The first Enemy Territory was a real gem. The online shooter was a good time for everyone, with inventive classes, fun objective-based gameplay and a wonderful team environment. I loved it. Enemy Territory was one of the best shooters I've ever played. That's why I was more than pleased to hear about Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, and after playing for a while, I am confident that Enemy Territory: Quake Wars will live up to its namesake.

The new Enemy Territory maintains the same gameplay, for the most part. You will be choosing sides between the Humans and the Strogg, after which you get to kill enemies while fulfilling various objectives (or preventing the other team from completing their own goals). I haven't played Enemy Territory in months, but I felt right at home in Quake Wars, and I suspect that anyone else that played the original will feel equally at ease with the second one.

The game looks amazing, so much so that all of the trailers I have seen from the game have been composed of in-game footage, and rightly so, there is little that pre-rendered videos could improve upon. Everything looks detailed, the explosions are fantastic, and the weapon effects make you believe that you could seriously fuck some shit up.

What is new to the series with this game is vehicles, and boy are there a lot of them. The vehicles range from jet packs, to tanks, jeeps, giant mechs, flying gunships, four-wheelers, etc. Each side has its own compliment of vehicles, providing a nice change of pace between the Strogg and Human forces. The vehicles are a lot of fun to play in, as well, and you can really bring on the hurt if you know what you're doing.

The classes are largely the same. You have your standard soldier, your medics, your engineers, the field-ops class and the stealthy covert-ops class. Each of the classes has access to different abilities and different weapons, and there is some crossover in some of the classes as well.

Engineers are not the only class to be able to deploy turrets, now field ops can do this as well. In the original Enemy Territory you could only build a limited number of turrets in pre-designated areas, now you can choose where to place your turrets, even orienting them to fire in a specific direction. Placing turrets is also a cinch, you can still move your character around while doing it with the arrow keys, while selecting a place for the turret to drop in from orbit with the mouse. The ease of this cannot be understated. Enemy Territory has some of the most elegant and fantastic design decisions that I've seen in a game, when you consider how complicated a class-based, objective-based multiplayer shooter could get, and when you realize how simple the Quake Wars interface is, it's simply astounding.

2lions and I played a twenty-minute match, both of us on the Strogg team. While 2lions got a little confused at first, and murdered our own troops at the start of the match, I was simply unstoppable. There's a reason why they call me Smapdey, and that's because I had the highest score at the end of my first round of Quake Wars.

The match itself was a total gas, there was never anything to do. This is part of the charm of the Enemy Territory franchise. If you get tired of running around as a soldier, blowing everything up with your rocket launcher, you can switch over to playing a medic, and roam the field healing your fallen comrades. All of the classes offer some exclusive gameplay novelty, and each class is important to a team. The inclusion of vehicles commendably enhances this variety.

So far, I'm going to have to say that Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is one of the best shooters at the show, and probably the one I am most excited about, which isn't exactly surprising, because I was totally gay for it last year, even without playing it. Now we just have to wait for the damn thing to come out.

-- Jackson 'Smapdey' Johns

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Not another step, ya bastards! Arghh!

Must be Darth Vader's distant relative.

	King Speedy	[mail] Sep 03 2009, 12:00 am EDT
	Reply w00t.