steve kwan user experience designer

Review: Quake 4

(November 5th, 2005 - 9:04PM)

My legs...I can't feel my legs!

(3 / 5 stars)

One sentence summary: It's like Doom 3, but you can GO OUTSIDE!

Quake 4 has been released, and this surprised me just as much as you.

I saw some information about Quake 4 a month or so ago, and thought to myself, "Well that's interesting. They're making Quake 4." The next thing I knew, it was out. Maybe I wasn't paying attention, but there didn't seem to be much fanfare prior to Quake 4's release. Anyway, the game is now available and I've played it through, so here are my opinions.

In Quake 4 you play as Matthew Kane, a space trooper fighting the war against the a race of cyborgs called the Strogg. And in typical first-person shooter style, you are totally mute. Quake 4 is a continuation of Quake 2, where you defeated the Strogg's leader at the end. This marks the first time that the Quake games were actually strung into a series. Quake 1, 2 and 3 had nothing to do with each other. It's nice that Quake 4 actually attempts to continue a previous game.

I was a little bit worried at first because Quake 4 is the first game in the series not made by id Software. id, who have previously produced games like Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein, decided to outsource Quake 4 to Raven Software. Since id wasn't developing this game in-house I expected the worst, but luckily Raven pulled off a solid title with Quake 4.

The game looks good. Very good. Right-click on the above screenshot to see a screenshot from my computer. You know what other game looked really good? Doom 3. In fact, Doom 3 and Quake 4 look almost identical. Shown random screenshots from one of the two games, a casual player may not be able to tell the difference. This is obviously because both games use the Doom 3 engine. It looks like Raven didn't change a single line of code when they adapted it for Quake 4. That's not a bad thing, mind you; the Doom 3 engine is a masterpiece. Just don't expect anything new from Quake 4.

The weapons in Quake 4 sound awesome. They've really got a mean kick to them. Unfortunately, they're all pretty boring. You've got your standard pistol, machine gun, shotgun, grenade launcher, rocket launcher, railgun, BFG, etc. The only difference is that in Quake 4, the BFG isn't called the BFG, it's called the Dark Matter Gun. I guess that means it's the DMG?

In particular, I found the railgun disappointing. The railgun in Quake 2 was just so cool - that was my favorite weapon in the game. You'd zap a guy with it and he'd get nuked into a pile of gore. Seeing as how Quake 4 uses Doom 3 technology, and considering how cool F.E.A.R.'s railgun (the particle weapon) is, I had high hopes for the railgun in Quake 4. I imagined firing a slug at a guy and punching a hole through him. Unfortunately, in reality the railgun was really quite disappointing. All it does is send guys flying. It's really quite boring.

I found that aiming in Quake 4 was difficult. At the beginning of the game you don't even notice, because with shotguns and machine guns accuracy isn't really an issue. When you get the railgun and attempt to snipe enemies from a distance, you'll notice that it's very hard to do pinpoint accuracy shots. Maybe it's not the game and it's just me or my computer, but it seemed that shooting where you want was more difficult than it should be.

Your enemies in this game aren't really that inventive. They're clearly patterned after the enemies in Quake 2, which basically means they're a bunch of cyborg zombies that look like Optimus Prime. It would have been nice if a little variety had been introduced.

The AI in this game was extremely disappointing. Like in Doom 3, the enemies practice the kamikaze rush - that is, they run directly at you like goons in a Van Damme movie. Later in the game you'll encounter some elite soldiers that actually use a bit of strategy, but most of your opponents are pretty brainless. I could forgive this weakness in Doom 3 because the game broke ground in so many other areas, and AI isn't really a necessity in a survival horror game. However, in Quake 4 we've been there and done that already. Considering that you're supposed to be at war in this game and war shooters usually have good AI, there is simply no excuse.

Overall, Quake 4 is a pretty game with decent weapons and decent gameplay. That's it. The game is very, very decent. It's good, but not great. With games like F.E.A.R. being released, there's no excuse for gameplay this shallow. The main reason to play Quake 4 is not because of the quality of the game itself, but because it can be viewed as a reinvention of Doom 3.