on 9 June 2006
Has it really been ten years? In the summer of 1996, id Software’s Quake changed gaming forever. The same team’s Wolfenstein 3D and Doom had allowed players to roam 3D worlds for the first time, but Quake’s network mode was something else again. As well as battling through an HP Lovecraft-inspired storyline, players could slash, shoot and rocket each other into small pieces in a selection of beige arenas. Internet gaming would take a while longer to kick off properly, but on an office network – bliss was it in that lunchtime to be alive. Or, at regular intervals, dead.
Nominally the fourth game in the series, Quake 4 is the first sequel. Quake III Arena, released in 1999, was multiplayer-only, going head to head with Epic Games’ Unreal Tournament and, frankly, getting its arse kicked. Quake II, which got a mixed reception, adopted a new scenario from the original, switching from gothic fantasy to science fiction. We now continue where it left off, but with a new protagonist.
As Marine Matthew Kane, you arrive on the home planet of the Strogg, where you go up against their fiendish defences, getting captured en route and hideously transfigured in a way that would be as shocking as it was dramatic if it hadn’t been explained in the blurb. Anyway, the scenario is all a bit more Counter-Strike/Call of Duty this time around. A cinematic opening segues straight into first-person action, with your fellow soldiers explaining the situation and giving you orders. The characters are drawn in some detail, both visually and psychologically, and the most atmospheric moments are those when conversations and events involving other Marines are happening around you. As in previous id games, music and sound effects are well integrated.
This all helps to create a movie-like feel, but not entirely in a good way. The more the characters talk to you, the more unnatural it feels that you can’t talk to them. They’ll bark orders, swear under their breath, panic when appropriate, and make sarcastic remarks if you’re slow, but they won’t move to let you past or react if you shoot them. The Strogg are even dumber, lumbering around like extras in a pantomime.
A rigidly linear storyline doesn’t help. You wander about until you meet someone who gives you an objective, then wander about until you’re told you’ve completed it, shooting whatever moves on the way. To relieve the claustrophobia, there are outdoor sequences where you get to drive heavy vehicles and blast massive spacecraft out of the sky. These are fun, but even more linear, like a ghost train ride, and the gameplay isn’t quite responsive enough to let you really lose yourself in the action.
That criticism applies in some degree to the whole game. Developed by Raven Software, Quake 4 is based on the engine from id’s Doom 3. As we said of that game, graphics aren’t everything, even if your Mac can do justice to them. On our 2.1GHz G5 iMac with 1.5GB RAM, Quake 4 defaulted to its lowest quality settings. That was a bit pessimistic: when we turned off energy saving and restarted, the game proved playable at 1024×768 with high-quality effects and some anti-aliasing, and looked pretty good on it, although the frame rate occasionally dropped to single figures in heavy action. Even at low settings, however, performance wasn’t seamless. A foe leaping out from the darkness just doesn’t give you the same adrenaline rush after a half-second delay.
Unless you’re a complete newbie, you’ll progress through quite a few levels without having any reason to die. Even when bigger enemies arrive, they go down quite straightforwardly. There’s a degree of strategy involved in choosing between your weapons, a familiar arsenal that gains various upgrades as you progress, but little real problem-solving to be done and only limited interaction with your environment. Later, to be fair, things do get more interesting.
And so to multi-player. What can we say? It’s a multi-player first person shooter. The railgun is the preferred weapon, great if you’re into pinpoint accuracy; rocket launcher fans may not be so impressed by the mushy effort on offer. You can play deathmatch or capture the flag. That’s if you can find anyone to play with. We logged on at what should have been a fairly busy time, and found a grand total of ten active games, all but two empty. Not exactly a vibrant online community. A dedicated server app is included to run your own games, but bizarrely there are no bots to practise against or fill out a match.
We’re too jaded to give this more than three out of five. Don’t let us put you off: the single-player story has its moments, and multi-player is OK. We’d just have liked to see something more coherent and compelling under a name that inspires such heady nostalgia.
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