Don’t know about you but I was kind of disappointed by Doom 3, sure it looked fantastic but it didn’t feel enough like the old game to really get my interest gland pumping. As a Quake fan of old I was therefore hoping that this supposedly all-singing 360 version (that returns to the story-driven campaign-style war against the mostly-robot Strogg of Quakes 1 and 2, and leaves the naff Arena-based combat of 3 behind) would be just the ticket, and maybe even a good substitute for the lack of a third Halo at the 360 launch.
Well it’s a big “yes and no” I’m afraid; the game starts off well and trains you, sucks you in as all good FPS do these days. The game looks great and controls accurately and positively, but inside the first hour I was wondering what exactly had happened to the frame rate - it looks decidedly “Xboxy” rather than what I’d hoped for from Xbox360.
As I said though, the game looks great despite a less than silky frame rate, and the level and depth of design soon becomes apparent. Every wall, panel. pipe, duct, console, switch and lever seems to have a purpose, and I love the treatment Raven have given to the architecture and machinery, it all seems to be there for a reason, and a lot of it actually works! Like many other games, a lot of ideas from James Cameron’s iconic Aliens movie find their way into Quake 4, but it’s all the richer for it – some of the game’s setting look nothing short of amazing. The character models are also superb, and during the mission-based campaign you’ll often fight along with a squad too, and they converse intelligently and unlike a lot of games (I’m looking at you Half Life 2) actually help as they fight well too. Medics can heal you and techs can repair your armour on the move, and particularly on the harder difficulty settings it’s vital to keep them alive so they can patch you up when you get mauled in battle.
A decent sized campaign mode with 4 difficulty settings means you should see the end too, and playing as Corporal Matthew Kain, an elite member of Rhino Squad and Earth's invasion force, you’ll have a lot of Strogg-splattering fun along the way, because Q4’s weapons are a magnificent bunch. Many of them return from Quake 2 (the entire PC version of Quake 2 is included on a bonus disk, and it’s never looked better), and some of the weapon effects look great too – but as always with the game’s choppy frame rate the more that’s going on, the more difficult the aiming gets. Once picked up, the weapons are all available as long as you have ammo for them too, none of this ‘only-carry-2-guns’ Halo-esque rubbish - trouble is, it now feels extremely old-school to scroll through a lengthy selection of weapons, and also means that many of them become completely redundant, particularly as the best ones get modified during the game to make them even better. Doom 3’s quick selection menu might not have been perfect, but it was better than this palaver. Rather than humping all those weapons around I’d would have preferred to have a melee attack – you really don’t want to get too close to the larger Strogg but Halo got everyone used to twatting someone if you got caught mid-reload or just got up close and personal, and now you really miss it if a game doesn’t let you do it. The red ‘B’ button is used instead as the ‘action’ button, operating switches, elevators and vehicles.
Q4 utilizes the DOOM 3® engine, but has much more open settings on the planet’s surface and relies less on the dark to provide its thrills - there are some really spectacular set pieces like when the massive Hannibal battle cruiser touches down, or your squad is attacked by a giant spider. Whilst most of the time you get down and dirty as an infantry grunt, there are several vehicle-based levels as well; they play well when you drive them yourself (hover tank and mech walker), but things started to fall apart on one particular monorail-chase level though, and the game engine that’s frame rate that had been inconsistent already actually seems to stop here and there – disappointing to say the least, and it’s so bad that it makes aiming really difficult – it’s not exactly a showcase for the new console or for Raven’s PC game porting prowess either, and it’s so bad (not to mention daft in concept) that I wish they’d left it out.
Your enemy are a race called the Strogg, and they’re about as nasty a lot as you’ll come across this side of the universe. They make Stare Trek’s Borg look like pussies, but rarely actually “kill” their enemy. Nope, they “Stroggify” them instead – removing legs, sometimes arms and heads too, implanting the brain and adding a selection of robotic replacements and enhancements… I’m not going to go into any more detail than that, it’d just spoil the “surprises” you have coming with some of the Strogg types you meet – safe to say that during the game you get captured and it’s an extremely gory experience, all seen by you form a first person viewpoint – but at least Kane won’t need to worry about getting arthritis in his knees.
Now quite what they were thinking with regards to the Quake 4 multiplayer I don’t know, and maybe I’m missing the point, but it’s a decidedly “retro” experience, and I don’t mean it in a good way either – it looks more like it’s running on the Quake 3 engine than Doom 3. It allows a maximum of 8 players, there’s no co-op mode (the game would have really suited one) and the style returns to that of Quake 2 or 3 Arena – the problem here being that it doesn’t look or play as anywhere near as well as I remember it on the Dreamcast (I’m sure I recognise some maps from 2 and 3), and also the new are extremely basic both visually and in design, and poor in comparison to virtually any FPS multiplayer you can think of on the old Xbox! – you can forget about the kind of expansive and detailed maps that games like Halo, Pariah and Far Cry supplied, Q4’s 12 look-alike arenas go back to the old days of flat, repetitive textures, winding corridors, grav lifts and teleports to give the maps some level of complexity. Deathmatch, team deathmatch, CTF, arena CTF and Tourney modes are included, but this lacklustre, half-assed effort is almost as bizarre a design decision as removing the co-op mode from the Xbox Doom 3 add-on Resurrection of Evil, and the simplistic, repetitive and basic gameplay just doesn’t even come close to hacking it in these post-Halo 2 days. The game is also in the bizarre situation that it creates for itself in as much as the split screen multiplayer Quake 2 that comes with Q4 actually plays better than it…
Quake 4 may not have an original bone in its body (you’ll feel like you’ve done it all before) but its campaign mode was an engaging and thrilling enough sci-fi-pulp shooter to keep me wanting to play it, despite some severe, game-spoiling technical issues. The simple fact that it made the 360’s launch may well indicate that the conversion/optimisation could have been better, and that’s a shame because there’s great potential in the Quake universe, fighting to get out. The Xbox 360 can do a lot better than this, and so can Raven.
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