bigtruckseries's Full Review: Quake 4 for Xbox 360
Quake 4 begins directly where Quake 2 left off. Earth is at war with a race of aliens known as the Strogg and are currently in the throws of a massive invasion of their home planet Stroggos.
The Strogg are a race of cyborgs which cannibalize living organisms and assimilate them so they can make even more horrific cyborgs to bolster their numbers. In this game, the player - Mathew Kane must coordinate with other squads and Earth soldiers to infiltrate the Strogg's military industrial complex and bring their barbarism to an end.
The XBOX 360, recent PC computer technology and the DOOM 3 engine allow ID Software to do things with the "Quake" theme that they always wanted to do. Now the developers have the power to create massive environments with visuals that contain mixtures of organic and metallic entities. This is especially important because the cyborg backdrop requires it. All the creatures are a bloody mess of torn flesh and metallic implants. There are horrific experiments being done on humans (mostly involving them being disemboweled and/or having parts amputated) which the DOOM 3 engine allows the graphic designers to perfectly conceptualize. Take for instance, the nightmarish situation where Earthforce soldiers are being beheaded so that their torsos can be connected to fluid pumps to provide bio-electrical power for the Strogg facilities. These headless, limbless torsos sit there – connected to the walls - and attached to wires as they undulate and writhe in pain. Some of the scenes are so violent, you can't help but stop to stare in horror as you see helpless human beings wired into machines, being used as "batteries" - similar to the Matrix.
Some of them for instance are trying to get out by struggling - only to seemingly give up once they realize they cannot escape. Since part of the game's theme involves these victims being the power supply for Strogg machines and lighting, I think it would have been a great idea for the developers to allow you to kill the captured humans (put them out of their misery) thereby deactivating ambient lights, or nearby machines being powered by them. A great idea for Quake 5 I think!
Or take for example the bloody limbs, bones and intestines of humans strewn all throughout the bowels of the Strogg facility which are intent on showing you one thing: If the Strogg get a hold of you, they are gonna’ tear you apart!
..and eventually they DO get a hold of you. near the midpoint of the game, Kane is captured by the Strogg and forcibly amputated and then assimilated by the Strogg. Fortunately despite the pain of having his legs and arms chopped off and having a huge needle jammed into his brain - his fellow squadmates rescue him before he becomes completely under Strogg control.
Unfortunately, The stroggification of Kane is Quake 4's one trick pony. Up until and after that point in the game - Quake 4 is nothing more than "DOOM" style gameplay. You simply move forward in a linear fashion killing any and everything that is pointing a gun at you - just so you can move to the next room where you will do the same. Sure this is the essence of FPS gameplay but, after a while it starts to get old - wandering through corridors waiting for the next enemy to attack you while searching for the LCD panel that will open the next door.
Though the gameplay can feel repetitive, QUAKE 4's visuals keep the action and the suspense moving at the pace of a horror movie. The game is also kept lively by giving you plenty of squadmates to keep you company. They mention things that add to the backdrop of the story. They also do a pretty decent job of laying down covering fire while you use your more advanced and powerful weapons to gun down the Strogg’s champion bots. Your squad members typically are important since some of them act as "keys" to areas, as they are the only members of the team qualified to manipulate some doors. Many of them can offer you upgrades to your weapons, or can heal you and recharge your armor. Protecting them has its advantages.
The weapons in my opinion are a mixed bag. We get all our favorite classic guns such as the Railgun, Rocket Launcher, the Dark Matter Gun (this game’s version of the BFG) and the Shotgun. Strangely, many of the guns: the hyperblaster, the machine gun, the nailgun and the lightning gun are simply rapid fire weapons that sound powerful, yet don’t take down enemies the way we’d expect them to. For example: headshots do almost nothing in terms of collateral damage to the enemies. Weapons such as the nailgun could have been made much better if they actually pinned the enemy to the wall similar to the way they did in the original Quake game.
There are some “driving” sequences thrown into the game for good measure where you can pilot a hovertank and a bipedal robot walker, but for the most part, they are simply slower versions of straightforward FPS gun blasting.
Many reviews I have read of Quake 4 show disappointment in the game’s framerate on the system. This is mostly due to the fact that the game was adapted to the 360 within a short time to meet the 360’s launch date. After playing through the game, I was able to see some of the framerate drops, however, I felt that they were not so bad that they distracted from the gameplay. The DOOM 3 engine has problems with multiple enemies on screen at once partly due to the immense memory requirements placed on the hardware by the dynamic lighting of the environments. I experienced the same framerate drops in Quake 4 that I did in Doom 3 on the XBOX. In fact, Quake 4 looks extraordinarily reminiscent to DOOM 3 since they both share the same cyborg-horror theme. This is actually more disappointing than it sounds. At times, QUAKE 4 looks so much like DOOM 3 that you might forget which game you are playing. Just as DOOM 3 used overly dark environments to convey a sense of vulnerability, QUAKE 4 follows suite forcing you to use a flashlight to check the dark places for monsters or item pickups.
