Genre: FPS
Publisher: Activision
Developer: Raven Software
Release Date: November 18, 2005

Buy 'QUAKE 4': X360 | PC | PC Special Edition

The Bloodiest Tech Demo … Ever

Id Software. Heard of them, have you? They're the good people who revolutionized gaming with Doom way back when; you know – the game that everyone on TV always mentions whenever a kid who wears lots of black does something bad. Fast forward 10 years and five different graphics engines and deathmatching and broadband connections to this year's incarnation of Id's formula: Quake 4. Quake 4 goes back to finish the "story" that began in Quake 2. Quake 3 Arena was a straight tourney-style game without the Strogg or Space Marines.

This time around, Id Software and Raven have sought to dismantle the reputation that Id can only do deathmatching and focused on a game with a compelling single-player experience. No matter the result, Id has evolved the Doom 3 engine, which gives Raven quite a palette to do a great many things. The Doom 3 engine makes use of a new technology called Mega Textures, which, like Quake 3's Nurbs and Doom 3's normal mapping, are not the easiest things to explain. Keeping it in layman's terms, Mega Textures are not your simple texture maps that give the polygons color and tone; they also contain information crucial to calculating light reflection, refraction, texture, density and physical characteristics that determine how each object interacts in terms of its physics modeling.

Mega Textures also just that, mega. You can take a Mega Texture of a desert landscape and wrap it over a very large area, and the texture will also know to give off dust clouds if someone's running or driving over the surface, and that a certain amount of light will reflect off of rocks and dirt in the texture. It makes for some complicated stuff to explain and understand, but the results are unmistakable. Compare Quake 4 to Doom 3, and you'll have a difficult time seeing that these games are really built off of very similar engines. Quake 4 is wide open, with massive creatures and vehicles, while Doom 3 is constricted and laden with ambience. The evolution really makes sense, as the Doom 3 engine was aimed at being able to create extremely realistic character models using translucent texturing and normal mapping, which created a realness and density to a person's skin not yet seen in gaming. Id simply took the premise one step further and applied it to landscapes and architecture rather than just people and creatures.

So what does this all mean? Quake 4 looks rather impressive. From the outset, things are being fought across a wide-open battlefield, and the design choices and values can be directly seen in the likes of Call of Duty, with massive set piece battles that serve as interactive cinematic moments. The game opens with what you think is your character looking out of a window and out into space…only it's not your character, and he's not looking into space, he's floating across it, with half a head and his guts tumbling out of his stomach. I smiled at this and felt and instantly good first impression.

Panning around, you see a warship that reminded me of the Sulaco from Aliens and ships like it moving straight for a not-too-distant planet, which incidentally is the Strogg Homeworld. Cut to the ship's interior, and Marines are running into a dropship that reminded me of the cool dropship from Aliens and the Marine Sergeant barked at his boys just like Sergeant Apone from Aliens. All that remained was for someone to say "I've got a bad feeling about this drop" for the homage to turn into a straight rip-off.

Then taking a page from Starship Troopers, the dropships peel off from their warships and make a run for the surface; bright blue bolts of dripping plasma pulse from the planet's surface and into space, and wouldn't you know it, your ship gets hit. The cinematic fades out into a Call of Duty-esque scene where you fade in and out of consciousness with your squadmates shouting and shooting around you; your vision is blurred, and your hearing is dampened from a concussion. I'd say that five years ago, this series of events would have greatly impressed me. Today, I am left shrugging my shoulders and wondering what happened to the great deal of anticipation the game's first image gave me.

This is where Quake 4 starts. You begin with the ubiquitous pistol until you find yourself a rifle, and along the way, you meet your squad's medic and have to escort him to your squad from the outside of a very human-looking complex and into some dark corridors, where you are jumped by some of the game's lower-end grunts. From here, you can see the Doom 3 engine's indoor and outdoor capabilities, which impress the eyes and ears. Light sourcing and texturing both look phenomenal, and the map's architecture are complex and realistic and feel authentic, but I wonder why things looked so human if this is supposed to be the Strogg Homeworld.

Things are different when it comes to looking at character models up-close. The Marines all look very generic and static; they come in white, tan or brown and their uniforms look identical, but it's their faces that really leave much to be desired. Normal mapping does wonders for making a person's skin look textured and dense – you can see it in all of EA Sports 360 games (the one thing those games did well) – but here, the Marines looks pallid and flat, decidedly lacking in character and substance. They all stand the same way, move the same way, and look the same, except for some minor textures like mustaches or maybe a scar here and there. The Strogg don't suffer from this so much because you usually don't get a long, undisturbed up-close look at them, but they too all look and move the same.

