Computer And Video Games - The latest gaming news, reviews, previews & movies

	Fantasy Wars ^PC Review: The strategy genre takes a nasty turn
	Every Studio EA's Bought... Feature: And closed
	The Club ^PC Review: You are not a free man. You are a number
	The 10 Best And Worst Characters Feature: The ten tops and ten bottoms of PC gaming

All

PC

PlayStation

Xbox

Nintendo

Mobile

BROWSE CVG

PC GAMING

Contact us
Feeds

Login

Not a member yet? Click here to register!

Video

Launch Player

More Magazines

CVG NETWORK

All PC

PC Previews

Scarface: The World Is Yours ^PC

The Godfather ^PC

Preview

Quake IV

Format PC

Developer Raven Software

Publisher Activision

Genre First Person Shooter

1-Sep-2005 Quake IV single-player and multiplayer ultra blast! Hands-on of justice!

If I concentrate really hard, then at the back of my peripheral vision I can just about make out the swish of a ponytail as Todd Hollenshead, CEO of id Software, shakes his head in dismay. "No, your other right. Over there. The red armour," he sighs, as I nervously jab the WASD of Quake IV deathmatch, walking into walls, falling off ledges and getting hurled into walls through faulty jump-pad use. I've been marked out as a player of remedial standards and Hollenshead is doing his utmost to make me less of a loser. It's horrible, and hard as I push myself I just can't concentrate. It's truly the stuff of nightmares. I'm playing Quake in front of the men from id - and the men from id think that I'm a noob. Freud would have a field day.

Normally at this point I'd be prepping myself to regale you with all the reasons that the multiplayer contingent of Quake IV is ineffably greater and more wonderful than Quake III: Arena. About how id and Raven (they of Soldier of Fortune fame who have been entrusted with the coding of id's biomechanical baby) have brought us so far from what we had in 1999 and how reassuring it is to know that in a world of confusion and a climate of fear we can at least rely on computer games to get betterer and betterer all the time. Thing is though, how can a developer improve on a game that it reckons it nailed the last time?

"What Quake III was, was... perfect," explained id lead designer Tim Willits to me a few hours before my humiliation. "It's hard to come up with any flaws. There's just such a connection between you and the game. It's just raw. Raw action. It's quite simply all about you aiming at someone else. It just has a vital connection between what you want to do, and what happens. It's perfect."

GLAD I SPENT IT WITH YOU
All that sounds like bluster; it pretty much detonates the bullshit detector, but if you sit back and think about it - if you liked the last game, what would you really want changed or improved in vanilla Quake III: Arena? Vastly different weapons? Slower gameplay? Realism? Physics objects? Vehicles? The breakneck speed, accuracy and competitive edge of Quake multiplayer has never been matched by any other commercial product - not even by Unreal Tournament. There are no off-beats in Quake - just an endless burst of adrenalin. And, as such, the multiplayer component of the Quake IV package is very much of the not broke/don't fix mentality.

And so it was that my playtest took in all the hallmarks of the last iteration of Quake deathmatch. Levels that bear no relation whatsoever to real world usage, neon lighting, primary colours, floating weapons and power-ups, tightly designed levels with several clear thoroughfares back and forth, jump-pads that throw you through the air and encourage (that holy-of-holies) the mid-air rail-gun frag: they're all back. Even favourite levels from Quake III are making a return - albeit with what Willits calls "neat little twists" and recast with the Doom 3 engine. "It's all about continuing that competitive, skill-based action," Willits explains. "There are lots of games that we play at work that are really, really fun. Lots of them. But if you happen to get in the bigger tank then you're simply going to win. But when you're playing Quake, well then it's just all about the skill."

This was certainly true in what we played - for the most part a level entitled The Fragging Ground. It was CTF in its purest form: two symmetrical bases with passages running between them and a concourse in its centre replete with jump-pads and power-ups, the action ebbing and flowing between attack and defence. In terms of weapons, the plasma gun and BFG 10k are out (presumably returned to the Doom universe where they belong) and replaced with the spiffy dark matter gun and (in a throwback to the Quake of old) a handy nail-gun. The tight balancing, however, remains the same if - in my opinion at least - slightly tweaked away from former benefits given by higher-end weapons. In the right hands the trusty rail-gun, however, still reigns supreme.

