Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

1. Official Site
2. Platform: 360
3. Publisher: Activision Blizzard
4. Developer: Nerve Software
5. Release Date: 05/27/08
6. Genre: Action/Adventure

by Mitch Youngblood

A friend of mine recently asked what criteria I used to justify my opinion on video games. He was miffed because my lengthy excoriation of GTA IV in no way matched his shining praise of it, or really any of the lavish praise heaped upon it by the media at large, yet the lone fact he was unable to reconcile was that my opinion was simply that: My opinion.

I told him it was quite simple. Since I’ve played every type of game across every type of genre for the better part of two decades, I’ve seen enough to know the ins and outs of what every game has to offer with less than an hour of play time. As with all things, when you have enough experience in a field it grows increasingly difficult to be surprised. Game developers seem far less inclined to take risks or grow their industry due to rising costs across multiple platforms, which translates (again, in my opinion) to an eventual homogenization on par with that of the film industry.

Here’s what frightens me about that: The film industry is already on track to become as homogenized and cannibalistic as the music industry and if that happens, I’m out. It’s the utter stifling of innovation which borders on soul crushing that I find the most aggravating aspect of most current games, and I go back to the point that I’ve played everything for 20 years and damn well know what I’m talking about.

So when a dud like Enemy Territory: Quake Wars hits my desk I can peg it as such within 10 minutes of turning it on because, again, I’ve seen enough to know what’s good and what’s bad. This is some very weak mojo right here, ladies and gentlemen, and Activision continues to prove that it doesn’t know what to do with the Quake brand.

By this point, mocking the color brown in a Quake game is a moot point. Everything in the series universe is some variation on brown, grey, or black. It’s like developers are cribbing from an id Software playbook which mandated back in '97 that all installments in the franchise could only include any and all shades of these three colors.

At first, I was excited when I saw one of the campaigns was set in the Pacific. It may have been presumptuous to assume these three maps would have varied at all from the color palette but I did. I was therefore not surprised when the game conformed to exactly the same color scheme as before. While the campaign locations may change, the overall aesthetic never does and remains as boring as ever.

The characters are pretty blocky as well. Some of the details on their skins might have been impressive five years ago, but pales when compared to current generation shooters. If there’s one complaint from this reviewer on the game as a whole it’s that ET: QW is about three years too late to the market. It doesn’t look very good, the characters are stiff, the levels recycle the same details again and again and again, and there is exactly zero in the way of eye candy.

I’m not an eye candy type of guy. I shy away from games that are all visuals but zero substance. Yet if a game shows up late and is this unattractive, then it bloody well better have a great personality or the date’s gonna be over long before desert ever reaches the table.

Ahh, the sweet melancholy sounds of sniper fire, of Strogg war machines gently stomping across the ground, of rockets lazily blasting through the air... and all the while you’re sitting there thinking, "why does this not sound more exciting?" Simple: Because it isn’t. The game feels like it was made by the mod community. There is little in the way of polish and I would frankly be astonished that a major publisher would put this out were I not already cynical of that same publisher’s motives.

There are plenty of other reasons why the game fails, but for now let’s discuss this one in particular. The lack of solid sound effects means the scale and stakes of the war fail to resonate with the player. The Strogg have invaded Earth and players are expected to either save it or conquer it. Fair enough. But how is it that when I’m running through a barren map, in theory loaded with either bots or fellow players, that all of the guns sound like pop guns and all of the explosions sound like fireworks?

Seriously guys. This is an alien invasion by a race of cybernetic monsters that make the Borg look like the Boy Scouts, and you’re telling me that these limp effects were the best you could come up with? For the sake of comparison, I threw on the fantastic and vastly underrated Quake 4, a terrific title that Activision stupidly released the exact same day that 15 other AAA titles all hit, and just listened. Guns on both sides roared with fury. Explosions sounded like they would tear you apart if you were just an inch closer to them when they went off. Each opposing force had respective sound effects that immersed the player into a conflict where the fate of the galaxy was at stake.

So why are none of those sound effects in a game that ostensibly focuses on the origins of that very same conflict?

