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Though it began with the original Team Fortress, the rise in popularity of the class-based shooter can be laid at the feet of DICE's Battlefield series, where people choose to be a soldier, medic, or that one class nobody picks just to complete their list of unlocks. That series is still going strong, if slightly stale, while Team Fortress 2 has been forcing players to all choose the same class once a month or so, and newcomer Frontlines has received a patch that breaks more than it fixes. On the PC at least, Quake Wars, based on the not so well known but much loved Wolfenstien: Enemy Territory, is on the top of the heap with fast-paced gameplay, well designed classes, clear objectives, and a whole lot of crazy fun. A good three fourths of that made it to the new Xbox 360 port.
There is a backstory to the war between the GDI and the Strogg, linking the various objectives you'll have to face on the variety of wide open maps featured in the game, but I always skip that cut-scene to get right into the action. That action is fierce with sixteen player free-for-alls, spread out among eight classes, a few dozen weapons, and other assorted pieces of ultra high tech gadgetry, from roaming hover tanks to giant cannons summoned from the sky. You can choose to hit the enemy hard with rocket launcher in hand, sneak in under disguise, or hang back to heal those in need. The wildly different play styles support a wide range of tastes and talents, and when they all come together as a team, they can be unstoppable.
If you can round up at least three friends online, the game's problems and shortcomings tend to fade into the background.
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If you haven't played this series before, expect to spend a lot of time offline against bots and a lot of page views on the official site before you get things down. The in-game tutorial gives you the lowdown on the basic controls and the general flow of battle, while touching on a few of the classes, and failing to explain the other ninety percent of the game. The manual is insultingly poor for such a complex title, giving only a single line to each class, not even mentioning the distinct differences between races, or at all explaining the upgrades gained on the battlefield. The irony is the one thing that would have greatly helped a newcomer, the personal objectives, are absent from this port. These were a series of class-specific tasks that the player could focus on, so no matter which class he chose, he always had a clear purpose. You also can't customize the controls, and considering their bizarre decision to map multiple functions to the d-pad, but make the Y button a dedicated vehicle entering function, it would have been nice. The controls are generally good otherwise, including a southpaw option.
Multiplayer is the core of the experience, and Quake Wars features a party system similar to the Halo series, which honestly I think is a bad move, since you can't really set up the matches how you want (unless you want to do a lot of waiting around), and there's no ping indicator. I've had a few matches with lag, and this game doesn't deal with that well at all. Expect to be shot by invisible enemies, and if you're not on the host's team, expect to lose. Most of my matches, however, have been lag-free and a blast to play, even when there's no more than four real people. Bots will fill out the extra slots in this case to get you up to the sixteen player count, and their AI does well enough as long as you've got a few people with real brains to lead the charge. If you're the sole living player on your side though, expect to have some trouble.
This is where the campaign comes in. It's a single player version of the game where both sides are filled with bots, with three difficulty levels and three arenas of conflict. Since this is a team game, you can't realistically win on your own except on easy, which leaves the whole thing a little too dependent on luck. The problem is the AI acts too much like real life random players. Occasionally, they'll storm the enemy and fulfill objectives without you ever having to pull the trigger, but most of the time they're blast happy fools seeking to raise their kill count while ignoring the objective. You do have a limited ability to issue them commands, but this is near useless in practice. There's also an instant action option for some quick single player experience, which serves as a good training ground before taking your game online. Split screen play for these modes would have been nice, but likely beyond the abilities of the aging Doom 3 engine.
Considering the source, it's not surprising Quake Wars looks like a touched up Xbox game, with an abundance of brown and low poly surroundings, but this does allow you to see for miles and miles in any direction on these massive maps, and sixteen player battles result in plenty of chaos with only extremely rare slowdown.
If you can round up at least three friends online, the game's problems and shortcomings tend to fade into the background. The fact that you don't need a full sixteen live people just to get it to work as it's intended is a nice bonus off the bat, and it's actually kind of fun to figure out all the classes and objectives on your own, even the sixth time your friend runs you over with the tank you were trying to repair. Though it's still a significantly better experience when played on the PC. |