BOX OF DELIGHTS
Whereas in Doom 3 the multiplayer felt at best like a failed experiment, and at worst a tacked-on afterthought, many punters will buy Quake IV for the multiplayer alone. It's about as original as those new Doritos packets that open longways instead of at the top (still tasting as nice as they ever did, I might add) but it remains a remarkably solid second string to the Quake IV bow. But what about the first string? Is the FPS war between the marines and the Strogg going to be any cop? If I may, I'd like to approach this in two ways. First by addressing those who got bored in Doom 3 (I know you exist, I got your letters) and then with everyone together as one big happy throng of gamers.

First group, please come this way. Quake IV feels a lot like Doom 3, this much cannot be denied. It has the same video links, similar interior environments, bodies that disappear into green stuff in the same way that imps burned away into red stuff, computers that are operated in the same manner and a general structure to its run-and-gun sections that is resolutely familiar. From what I've played, if Quake 4 were to be at a teenage party where a bottle of schnapps has been purloined from a parent's drinks cabinet, then it would without a shadow of a doubt end up copping off with the Mean Green Marine's Martian Adventures in the corner... while Far Cry and Half-Life 2 sit on the couch being a bit more sophisticated and pretending that they've smoked cigarettes loads of times before. This is hardly a newsflash - Doom and Quake are from the same engine and pretty much the same stable after all - but it is worth pointing out that some of those with chainsaws to grind against Doom 3 might not be in the right frame of mind for Quake IV either. Right, the others can come in now.

YOU ARE NOT ALONE
The very nature of Quake IV - that of high action and invasion - means that it's far more varied than id's last offering. From the Aliens-style jumpship opening and subsequent crash landing onwards, the player is surrounded by other marines - both to fight alongside in squads and to watch die in hideous ways. While opening a door in Doom 3 would invariably prompt a scripted 'jump point', opening a Quake 4 door results in sequences that involve marines either getting mangled or pulling off some particularly nifty gunplay. There's always stuff going on to grab your attention - a real cinematic edge - and what claustrophobic solitary adventurings there are deep in the guts of the Strogg war machine are neatly interspersed with hurtling around wide open spaces on the surface in Halo-esque hovertanks and battling alongside other members of Rhino Squad. You also come across a Badger Squad, but needless to say they're not quite as cool.

The heavily publicised 'evil car factory' sequence in which your struggling body enters the Stroggification process after capture is also set to add to variety within the gameplay, since after the excellently presented slicing, dicing and multi-amputation carried out on your body you come out a far different proposition than you were when you went in...

In short, Quake IV single-player won't be rocket science - it just revels in its sci-fi stereotypes, from the "Who's this guy? He could get us all killed!" opening all the way through to the Aliens/Riddick-styled walker that you stomp about in later in the game fighting giant Strogg spider robots. It's the sort of game that'll have you happily shutting down the higher parts of your brain that millions of years of evolution have sought to create, just so that the part of you that enjoys explosions, gore, unremitting action and that unquantifiably musky scent of men in serious trouble can be given free rein.

For me though, in terms of excitement the multiplayer just edges it. You forget, you really do, but multiplayer Quake is like the deathmatch version of Heinz Big Soup - big, chunky, satisfying and running through your system as fast as lightning. Amazingly enough, at the time of writing there's a new build in the id offices that's running 20 per cent faster than the already hyper-nifty version I played three days ago. And I'm still buzzing, I really am. You should have seen me when I pulled my act back together - two rail-gun kills and a frag from the spinning melee blade of my gauntlet prompting a "That's it man, you're on fire!" from the id guru standing behind me. Of course he might have been talking to the guy sitting on the machine next to me, or even to someone who had come into the room and happened to be burning. It didn't matter though, my manhood had been reclaimed. The joys of Quake deathmatch are coming back to the ascendancy...

PC Zone Staff