Quake 4 Review

Quake 4 combines the best parts of Quake II and Quake III Arena by featuring a lengthy single player campaign along with fast and frantic multiplayer to create the ultimate Quake experience. Some technical issues sour the experience, but the game is undeniably fun and a surprisingly good value so it is worth checking out.

Single Player

The story follows the struggle between humans and the evil Strogg and the single player campaign picks up right after Quake II. The nameless marine from that game killed the Strogg leader and now it is your turn to go in and finish up the job on the Strogg home planet. This time around, though, you aren’t alone and have a bunch of other soldiers around to help you out.

Quake 4 doesn’t really add anything new to the FPS genre, but it doesn’t have to. This is old school, fast paced, action-filled shooting. Because of the frantic pace, you can’t help but have fun. The fact that you have an incredible arsenal of weapons that get upgraded throughout the game doesn’t hurt. You have a machine gun, shotgun, lightning gun, nail gun, rocket launcher, rail gun, and much more and all of them are a blast to use. The variety of weapons and wanting to see what you’ll get to use next keeps you interested, but there are also vehicle and turret sequences that do a good job of breaking up the FPS action. Your AI controlled teammates do a good job of acting like real soldiers and are worth protecting because they can repair your armor and replenish your health. All in all, single player is a 12 hour romp that is a lot of fun to play.

Techinical Issues

Unfortunately, some issues spoil the fun somewhat. The biggest problem is that the framerate is very unstable and the game slows down a lot whenever a lot of enemies appear and there are a lot of projectiles flying around. The game is still very much playable, but it just seems strange when you are going along shooting stuff and then the rate of fire from your machine gun gets slower and slower and slower. Even when simply looking around the environments the game is choppy. When standing still and looking at stuff the game is beautiful, but start to move around and you’ll notice a definite hitch in Quake 4’s getalong. This is just a sloppy port. Period. It is still a lot of fun to play, but it should have been better than this.

Multiplayer

The other half of Quake 4’s offerings come in the form of Xbox Live multiplayer. Surprisingly, the game runs smoother in hectic multiplayer than it does in single player, but there are still frame rate issues that detract from the experience. The gameplay itself feels very much like Quake III which is down and dirty and not too deep. Just shoot first and ask questions later with none of the strategy and tactics of recent multiplayer FPS necessary. The maps were designed with multiplayer in mind so they are all pretty good and streamlined versions of the single player weapons make up your arsenal. You can only play with 8 players, which is somewhat disappointing, but it is enough so that you are never wandering around alone for too long. The game features free for all and team deathmatch, one-on-one battles, and capture the flag. It doesn’t have all of the options of Perfect Dark Zero, but it is still a lot of fun to play.

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