We all predicted in one of our more glib moments of cynicism that it would essentially be a brown Doom III, and that's not a million miles away from the truth. That Quake 4 has arrived with such a muted fanfare is maybe telling. KILL THEM ALL! WOOOOAAAARGH! HURRY UP KANE! It's all just as simple as Earth against the aliens. We know nothing of The Strogg's back-story, nothing of its prime movers and their plans.
Quake 4's setting is an empty, soulless base, with radio chatter that (more often than not) gets completely buried in the audio mix. At least their lip-synching is spot-on, eh? But what, exactly, is the point of constructing a story-driven game and then giving players the most tediously uninvolving tasks there have ever been? Aren't we beyond that now? Is this not 2005? The start of the next generation? At least Doom III had the little emails and audio logs to deliver something of a back-story. And then there are the 'characters', which we use in the loosest sense of the word a bunch of generic droids so devoid of personality, witty lines or any point to their existence at all that the fact that you can't gun them down yourself is the central low point of the game. Powering down the next generator, turning off the security, meeting so-and-so, escorting so-and-so to such-and-such. Compare this to, say, Metroid Prime 2's innovative and infinitely challenging bosses and weep.Īll you're literally doing throughout the entire game - and this won't come as a spoiler - is charging after the next switch and taking down the next cluster of dim-witted Strogg. Even the boss encounters are unbelievably easy - some going down on our first attempt by merely unloading our fully stocked big guns and circle strafing. After a while you realise it's neither especially challenging or that exciting. There's no Halo-esque ducking and diving, no running around cover points and playing hide and seek, just plenty of wham, blam, but no 'thank you ma'am'. They're largely tight encounters, four-on-one shootouts where they all rush at you suicidally, and it's a case of the bravest one wins. This might sound like an insult, but essentially, the firefights feel more or less the same as Doom III, just without the old-school respawning out of a gap in the wall nonsense. Quake 4 doesn't really do enough to make the core of the game all that exciting or different. Eye Eye, cap'nĮven taking all of that into account, it's the AI that's ultimately to blame for the game's inability to challenge and involve. But this, of course, would be a dirty, filthy lie. Numb yourself to the sense of familiarity, blur your eyes and convince yourself you haven't seen it all before and better and you could quite easily convince yourself that this was the best shooter you'd played since Half-Life 2. There's no doubt about it: Raven tries its best to throw in the right ingredients, but any vaguely experienced FPS player can tell it's suspiciously under-cooked. And a gigantic great plot twist (that id completely ruined for us back at E3 - thanks guys) to get excited about, only to realise it doesn't change anything. Now and then there's even the odd visually magnificent boss section to get the pulse racing (where you probably won't die). To break up the action a little, occasionally you'll hop aboard a giant Walker mech and stomp around for a bit causing maximum destruction (but never actually die because you've got a rechargeable shied), or glide around in a SMC Hovertank shooting equally gigantic (and admittedly spectacular) targets (and rarely die for the same reasons), or engage in some on-rails shooting against a band of relentless pursuers (and never die, because, well, it's a piece of piss).
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