Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars - 6.9/10
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
A Review - By Gaetano Prestia
NOTE: This review of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is based off the XBOX 360.
Those of you who are familiar with the typical multiplayer-based shooters on PC will no doubt know of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. It was released to relatively good critical and commercial success when it launched back in October 2007 and almost a year on it still has a decent following. That decent following seems to have justified a release of the game on the consoles, which unfortunately doesn’t add anything new to both the game in question and the genre itself.
For those unfamiliar with Quake Wars, it’s a FPS team-based title that pits two teams against each other to vie for a battlefield. Gaining control of the battlefield isn’t as simple as killing off your enemies, but instead there are objectives spread out across the field that range from hacking a computer system to opening doors and building gun torrents. Once you’ve achieved a certain number of objectives and gained control over a certain area, the enemy retreats and the area belongs to your team.
If you’re looking for a new single-player FPS, Quake Wars probably isn’t the best option. Clearly the focus was put onto the multiplayer in this (and you can’t really complain about that), but the single-player campaign is unimpressive and dull. There are twelve maps altogether which are split out into four groups (three maps per group). While the objectives and ideas can be applauded, the lack of a story and a fairly moronic AI system bring the single-player campaign down. You’re thrown into maps and given set objectives to complete and the enjoyment to be had is highly reliable upon the intelligence of both your team and enemy AI. Unfortunately, the AI lets you down far too often and you’ll find yourself respawning more than you should have too. A perfect example is when you have to hack into a computer and instead of your teammates hanging around and shooting off any approaching enemies, they run around the area and get easily picked off, leading to your inevitable shooting down and death.
The achievable classes throughout the game are well designed and implemented well into the gameplay. Both The Strogg and GDF have their own unique classes and abilities and they are spread out consistently and are evenly balanced.
While the core aspect of the gameplay is still there, it’s disappointing to discover that Quake Wars on the consoles has less than its older PC brother. Quake Wars lacks a lot of the basic and memorable stuff from the PC version. The gameplay also seems to have been dumbed down and given an alternate porting when compared to other PC-to-console ports. The character control is unrealistic and freakishly fast and it’s sometimes difficult to aim and control the path of the bullets. This wasn’t a problem on the PC version. Granted, PC FPS are generally more accessible than console ones, but instead of making Quake Wars on 360 and PS3 run a little slower and more intone with console controls, it’s speeded up to give it an unnatural feel.
Changing weapons has also been downgraded from the PC version and you’re restricted to a one-direction path for choosing weapons. This sometimes affects your position in the field, as you may need to throw a grenade but instead have a machine gun in your hand. Instead of going quickly and directly to the grenades in your weapon list, you have to cycle through each weapon, which takes a few seconds.
Thankfully, all of these downfalls in the single-player and on the porting front can be overturned (slightly) when you bring the game onto XBOX Live. Quake Wars reaches a high level of enjoyment once you start playing with actual human beings, as the tactical side of the gameplay requires actual human thought and direction, instead of dull and moronic AI decisions.
Graphical, Quake Wars on 360 doesn’t pack the same punch that the PC version did, but it isn’t that far off the mark. The environments seem to have less detail and the character design isn’t much to write home about, but it still has the environmental feel that the PC version had.
While Quake Wars has been out for a while on PC, there seemed to have been nothing stopping it from arriving on XBOX 360 and Playstation 3. The game plays good on XBOX Live and is a reasonably enjoyable online experience, but unless you’re playing it with friends, the AI isn’t smart enough to make this title worthwhile. It’s a decent port that gets the job done online, but only just.
Gameplay
6.5/10
The ideas are there, but the development team obviously didn’t have much to work with when porting this over to the consoles. It plays a lot smoother on the PC and only just gets along on the consoles.
Graphics
6.5/10
The environments are OK but not as impressive as the PC version. It looks like an early-generation XBOX 360 title, which isn’t overly terrible, but nothing really impressive, either.
Sound
6.5/10
Generic sounds coupled with a decent soundtrack. It doesn’t create the same atmospheric feel as the PC version did.
Value
7.5/10
The single-player isn’t that enjoyable because of team-based objectives and no story, but once you get online and play with friends you can get a decent amount of playtime out of this objective-based shooter.
Overall
6.9/10
Enemy Territory: QUAKE Wars just misses out on being a 7/10 title. When you compare it to the PC version it clearly lacks some of the basic aspects that made that version so accessible and enjoyable. There’s no doubt it’s been dumbed down for the consoles, and you can’t really blame the development team for that. They’ve done a reasonable job in porting it over with no major problems and the final product is an average shooter with a decent multiplayer experience.
Submitted by Gaetano
04/06/2008
70
8
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