The biggest criticism of Doom 3 was that it was essentially the world's longest linear and indoor corridor. True, the game did create a scary atmosphere that was straight out of a hellish nightmare, but it didn't really showcase the engine, nor was the gameplay terribly revolutionary.
So, the goal with Quake 4 was to show off what the Doom engine was truly capable of. The game would involve waging an epic war with your fellow Marines against the Strogg in vast open terrain complete complete with tanks, walkers, space ships, and gigantic monsters. At least, that's what I remember reading years ago when the game was first announced.
Years later, as I get around to finally playing all these games and crossing them off my list, I found Quake 4 to be an enjoyable single player FPS, albeit with a forgettable and completely un-noteworthy multiplayer (death match only). I guess if QuakeWars had a single player campaign, it would be Quake 4. I thought that the game did start out capturing the feeling of fighting in a war really well. But then as the levels progressed it would often degenerate into Doom 3 solo corridor crawls. I thought, "damn, if only they had stuck to keeping this as a squad based FPS with vehicles". But they didn't and its a shame. Hell, I remember feeling the exact same thing when I played Command and Conquer Renegade back in the day. The entire game feels like its struggling to figure out what it's supposed to be.
Sometimes I feel like I'm playing a horror game. In the Strogg medical facilities, I fought off hordes of zombies in a dimly lit blood drenched medical waste processing facility that store the mutilated corpses of the botched Strogg experiments. My heart was pounding and I was having some serious Doom 3 flashbacks.
Other times, it felt like more of a feel good shoot em up, ie serious sam. On the tram rail level, I'm riding a tram car outside in a big bright canyon and mowing down legions of pursuing enemy Strogg with a mounted turret. A casual, fun and mindless shoot em up mission! The general trend appeared to be that anytime there was indoor fighting, there would be very little lighting and plenty of tense and scary moments, and anytime the fighting was outdoors or when it involved vehicles, it was a lot less frightening.
Not surprisingly, the story is pretty forgettable, but that's ok. Its a sequel to Quake 2 and a simple tale of good (Humans) vs evil (Strogg). Sadly, you do not get to play the hero from Quake 2 who destroyed the Big Gun and defeated the Makron. Instead you are Matthew Kane, of the elite Rhino Squad. Neither Kane nor Rhino squad are mentioned in Quake 2, but soldiers seem to be in awe and reverence of you for your past exploits - kinda like how everyone kissed Gordon Freeman's ass in Half Life 2 - except you have no idea what these exploits are. The opening scene starts off with a zoomed in view of a marine's face. It slowly starts to pan out and you realize the marine is missing half his face. After some more panning you see he's missing the lower half of his body as well. This lovely scene is a taste of the gore to follow. A bunch of drop ships then begin their descent to the Strogg homeworld, only to get shot down by the anti air defenses, a scene that has played out before in Quake 2 and its various mission packs before. Those silly humans never learn.
After crash landing on the planet, you receive your first objective from Sergeant Morris, who tells you to rendezvous with the rest of the squad. From here on out, you will be assigned missions in game from various people. The more epic missions are explained via cutscenes, but the large majority of them unravel in real time, which is great for pacing. I'm not a big fan of cutscenes advancing the story anyway, especially after playing the Half Life series and seeing how it could be done without any at all. Anyway, everything is just a thinly veiled excuse to start killing stuff. Hey, no complaints here!
There is plenty to kill. You've got all your standard enemy types in an FPS. In addition to the standard humanoid Strogg soldier armed with a machine gun, you've got short, fast and heavily armored grunts that engage in meelee. These are joined by tall, fast and heavily armored berserkers that engage in meelee. Their slower counterpart, the gladiator, are tall and heavily armored as well, armed with a shoulder mounted railgun and protected by an energy shield. There are quite a few more baddies in the game, and they will all give you a run for your money, to speak nothing of the boss fights. These involve epic battles against giant monstrosities that tower above you.
The harvester is a giant arachnid robot that shoots homing missiles at you. Ouch.
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The Network Monstrosity is a hideously deformed beast that stalks you for the last levels in the game, before engaging in a final showdown with you on the top of the Strogg processing towers.
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And the Markon, who was defeated in Quake 2, reprises his role as one of the final bosses. Good times!
Luckiy, you will have the same bread and butter weapons from Quake 2 to help you defeat the bad guys. You even get access to the lightning gun from the original Quake! Better yet, at certain points in the game, various squad mates will mod your weapons for you. For example, you are able to lock on to targets with your nailgun after a technician upgrades it. Taking a cue from the complaints about Doom 3 about having to switch between the flash light and the weapon, your standard machine gun has a duct tape mod - no more fumbling about in the darkness for a light.
Unfortunately, the BFG does not make an appearance in this game. A shame. Its replaced by an anti matter gun which shoots out this black ball that sucks in surrounding enemies and then explodes.
Squad mates surprisingly are useful. I did not play at the hardest difficulty, so they seemed to be fairly resilient. Hell, they even know how to use cover. Medics even heal you and technicians repair your armor. Perhaps they die quicker in the harder difficulty levels, but I did not have any issues. Hence the escort missions are actually enjoyable, instead of becoming the horrifying babysitting nightmares they become in other games. I would have liked it, however if I had squad mates with me for most of the game. As is, you spend more time alone than you do in a team. Your buddies will often be separated from you for a number of contrived reasons: they are recalled back, you are recalled back, they need you to go off on your own to investigate something, etc. It seems kind of silly that with a major war going on, that they'd let soldiers go solo. I mean, I'll go through all this effort in an escort mission, and then they'll recall me back, and leave him there all by himself? and this is after we had just fought through a legion of bad guys, indicating that this is an unsafe area with a large number of hostiles? WTF?
The vehicles in the game are great and give the levels variety. Its definitely a nice change of pace. There is a set of back to back levels where you get to use the tank, and a set of levels where you get to use the mech. Both have regenerating shields and hit points. In other missions, you ride in vehicles such as an APC or a tram car and control the mounted gun turret, and get to blast away with impunity at the bad guys. Unfortunately, you don't get to control any flying vehicles, but given the restrictive feel of the levels, I'm not surprised.
After playing the game, I'm not really convinced the Doom 3 engine is good at large outside areas. The outdoor levels still felt confined and small, and you can't help but notice all the boundaries and borders that restrict exploration. This is due in part to the linearity of the level design. You're presented with very few choices in terms of places to explore or how to beat a mission: there is only one path from point A to point B. However, because the game is so enjoyable, it really isn't really an issue here. So at the end of the day, it was a great game, but its not something I would probably play again anytime soon. The replay value is especially limited given the lackluster and unimaginative multiplayer.
