Hi,
I said I was writing a review of Dark Messiah, but I finished Quake 4 and for some reason it felt easier writing a review for that instead. Here it is:
Oh, by the way…*SPOILERS*.
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Quake 4
I’ve played at least a little of all the Quake games. I played a few levels of Quake 1 and Quake 2, and I’ve played Quake 3 extensively, coming back to it from time to time. I’ve avoided buying Quake 4 for quite a while now, for whatever reason. Perhaps I skipped buying it on release because I had other FPS games like F.E.A.R., Call of Duty 2 and the almighty Half-Life 2 to contend with. But now I’ve bought it and played both the single-player and the multiplayer, and I’m glad I did.
For me, Quake 3 was always the connoisseur’s choice for an unadulterated deathmatch experience. If you want to settle a grudge, or just test pure gaming skill, Quake 3 was the only choice, leagues apart from any other FPS out there (any of the UT games included). I can now say that Quake 4 has taken up the baton left by Quake 3, because there’s nothing that Quake 4’s multiplayer doesn’t have that Quake 3 did, and it looks and feels suitably improved.
There are certainly some changes that have been made. You get the new nailgun from the single-player, as well as the dark matter gun in place of the BFG. The flamethrower, another newcomer, is a truly odd weapon; instead of pouring flame outward in a spray, it flings a ball of fire a short distance at high speed that then lingers as a hot-spot on the ground, waiting for any poor soul to come near it. There’s also a new range of maps to play on, and some updates of oldies from Quake 3. The map q3dm17, known as ‘The Longest Yard’ was always a favourite of mine from Quake 3, and it’s reborn as ‘The Longest Day’ in Quake 4. All of these changes are minor ones though. What really sets Quake 4 apart from its predecessor is its single player mode.
The premise of Quake 4’s single-player is a fairly simple one. You play Corporal Kane, the classic generic tough-guy, as he fights against the Strogg enemy alongside his marine comrades. Kane is a member of Rhino squad, one of many squads based on-board the Hannibal, a space ship and the marines’ headquarters for the duration of the game. The events of Quake 4 are all set on Stroggos, the Strogg’s home planet. In this case the marines are the aggressors, and their overriding goal throughout is to disrupt the Strogg’s operations enough that they’re fatally crippled.
The game is split up into several distinct missions with clearly defined objectives. The missions are invariably ambitious, and typically involve Rhino squad and a few others heading straight into the heart – or indeed bowels – of a Strogg installation and disabling some sort of device that’s crucially tied-in to the Strogg’s strategic capability. What also almost always happens is that the majority of the marines sent on the mission are killed off and Kane is left to finish the job.
I’d say there’s roughly a 70%/30% split between you being on your own on the one hand and fighting alongside marines on the other. This is perhaps a shame, because the sections where you form part of a squad, or indeed part of a multi-squad operation, are really quite entertaining. The experience you get when your squad members are moving through a room or down a corridor, taking up covering positions and helping each other out is generally much richer than the one you get in solitary play.
Aside from the feeling of being part of a team that you get when you’re with your squad, they can also, as they should do, make fighting the Strogg considerably easier. The AI governing your squad members is consistently competent at taking down enemies, and when you’re in a squad with technicians or medics, you can charge insanely into the line of fire and get your health and armour immediately replenished once the fight is over.
This has been done before – in Half-Life 2 for instance – but the implementation of it in Quake 4 has a little more polish. I remember that in Half-Life 2 the medics would often ignore you when you were standing in front of them, and that it would take a few moments for them to register your presence. I never had that problem in Quake 4, and what was additionally refreshing was how quickly my health or armour got refilled once the techs or medics started work on me.
Being on your own isn’t so bad though. In fact, it’s damned fun. One of the most striking things about Quake 4 is the weapons that you get to use. They all have their own unique flavour, and perhaps more importantly, they’re fun. You begin with the blaster (a pistol) and shortly pick up the machine gun and shotgun. These are your only weapons in the early game until you get access to the more advanced hyperblaster (the successor to Quake 3’s plasma rifle), the nailgun, and the grenade launcher. Later on you come across the rocket launcher, the railgun, the dark matter gun, and my personal favourite, the lightning gun.
What’s great about the weapons in Quake 4, apart from their uniqueness, is that they are all (with the possible exception of the blaster) useful throughout. The shotgun and the machine gun are fantastic in the early game, and they never stop being fantastic later on. The shotgun still packs the massive punch in the late game that it does in the early game, and as for the machine gun, I found that as the game went on, it became less of a close-combat tool for laying down suppressing fire, and became more of a long-range sniper rifle.
