes more I've managed to find a better populated game and am under way. But the problems mentioned earlier are only worsened online as the human opponents are much more astute at exploiting the game's weaknesses than the bots. So the single player is slimmed-down to accommodate the online mode, which only works provided enough people log on. What strikes me as even more bizarre is the lack of any smaller maps and split-screen modes, leaving you to rely almost totally on Xbox Live to get any use out of the game. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars feels like a game that has been released too late. The PC version has been out for six months and since then a number of great team-based online FPS have come on the market, all of which either do something different to or much better than Quake. It is by no means a bad game, but it has too many errors and not enough depth to warrant purchase over a number of good quality games already out there.

Best Bits
- Nice Graphics
- Interesting vehicles
- Good soldier class variation

Worst Bits
- Doesn't feel 'Quakey' enough
- Poor SP mode and no offline Multiplayer
- Awkard vehicle controls
- Gameplay objectives too much in favour of defenders


by: Crazypunk