Quake 4 Review

Not the sharpest shooter.

The Xbox 360 has only been out a week and already has a solid selection of first-person shooters. This is good and bad news for Quake 4. On one hand, it’s one of the fledgling system’s decent games; on the other, it’s worse than Call of Duty 2, Perfect Dark Zero and Condemned: Criminal Origins. Guess that ‘4’ in the title stands for ‘fourth place.’

Even if this were a perfect port of the PC version, it would still be at the bottom of the food chain, so the fact that its transmigration met with some framerate turbulence makes it an even more obvious candidate for the retail firing squad. Hold onto that last cigarette, though, because Quake 4 is still a pretty good rental. Featuring a fun if formulaic single-player campaign, fast-paced but ancient multiplayer and a full playable version of Quake II with four-player split-screen and eight-player LAN options, this game is definitely worth something, just not sixty bucks.

The single-player campaign picks up where Quake II left off, with human forces pressing an all-out attack on the Strogg home planet after a lone marine killed their leader. As Matthew Kane, another heroic marine, you lead another crew of soldiers against the grotesque alien hordes. Don’t let that fool you, though – there’s no squad-based anything here. It’s still just you takin’ it to the Strogg like the Army of One you’ve always been in Quake games.

Quake 4 tries to switch things up a little with a plot twist that turns you into the very thing you incessantly frag – a Strogg – but even after your transformation you’re just a dude with guns killing aliens, now with more health and faster movement speed. Ravensoft, the game’s developers, really should have turned the series completely back on itself, pitting you against humanity as one of the repossessed agents of industrial evil you always fought against.

Even the humans you occasionally run into don’t seem taken aback by the fact that a pal they were chatting with just an hour earlier now looks exactly like the enemy, bursting with all sorts of nasty tubes and machinery. Then again, with their plastic looking skin and rigid mannerisms, the NPCs hardly have room to judge. Even worse, they only come in two flavors: movers and chatters. The movers simply pace back and forth, telling you they’re busy if you question them. The talkers usually engage each other in some interesting conversations (you never have any dialogue options), but after they finish they just stand there staring at each other. It’s pretty creepy.

Your buddies do try to help out by shooting at the Strogg and healing you or giving you extra armor, but that all feels like part of the scripting rather than actual A.I. at work. Despite this nod to squads, it’s really just you versus the world.

Besides, you’ll feel more at home running through corridors and blasting aliens than hanging out with your paranoid friends. In fact, you’ll feel a little bit too comfortable, because Quake 4‘s single-player is much like a million other first-person shooters. You walk down a hall, open a door, kill the enemies, rinse, wash, get in a vehicle fight and repeat.

Like the friendly NPCs, there are two types of enemies – those that charge and those that don’t. This binary A.I. makes traveling through the game a snap. You just draw the chargers out into territory you’ve already cleared, kill them, and then pick off the rest at your leisure. If you get surprised and take a big hit, you can always quick-load and avoid the bushwhacking. When you have some open space to work with instead of corridors, life is even easier. Evidently, the Strogg, with all their advanced technology, haven’t invented an answer for the circle-strafe.

Still, killing them is good fun. You have the usual assortment of Quake guns, including a chargeable pistol, assault rifle, shotgun, grenade launcher, rocket launcher, nail gun, plasma gun, rail gun, lightning gun and BFG (dark matter gun). The problem with most of these is that you have to shoot your enemies like the NYPD to bring them down, and headshots don’t seem to work. The only gun that really kills foes dead early on is, ironically, the shotgun – the least advanced weapon in your arsenal.

As you progress you’ll receive various weapon upgrades, making the guns more proficient at taking out massive numbers of enemies as well as just plain massive enemies. The lightning gun gains a chain effect, the rocket launcher loads three rockets instead of one, and the nail gun gains a homing effect. While the game never becomes any less mindless, it at least gets more violent and varied.

Something we should also mention is the fact that the pistol and machine gun come with mounted flashlights, while the rest of the guns do not. This is more important early on, as you’ll fight enemies in some pretty dark quarters and the flashlight is a big help. Later, though, your enemies will be big and glowing, so spotting them won’t be such an issue.

The vehicles provide a welcome change of pace, especially the hover tank. No longer bound by such constricting corridors, you move fast and find yourself in nice open areas with lots of enemies to run over and shoot. Instead of simply back-pedaling and blasting away, here you’ll wildly lob tank shells while dodging enemy rockets.

But even with such an alternative gameplay style, the single-player game is so old-school and linear it’s silly. You’ll be reminded of carnival haunted houses as you sweep down corridors, quickly dispatching the enemies who spring around corners as you step on this or that floor panel. There are several segments where you’re literally stuck to a rail, either watching things happen or shooting the hapless enemies that charge you and your mounted cannon. If you’re old enough to be genuinely excited about a new Quake game, nothing here will entertain you for long.

That goes for the multiplayer, too, which is pretty much unchanged from Quake III (which came out in 1998). You frag opponents and capture flags in wacky environments full of weapons, power-ups and launch pads that bounce you around like a pinball. There is no new take on the old formula whatsoever, just some new maps and guns, and you’re still instantly wielding any gun you happen to run over. Kicking ass with the rocket launcher only to have a rail-gun pop into my hands is an unpleasant surprise every time. I can’t believe they didn’t fix this.

There are two online differences between the PC and Xbox 360 versions: the latter is limited to eight players per match and is generally chunkier, suffering from the same framerate issues that nag the single-player game. Still, Xbox 360 owners also get a fully playable copy of Quake II, good for a jaunt down memory lane, plus old-school, offline deathmatches. The promise of a nine year-old game isn’t something that should entice you into a purchase, but it does run smoothly and should be good for a few hours of nostalgiac fun.

Ironically, the nine year-old game runs much, much better than the brand spankin’ new one. Using a modified version of the Doom 3 engine, Quake 4 looks great – the enemies are terrifying, the environments richly detailed, and the lighting superb – but in big rooms with tons of enemies the action distinctly bogs down. This would be a bigger problem in a better game, but here, it’s just one of several reasons to buy something else.

It mostly sounds good. The music is dark and foreboding, but lacks the industrial perversity that made the game so distinct back when Trent Reznor provided the soundtrack. The voice work is great, except sometimes the chatter of NPCs near you is conspicuously soft. Like the framerate, this can’t break an already broken deal, but it is another example of shoddy port work. Finally, the weapons, explosions and roars all sound perfectly chaotic and violent.

Quake 4 wasn’t a very impressive game on the PC, but there it had hundreds if not thousands of rivals to compete against. On the Xbox 360 it only has three, yet is even less compelling because it feels so old. Assuming you just spent a mountain of money to own the newest of the new in video gaming, you’ll probably want to leave this marine lost in space.