Quake 4 Review

The powerful Doom 3 engine provides the means to see each hideous detail of a race of soldiers that has weapons grafted onto swollen limbs, prosthetic inserts that serve as melee weapons and armor plating grafted onto chests and skulls. In short, the Strogg look good enough to attract and repulse at the same time. Graphically, everything in game has benefited from the powerful new engine; marines, weapons, vehicles and effects all look fantastic. Of course, you still need a powerful machine to enjoy all the new beauty, but the updated graphics on units that I have not seen since way back when in Quake II had me marveling at level of detail multiple times. Parents be warned: Quake 4 is graphic. It should surprise no one that a race that combines weapons and body parts like a 7 year old plays with Legos is going to make a bit of a mess in the process. Blood and gore abound. Mutilated torsos are built into machinery through the Strogg complex and in later levels you will be literally slogging through charnel pits where heads and limbs lie around in piles and pools of blood. While this does set the mood and is expected for the biomechanical Strogg, it's probably not something you want your kids to witness.

SPLAT!!

The Strogg are helpless against my little tank.

Raven has also paid a lot of attention to Quake 4's audio. Voice overs are (thankfully) done by actors who sound like they give a damn. Music is well done and used sparingly as environmental clues when some pivotal plot point is about to occur or to punctuate dramatic moments like the start of a boss battle. Weapons, for the most part sound as though I imagine they would in the real world. The only annoyance I had was that the grenades fired from the launcher still sound like heavy little tin blocks as they did in Quake II. I have tried to figure out why this bothers me but the only thing I can recall is that I hated them in death match way back when and maybe that's why the sound of them irritate the hell out of me now. If you are lucky enough to have one of the new Creative Labs X-Fi cards, Quake 4 has full support for these new wonder cards and the effect is first rate. Positional audio really adds to combat and environmental noise brings gameplay to a whole new level. The only downside is I did experience several lock ups that went away when I turned off the X-Fi support and went back to the plain-old EAX settings. I hope either a patch for the game or a driver update from Creative will address this annoyance since the game is much more enjoyable with all the advanced audio goodies enabled. Either way, this is the first clear example of the amazing audio we can expect in the coming months.

Overall Quake 4 was an enjoyable single player experience. I found that as I got further into the game, the more enjoyable it became, with just a few exceptions. Raven has done a great job of game pacing and fans of the original games (as well as newbies) should be happy with this new chapter in the Quake universe. While the game is not perfect, its good features greatly outweigh the negative. Throw in a multiplayer experience which is essentially a graphically updated version of Quake III Arena and your got a worthwhile purchase. Unfortunately I could not play the online portion of the game because my connection to the internet is still flat as a pancake (Thanks again Comcast!!!). Quake 4 helped me forget that I had no connectivity. So in a way, I should not feel bad I am still shelling out money to a cable provider for an internet connection that is currently not connected. Talk about irony.