The controls are pretty basic as this is after all a first-person shooter. Use the thumbsticks to point your weapon in the direction of the bad guys and pull the trigger to take care of BLAM! Sniper again. Respawn back at the base. Fifteen seconds from now. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting some more.

While I’m waiting, I may as well bring up the point that the response time on a console handset pales in comparison to the mouse/keyboard combination favored by most gamers over the age of 18. As bizarre as it is to find myself on the other side of the glass, I realize that a generation weaned on console video games is woefully underprepared when thinking that’s how first person shooters are played. I can understand this because it was a long while before people explained that the use of a mouse can better aid in precision sniping. Up to that point, I was simply using a keyboard while racking up unheard of scores in Quake.

On the 360, players use the shoulder buttons to cycle between two different sets of equipment. The one on the right is your list of available weapons while the one on your left is the list of items or tools unique to the respective classes. The A button jumps, the B Button crouches, the X button reloads, and the Y button mounts vehicles. And I’m going to leave you with that image while moving on to the rather lifeless gameplay.

The gameplay for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars boils down to a simplistic theme: Kill them before they kill you. Simple, right? Both sides are given a set of objectives and through a mixed crew of soldiers, snipers, medics, engineers, and special forces, seek to push far enough into the enemy’s territory to achieve each goal before time runs out. This give-and-take results in each team being at the other’s throat through the whole of the match, and should provide, in theory, an exciting battle of wills.

The only thing the game results in is a cure for insomnia. If you want to know how an action-based multiplayer game can put you to sleep, follow me through a single mission wherein I recount the blow-by-blow nature of the game.

I fire up the game and choose the North African campaign to start. I choose to be an Engineer because I like building things, and the mission starts loading. My squad and I parachute into a small base, then we all hop onto the available vehicles (Hummers and four-wheelers), then speed through the gate headed towards the enemy lines, conveniently marked by a giant red line cutting across the map like a bloody scar. We get maybe 40 or 50 feet from the entrance before rockets fly into us and all of us die instantly.

I scratch vehicles off "To Do" list as I respawn back at the base. I opt to head out on foot this time. I make it about 35 feet this time before I notice a translucent greenish silhouette. I approach it then pull out my trusty wrench, and build a tower. Cool! So I climb the tower and there is a hefty mounted machine gun. Neat! We’re getting somewhere! BAM!

Taken out by a sniper. Respawn back at the base. Move out again. Get to the tower. Turn right and head around the barracks. Ooooh! A back way to enemy lines! Alright!

I make it to the end of the barracks and I actually take out a Strogg sentry with my pathetically weak gun and the equally weak targeting system. But at least I scored a kill. Then I walk through the building and come face to face with a MASSIVE Strogg battle mech taken straight out of Warhammer. I feel the Strogg smirking in the mech before it fires a volley of missiles at my face. Respawn time. Something about this clearly isn’t working. Maybe if I altered my tactics...?

Before respawning, players have the option to change which character class they come in as. So I switched to Soldier thinking I might live longer. I press our non-existent advantage with my mates. We push the Strogg back to the next checkpoint, i.e. obtain our first objective, and I begin to notice a trend. The checkpoints, i.e. goals, are not clearly explained. The first one is to get the MCV to point X. Okay then. Where’s the MCV…? Oh, the giant vehicle thing that tears off at the beginning and gets blown up halfway there but is surprisingly tough to find even with a small mini-map! Shouldn’t be too hard to keep up wi... BAM!

Death by sniper. Respawn back at the base. Wait, where’d the MCV go and why is the game telling me it’s broken down and that I need to respawn as an Engineer to fix it? Can’t one of the bots do that? Or one of the other players? For that matter, when I die I have the chance to wait for a medic to heal me yet no one else wants to play as a medic because it’s easier to just respawn and jump back into the fray, thus rendering an entire class useless.

So I try other maps. I meet the exact same style of resistance from the foes who all have killer aim, even on Easy, and the friendlies who have zero sense of teamwork and even less clues on how to fight correctly. I get the feeling that the entire teamwork aspect of the bots is window dressing to give players the sense that the game is about more than just them by themselves versus continuously respawning enemies.

