Quake 4 is id’s next game using the engine designed for Doom 3 from Raven Software. Once more you will need a monster PC, though any of the latest generation of graphic cards should be able to handle the requirements.
I played the game on ultra high settings, with 16 x AF, full AA and running the game in 1280×1024 with my GeForce 6800GT with stock settings. The result was nothing short of impressive, with high quality textures, brilliant lighting and gorgeous mechanical and organic environment designs.
So what’s it like? Well the story carries on from Quake 2, which was a game ahead of it’s time graphically and offered a single player experience where you played a soldier fighting aliens in a conflict of worlds. Although it had little to do with it’s prequel in Quake, or it’s sequel, Quake III, Quake 4 picks and continues the conflct, and once more you play a rookie solider, part of a squad named Rhino, out to prove yourself in the ongoing war against the Strogg (the aliens).
The first thing that strikes you are the graphics, which are really quite impressive. The gluttinous use of bump mapping taking precedence, with dynamic lighting and all sorts of particle effects running close behind. Using a modified Doom 3 engine, it will crawl on lesser systems, but quite clearly dazzle those on higher end systems. It’s fair to say it’s one of the best looking first person shooters for quite some time.
Where the game falters, for me at least, is how linear the game experience is. Call of Duty and Medal of Honor were engaging, linear experiences with scripted actions. The said games are rather old now, and have been surpassed by their younger siblings and sequels, offering similar but more hectic experiences. Quake 4 seems to have taken its queue from these games and simply changed the setting.
Quake 4 is a bog standard, run of the mill first person shooter set in a sci-fi setting. It offers a lot of what you’ve already experienced over the years from said games, from hectic battle scenes, to large scale confrontations, and the obligatory vehicular levels. It does add something new, in the form of upgraded weapons, but a lot of what’s being offered has already been done to death.
The death nail for Quake 4 is the lack of new ideas, and the stifled concept that gamers are still hungry for run and gun games where the AI simply runs at you. It’s a far more chaotic and creative game than Doom 3, and it does offer some welcome ideas (well done for inventing the flashlight on the gun), but it’s all so dull when you walk down the same corridor and take out the same mornic enemy with the same guns time and time again.
There’s atmosphere, but no tension, which interestingly Doom 3 managed. In the end, four games on in the Quake franchise, time hasn’t moved on at Raven Software, who some stuck in the past with ideas fit for relics.
Verdict: A visually gorgeous title that plays with average ideas