Quake 4's story progresses and, without giving away too much (as if there is much to give away), you do get a big plot twist which was nice. You see, the Strogg are like the Borg from Star Trek (noticing anything yet?), and they assimilate their vanquished foes into more Strogg. To make a long story short, you get yourself assimilated in what transpires as a nice little scene and makes for a nice little story development. It echoes Senator Joe McCarthy's sentiment about combating Communism, "To defeat the Communists, we must become like them." I suppose it makes for a better gameplay device than it does a political ethos, but I digress.

While Quake 4 makes use of successful narrative devices to create a storyline to fight along, it is the actual fighting that really takes a tumble. This is the seventh iteration of Id's franchise, and the seventh game plays like the first; in fact, it doesn't play all that different from Castle Wildenstein. You run forward, strafe left to right, aim and shoot an assortment of bullets and rockets, and carry as many as five different weapons and hundreds of rounds for each of them. You cannot go prone. You cannot lean from behind corners. You cannot use binoculars. Your assault rifle can double as a sniper rifle if you aim. One thing you do get to do this time around is drive vehicles like tanks and jeeps, but Halo and Halo 2 and Unreal Tournament 2004 and Battlefield and Battlefront let you do that too, and quite frankly, those games let you do it better. A flat storyline populated by nonentities and a soulless enemy can be forgivable, but flat and soulless gameplay is not.

Quake 4 stops being interesting about 15 minutes after the first cinematic ends. There is no subtlety or nuance to Quake 4, and before anyone shouts "It's Quake, what do you expect?!" recall Call of Duty 2, which is both frenetic, fast-paced, and yet still remains engaging and complex. Running around, pointing, and shooting simply doesn't cut it anymore. Even mainstream gamers are too savvy for a gameplay model that is so outmoded by more imaginative game design. As dull as the single-player game is, Id and Raven left the multiplayer game for Quake Wars: Enemy Territory to fill that void. All of Quake 4's multiplayer can be pretty much summed up as team Deathmatch using blandly balanced weapons and no classes, team play or objective-based game modes.

What Quake 4 really amounts to is, and this sounds harsh, a tech demo for Id's middleware. Now that EA has bought Criterion Studios, the makers of the most widely used middleware application Renderware, and Epic Studios is showing off a very impressive Unreal 3 engine (which many developers are purchasing rights to use as you read this), Id is really looking to secure its future in the industry by licensing out the newer Doom 3 engine because the last rendition of the engine can only do indoor environments, and that's too limiting.

Quake 4 can do inside, outside, particle lighting, normal mapping, mega textures and a whole host of other features, and Id is hoping that developers see this game and marvel at what they can do with the technology rather than hoping that they've created a game that is fun to play. There's not much for Raven to create around when Id is more concerned with creating a technology that can generate really impressive visuals on current hardware. It's all technology first, game second, and that's sad because in the end, the gamer who's put down 50 to 60 dollars on this game is the one who is suffering.

To compound the disappointment of Quake 4's retread gameplay, the game uses just about every science fiction cliché and plot device one can think of. If there was a popular science fiction movie or idea that you can recall, there's reference to it in Quake 4. While Id has focused solely on making things look impressive, Raven has focused solely on making things sound, look and feel like anything else that was once cool. The biggest influences are definitely Aliens, Starship Troopers (even though the movie was lame, the book was awesome) and Predator. The Strogg Homeworld looks surprisingly a lot like rural countryside of Texas, and the Strogg seem to not only like using our body parts for spare parts, but they also like the way we design buildings. There's nothing mysterious or alien about them. Their tanks and walkers looked fascinating, but painfully juxtaposed to their physical forms and buildings, the walkers are sorely out of place.

Id and Raven ought to know better. With the impressive titles and gameplay feats on their resume, one could reasonably expect something new from Quake 4. It could be said that with Quake 4, the more things change, the more they stay the same, but that would mean something has changed in the first place. Perhaps it could also be said about Quake 4 and Id in general that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Quake 4 might not be broken, but it sure is boring, and if it is boring, then fix it. Id should save their tech demos for clients and think about how they can evolve their gameplay experience, not their rendering capabilities.

Score: 6.5/10