Review: Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

It's been about eight months since Enemy Territory: Quake Wars came out on the PC, and though many were hoping for a real engrossing and thrilling upgrade as it came to the Microsoft Xbox 360 and the Sony PlayStation 3, few really got all that they had hope for, and some might have even been left a little disappointed.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is a classic team-based multiplayer first-person shooter where two warring factions battle it out for territory. You have the Earth forces, the GDF troops or as I like to call them, the good guys and you have the Strogg, or as I refer to them as the bad guys.

The game opens with a trailer that describes the situation as the Strogg – part flesh and part machine that destroy and consume anything that stands in their way – have found their way to Earth. My first thought was, “Great…first we have the Democrats, and now we have the Strogg to deal with too!”

There are online multiplayer modes of play as well as the off-line campaign mode of play for those who wish to get their feet wet with bots first. You will fight through four regions starting in Africa, then North America, North Europe, and lastly in the Pacific. Each region gives you three maps to battle in and there are three difficulty settings allowing you to hone your skills. You will use the same maps in the Multiplayer games with up to eight players on each side, with bots filling the ranks of the empty slots. You can also start out in the training mode to get the hang of the game should you choose to do so.

There are several kinds of vehicles throughout the maps allowing you to quickly get across the map but I had an issue with some of the vehicles. It seems weird to me that you would be able to take out a tank with enough small arms fire trained on it, but in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars it's possible. This seems to me to be an inappropriate use of physics but I guess that's just what Nerve envisioned for their game.

There are five classes of soldier on each side. For GDF troops it is Soldier, Medic, Engineer, Field Ops, and Covert Ops. On the Strogg site you have about the same type of classes but with different names; Aggressor, Technician, Construction, Oppressor, and Infiltrator. Since each mission is objective-based, to accomplish the objective you might need to blow up a bridge and so to do that you would need explosive charges and would need to be a Soldier. Or you might need to hack the enemy base central core and so need to be a Covert Ops or Infiltrator. Or maybe you want to support the mission and so you might be an Engineer or Construction to repair equipment or build defensive turrets, or maybe a Medic or Technician to heal your teammates.

One of the challenges I also had was in the single player mode, Campaign where I found that the bots AI didn't really seem to work as well as a team as I might have liked it too. I would call for a medic and see one charging right towards me on a quad runner only to see him drive right past me instead of stop and heal me. I was also disappointed by the fact that there seemed to be no way to track the upgrades in the classes in the 360 version of the game. I know that you can earn upgrades to your classes but I just could not find any screen to track that advancement. Maybe that will come later in the next patch.

For the most part, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars incorporated some great graphics and rather large maps which also equated to some rather long loading times. The audio was not too bad but was nothing extremely special. But the physics were interesting. I say interesting because I believe that they could use a little tweaking here and there. When you can kill tanks with small arms fire, you might have an issue. I also saw issues when many spent more time returning to the battlefield from respawn than they did on the battlefield itself. That can have a tendency to spoil much of the fun of the game when you can't be in the action because you are too busy trying to get back to the action.

So overall, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is a good game spawned of great stock. It had the dream of greatness but just couldn't quite reach the mark. Yes it is a fun game when you get together with you friends and play on a Saturday night, but I just don't see this being an EVERY Saturday night activity. Many will go through it once and that will be enough for them. It's a good game where enough glitches, a few bugs, some long loading times, and some funky physics kept the game from achieving the hoped-for greatness that many of us had also hoped for.

Score: 7.8 (out of 10)

Published by: Activision

Developed by: Nerve Software / Splash Damage

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Genre: First-Person Shooter

Number of Players: 1-16

ESRB Rating: "T" for mild blood, mild language, and violence

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