Another great aspect to the weapons is the way that several of them get upgraded as you progress through the game. The nailgun is lethal in its original dumb-fire form; but later on in the game a tech marine offers to attach a scope to it. With the scope attached, the nailgun can lock-on to any target with a hold-down of the right mouse button, and then guide all subsequent nails to that target. I was still using the nailgun right up until the final boss fight. The nailgun isn’t the only weapon that gets an upgrade either. For instance, the rocket launcher gets a guidance system, so you can steer rockets that you’ve fired wherever you want them to go, and whereas for the first half of the game you have to hold down the reload button to load shells into the shotgun; later on it gets changed to accommodate a clip of shells instead.
The stunning quality of design isn’t exclusive to the weapons either. The levels in Quake 4 are very cleverly laid-out, and often quite beautiful, which is rare to see in such a gritty shooter (I’m thinking of Doom 3, which I can’t remember being what I would call beautiful). Certainly, you spend a lot of time fighting in fairly samey corridors, but these sections are regularly interrupted by distinctive set-pieces. I never felt that I was in a ‘fake’ environment, or that the environments were built just so that they could be populated with bad-guys; rather, I felt that I was travelling through a fully-fledged, structured installation that was serving a purpose.
There are a few usable vehicles throughout the game. You have the opportunity to drive a hover tank and a walker, and there’s also a tram-ride stage. What all the vehicle stages share is that they put you in charge of devastating weaponry. The hover tank has a hugely powerful main cannon, the walker comes with a heavy machine gun and a rocket launcher, and the tram has a hefty machine gun mounted on the rear. All these weapons absolutely tear apart Strogg footsoldiers of all kinds, and it only takes a modicum of skill to master taking down the bigger targets that are thrown at you. They may be simple and easy, but what the vehicle stages do well is break up the gameplay and give you something different to do, which is always welcome.
Between missions you’re required to attend briefings on-board the Hannibal. The briefings themselves are cut scenes – in the game engine, but scripted. Before the briefings begin you get a chance to explore the Hannibal and chat with some of the marines on station. I use the word ‘chat’ in the most limited possible sense, because essentially all you get to do is click on a marine and receive a comment, insult, or just a polite refusal to speak, depending on the mood of the marine in question. After the briefing some of the marines that you spoke to before will have gone off on missions, new marines will have arrived, and those that stayed will have new comments or insults for you.
The Hannibal sections are very reminiscent of the between-mission sections in an older game, Voyager: Elite Force, where you were allowed to have a similarly limited ‘chat’ with the likes of Harry Kim, Tuvok, and last and certainly least, Voyager’s own loveable head chef, Neelix. There’s no real wow factor here, but just as with the vehicle stages, the Hannibal sections serve a purpose. They provide a change of pace, and they advance the main storyline
So, the environments all range from decent to great, and the weapons are fantastic to use, but what do you get to use them on? The Strogg are composed of a myriad of wildly different creatures, each of which is (as you later learn) linked to a single commanding overmind, the ‘nexus’. Although they’re all commanded by a single entity, each variety of Strogg has its own unique weaponry and attack pattern, which you’re forced to adapt to.
For instance, there’s the Big Lumbering Bastard with a shoulder-mounted railgun and a giant energy shield (of course I don’t know their real names, give me a break!), or BLB for short. The BLB presents you with an interesting dilemma. He’s in possession of one of the most deadly single-shot weapons in the game, and between shots he’s nearly impossible to hit from the front. You have to either attempt to snipe him from the front by hitting one of the few areas of his body that isn’t shielded, or flank him and hit him hard before he turns around, or use explosive damage from the grenade launcher or the rocket launcher to shake him up for the final killing shot.
There’s also the rocket-launching, teleporting mega bitch, who deploys from a pod set into a wall, and floats toward you with rockets primed. You have to hit her with some serious damage very quickly, before she gets to teleport; and if she gets to teleport, you have to be quick on your feet and have your gun aimed at her face as soon as she re-materialises. Believe me when I say that you don’t want to get hit by her too many times.
It’s not all good news though, I’m afraid. Having said that the Strogg present a challenge, and that you get to use some awesome weapons against them; it is certainly not the case that the combat in Quake 4 is, when taken as a whole, top quality. With the notable exception of the Strogg marines (again, this is just my name for them), who work in teams and move from cover-to-cover, leaning around corners, and firing with a variety of weapons, all of the Strogg pursue the often effective but basic strategy of charging like a crazy maniac.
It’s also a bit of a piss-take when you see the Strogg marines leaning and yet you’re unable to follow suit. Nowadays, it should be a matter of course for there to be a lean function in an FPS. All too often I found myself taking far too much damage from incoming enemy fire simply because I was forced to come out of cover more than I’m accustomed to, coming from games like Far Cry – released more than a year earlier than Quake 4, I might add – and, more recently, F.E.A.R..
