- Title: Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
- Platform: Xbox 360
- Publisher: Activision
- Developer: Nerve Software
- ESRB Rating: “T” For Teen
- Genre: First-Person-Shooter
- Pros: Distinct classes; huge maps; gameplay is solid
- Cons: No story; limited mission objectives; so-so graphics and sound; we’ve done all of this better elsewhere; long load times; it is only “Quake” by title alone
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars has pretty much zero story. There are no cutscenes. No real characters. Nothing to tell you how or why you are fighting. It is purely an “Aliens have invaded, so let’s go kill them”-type of setting. It also has pretty much nothing in common with the rest of the Quake series. None of the levels or memorable enemies or the weapons are present here. This is a generic military shooter with a (surprisingly poor) Quake skin pasted over it.
Quake Wars also fails in terms of value. The single-player campaign consists of playing one match on each of the 12 maps and then calling it a day. There is no story or even cutscenes telling you what your objectives are for each map. You are just dumped onto the battlefield.
Multiplayer is what the game was designed for, and it does work fairly well. Playing with real people is always more fun than bots, and humans usually do a better job of working as a team. It isn’t great, and certainly doesn’t fare that well against the best FPS on the Xbox 360, but it is okay. However, for a $60 game, you should expect more than a throwaway single-player and “okay” multiplayer.
Gameplay
Quake Wars also succeeds by giving you five distinct character classes. You can play as a medic, soldier, field ops, covert ops, and engineer (with basically identical classes on the Strogg side as well). Each class has different abilities and different weapons, and they are all actually fairly deep and have some secret abilities that are pretty darn cool when you discover them.
However, this is an objective-based game and not just a deathmatch, and that is where ET: Quake Wars struggles. The objectives consist of hacking enemy equipment with covert ops, blowing stuff up with soldiers, defending objects, and building/repairing stuff with engineers among other things. There are only a handful of objective types, and after you defend a generator or rush through an enemy base to blow up a doorway for the tenth time, it all just feels bland and repetitive. It also doesn’t help that the objectives never change on a given map, so once you have played on a map once you know pretty much how that map is going to play from here on out. Simply put, there just isn’t enough stuff to do in this game to make it worthwhile.
Graphics and Sound
Graphically, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is pretty disappointing. The game does get points for having absolutely huge maps to play in, but the textures in the environment are bland and lack any sort of detail. And, really, the huge maps are pretty much wasted because you can only go after one objective at a time so 90% of the action takes place around the objectives. And there are only 16 players anyway, so the huge maps are overkill. I’d trade better graphics for smaller maps any day. The character models are also seriously lacking detail and just don’t look good.The sound is similarly bland and uninspired. You hear the same voice clips from enemies and teammates repeated a thousand times, which grates on you after a while. The sound effects are okay and the music, what little there is, is unremarkable.
Bottom Line