One would think there would be a natural ebb and flow to this sort of game, but none of that exists. The maps are intricately designed around a series of chokepoints and whoever has the biggest guns pointed at the chokepoint is going to make life hell for the other team. This would be considered fun five years ago before map makers developed an imagination and began thinking outside the box. Chokepoints are cool for small contained maps or specific game types. This style is not what you build a game around in current times.

Look at Call of Duty 4 as an example on how to do multiplayer object-based gameplay correct. The maps are expansive while giving players plenty of options on where to go and how to achieve their goals. ET: QW devolves into a slugfest with luck deciding more often than not who controls a checkpoint for long. I’ll point out again that had this come out five, or even three, years ago it might have been fun. As it stands now, the game is poorly executed, not fun, and been eclipsed by another of Activision’s own titles.

One last thing. As I played every class in the game, I continually achieved… something. Class-specific goals would be my guess. Power-ups, maybe. But for the life of me I could not tell what benefit my Special Forces character obtained from scanning the dead Strogg/Humans I killed, nor did my Engineer become noticeably faster the more structures I built. There is no intuition in the game beyond point and shoot. It seems as if there is more going on but the game never educates you on what the extras are. Before you bring it up, the training mission illustrates how to play the basic game without filling in the extra details necessary to these little power-ups.

One would assume these level-ups are meant solely for the purpose of unlocking achievements, because they never, ever affect the core gameplay inherent to the classes. My three-star engineer did not repair tanks any faster than my beginner engineer did. My soldier did not shoot better or more accurately at three stars than when he was fresh to the war. This results in yet something else that is ultimately pointless, much like the game itself.

Funny enough, that’s how I viewed the game even after playing it for several hours. Point, shoot, repeat. Switch sides then point, shoot, repeat again. The gaming industry is past this and we the public expect more from its shooters. ET: QW feels like it got caught with its pants down while the industry moved forward, and Activision shipped it anyway. Vote with your wallet and ignore this flaccid, weak excuse for a game.

Also, for those of you wondering where the multiplayer portion of the review is... so am I. I tried to get on quite a few times but never could get a game going (my wireless connection is not the most ideal for hosting purposes). The one time I came closest was when a grand total of five (count ‘em!) people were online and only one of them was hosting. The host, however, would not activate which left us all sitting there ready to go for 10 minutes straight while waiting for him to wake up/sober up/get back from errands/stop licking himself.

Which never happened. It’s also not exactly inspiring to realize the number of people playing your game online can be reached using the fingers of one hand.

If you’re into some achievements then this is definitely not a game for you. Also if you’re into fun multiplayer games this is not for you. Basically the game sucks the life out of you because the banalities inherent to each class and map are such that a potentially grand experience in an intriguing universe is utterly wasted.

This is not a natural ambivalence toward the universe, either. The Strogg-Human conflict has the potential to be a heck of a story, one that only Quake 4 has thus far fully realized. Granted, ET: QW was never going to be story based and that’s fine. But it could have utilized some degree of creativity in its maps and character balancing to make the game fun.

Heck, after two hours of play I would have settled for enjoyable.

ET: QW is not fun, period. Regardless of which class you play as and whether it’s against bots or living people, the game just isn’t fun. There is little in the way of balance, the medic class is completely useless, the maps funnel teams into one bottle neck after another thus making it far too easy for one team to resoundingly dominate the other, and so forth. It’s not an epic failure of a game, but it’s not an interesting one and it squanders a tremendous amount of potential.

Had this game arrived three years ago when it was still on the cusp of relevancy, ET:QW might have been the last gasp of multiplayer-based first-person shooters before finding itself replaced by the next generation of shooters. As it now stands, a generational shift has already happened, yet no one thought to clue in the developers. ET:QW is so late to the party that the party has already moved on to another venue and the only thing the game can do is sit there on the shelf collecting dust.

Or pick up the check and shuffle off into the void from whence it came.

Gaming Trend Score

58

1. Graphics: 70
2. Audio: 70
3. Controls: 80
4. Gameplay: 50
5. Value/Replay: 30
6. OVERALL:58