Apart from the lean function, there are other innovations that have been made in the FPS genre that Quake 4 would have benefited substantially from. F.E.A.R truly raised the bar in the rapidly advancing area of AI, to the extent that surviving for any length of time would have been made utterly impossible without the added slow-time. The AI in Quake 4 – even that of the strogg marines – doesn’t really compare.
Something that F.E.A.R. shares with other FPS games – both of the Call of Duty games, for instance – is a commitment to realism. Limiting the player so that they can only carry a small set of weapons is critical to achieving this goal. In Quake 4 the player is fully capable of carrying all of the weapons in the game at once; not excluding the rocket launcher and the grenade launcher, which I would have thought would be fairly weighty. Furthermore, you get to carry around a significant stock of ammunition for all of these weapons. Imagine the burden of a backpack of rockets, a satchel of grenades, another of shotgun shells, and dozens of clips for the machine gun and the nailgun!
Limiting the player’s capacity for absorbing damage is also crucial, because it forces her to make tactical decisions; not to mention the fear of getting hit that it creates. Kane is quite comfortable taking a couple of rockets to the face in Quake 4. Well, maybe not comfortable; he feels the hurt, but it’s nothing like Call of Duty, or Call of Duty 2, where a grenade going off in the room that you’re in kills you instantly.
I realise that all of this might not matter to those among you that prefer a simpler, more back to basics FPS experience, but I’m not one of you. I really feel like all of these innovations represent a larger advance in the genre, and that we shouldn’t be tempted to applaud a game because it sticks to the hallmarks of the previous generation. The more realistic the genre becomes; the more immersive it becomes. When you’re made to feel like you have limits, that you’re vulnerable, that you can’t behave like a terminator and survive, you start to become the player character in a way that is, I think, crucial to distinguishing the computer game from the movie, or the book, in terms of its potential.
I have some minor quibbles with other aspects of Quake 4 as well. First, as an aside, the load times for each level in the single-player are consistently extensive. The load times are, I think, longer than those in Far Cry, which I remember being particularly long.
Second, although Corporal Kane is the protagonist, and is spoken to all the time by the NPCs, he never gets to speak himself. There were moments when I wished that Kane had been given some lines, like when you get back to the Hannibal after being partially stroggified (turned into a Strogg) and some of the marines say things like “what’s that doing here?” and “god damn squibby!”; I felt like Kane should really have given some back. I don’t feel like deducting too many points for this one, because it’s actually very rare to find an FPS that has a speaking player character, but I can’t help thinking that a Kane with a personality would have added a lot to the story.
It’s not just a lack of a Strogg attitude in Kane that’s lacking either; the whole stroggification process, and the aftermath of it, was very underwhelming. Being partially stroggified means that your HUD is changed to look more Strogg-like, you get more health and armour, the ability to understand Strogg language and use Strogg technology, and you can run slightly faster.
There are some plot implications too. Once or twice, Kane is ordered to bypass Strogg security measures because his implants allow him to pass through them without setting them off, or he’s told that he alone can reach certain areas of a Strogg installation and achieve a crucial objective. But this didn’t impress me; instead, it struck me as an attempt by ID at offering an in-game justification for a gameplay mechanic that was already in effect before stroggification – that Kane has to go ahead and save the day when no other marines can assist him.
Furthermore, so much more could have been made of stroggification. Kane could have had the occasional order slip through from Strogg-command, telling him to work against his comrades, and if he’d had some dialogue in the first place, that dialogue could have changed to reflect an altered personality. Also I think that Kane could have been far more enhanced in terms of running speed and reflexes, to the extent that a slow-time mode could have been added.
Taken as a whole, Quake 4 is simply old school. That’s both good and bad depending on what aspect of the game you look at. If you look at the multiplayer, it’s all good, because what’s old school in Quake multiplayer is an incredibly refined test of FPS skill. If you look at the single-player, a lot of the elements that ID have chosen to keep old school are bad old school, not good old school. I’m glad that they left the multiplayer more or less unchanged, but I’m not glad that they didn’t draw some inspiration from more recent FPS efforts in crafting their single-player.
✓ Very cool weapons
✓ Intelligent level design
✓ Solid squad gameplay
✓ Decent vehicle stages
✓ Fantastic multiplayer
✗ Long load times
✗ Basic, uninspired combat
✗ Poorly implemented stroggification
✗ Kane has no personality
80%
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The Dark Messiah review will be along soon. I still haven’t finished Oblivion but I will eventually. I’m just into the age of gunpowder in Medieval II, and enjoying my conquest of France. The Pope is giving me a really hard time.
Thanks for reading,
Chris