Also noticeable, comparind Doom3 to Quake4 is the lack of newer, more exciting environments. ALL Doom games and ALL Quake games seems to be composed of the same ol': Communications centers, waste processing facilities, main power reactors, and computer data bank levels.
Doom 3 tried something new by having a short stay in HELL but Quake4 doesn't offer a map as exciting as HELL or as XEN from Half Life. To its credit, most of the fighting in Quake4 takes place in well detailed, open-air environments instead of Doom3's closed cooridors.
This is mostly because the Doom 3 engine recieved criticism for not being able to handle large outdoor environments - unlike the Crytek engines.
What really, really, bothered me is how both games “dematerialize” enemies you have just killed. In Doom 3, it is claimed that the “demons” return to Hell after being killed. In Quake 4 it is claimed that the bodies are “teleported” to a processing center so they can be turned into a mulch called "Stroyent" - which is an organic substance being pumped all throughout the facility to nourish the organic components of the cyborgs.
I would much prefer I be able to closely examine all the enemies I kill to see the graphic detail that has gone into them but, to save memory, they disappear as quickly as they come. If you fire a weapon at them that does excessive damge, their bodies are "gibbed" and all that is left are blood stains and pieces of flesh no bigger than the human hand.
Quake 4’s singleplayer experience is worth a single play through. On top of that – since many people who may now have a 360 may not have ever heard of Quake 2 on the PC back in 1995, Quake 4 comes packaged with a bonus disk containing Quake 2. This way, if your willing to play through it, you can relive the first invasion of Stroggos and draw comparisons of both games past and present.
Quake 2 runs perfectly on the 3Ghz cpu of the Xbox 360 - having been designed primarily to run on a Pentium II with a 32 MB Video accelerator. The game looks just like it did on the PC in fact with a very similar play experience. The only downside is, that this game was intended to be used with a mouse & keyboard - sometimes the quick action shooting feels a little too intense for the controller.
You get an XboxLive achievment for passing each of the games 9 levels (9 achievments in all). Not much more to it than that.
After playing through Quake 2, it is easy to see that Quake 4 improves vastly on the game's theme.
Unfortunately, the multiplayer – which should have been the strongpoint of any Quake game – has remained relatively unchanged from the days of QUAKE 3. The action in multiplayer is fast. Too fast. You simply grab a gun and start unloading on the other guy mindlessly. You both spawn close to each other so the killing begins almost immediately, but, when its all over and the fraglimit is hit, the round ends abruptly and you’re left wanting for more. This is especially annoying when too many players are put in a small map (you can't choose the map you want). After you are shot in the back the 50th time, you may get frustrated.
There are no permanent servers for Quake4 like there are for Halo2 so actually finding a game with random players can take over 5 minutes on slower days. However, if you have friends with fast connections, setting up matches isn't too bad.
The multiplayer experience of QUAKE 2 was actually better than the multiplayer of both Quake 3 and Quake 4 in that the action was a bit slower and the weapons seemed more balanced, and violent. Unfortunately Quake 2 can only be played on LAN hookups and is completely left out of Xbox Live.
Probably the worst thing about the multiplayer is the CHEATING. Quake 4's Xbox live leaderboard is based on win points. You get 30 win points for being 1st place in an Endurance match and 20 Win points for being 1st place in a shorter length match. The problem is that there is a glitch in the game which allows cheaters to get 3000 win points in a single match of Capture the Flag. This means that the cheaters are easily able to "boost" their scores well beyond normally attainable point values. The Cheater DETRIMENT420 for example has over 200,000 points.
Worse yet, 2 of the games Achievements are tied to ranking in the top 10. This means that:
#1 you aren't going to reach top 10 because of the cheaters unless you cheat, and #2 the only way you'll get those achievements is by cheating so you are left with no reason not to cheat. It really sucks knowing I'll never be able to pssibly be #1. This needs to be addressed.
In Conclusion Quake 4 is a pretty good game for the Xbox360. If you can get it less than $30, it is well worth it. With a little more development time, many of the framerate issues might have been solved (or maybe not?) but, as it is, Quake 4 runs very well on the 360 and provides some great entertainment.
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