Quake is one of those words that when uttered to the gaming elite it rings memories of late night LAN parties and pizza stains. For over a decade the Quake franchise has exploded its way into homes all around the world. Not only has it always been atop the graphical ladder but developers everywhere have envied the solid multiplayer experience it represents. One thing Quake has never been famous for is the deep strategy involved to win a game, usually relying on numbers and massive gun power to pull out the victory. All of this is changing with the release of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars for the Xbox 360 on May 27th of this year. Enemy Territory focuses solely on the class system and using strategy influenced objectives to create a true next-generation multiplayer experience. Whether or not this game actually succeeds at that goal is a question yet to be answered but after a good couple hours with my hands on a near-final version of the game we walked away excited and impressed.
Activision called us out for a lengthy sit-down with id Software’s latest shot at the console market. After a six hour flight and one to many draft beers we won’t lie and say we were overly excited to put our mitts on the upcoming PC port Enemy Territory: Quake Wars for the Xbox 360. To our surprise the experience ended up being a positive one and here we are now giving our readers a small snippet of what made us feel the way we did. Enemy Territory is nothing new to the hardcore gamer; it was released on the PC over six months ago and has been making it’s rounds on the gaming news network for almost as long. The title is being developed for the 360 by Nerve Software and on the PS3 by an entirely different development house, Underground Development; neither of which worked on the PC version.
The thing that separates Quake Wars from every other generic FPS (first-person shooter) out there is the game’s reliance on the class system to deviate how gamers compete in multiplayer matches. Although the game does have a “campaign” mode it is obvious that the focus is multiplayer. The campaign mode is basically Quick Play with a little video that connects the three random levels. Each level is full of team objectives and plenty of bots but the single-player experience available from other games are really not there. For that reason it took only a matter of minutes for me to stop thinking about any single player experience and focuses exclusively on the team based gameplay.
Each of the twelve levels is divided up into different sections, with each of those sections being controlled by either the Strogg or the GDF (human military). Enemy Territory: Quake Wars has a lot of its roots in id Software’s last fantastic game, Return to Castle Wolfenstein (one of our personal favorite shooters of all time). The locations and stories have changed but the basics are still there and we ere excited to be reminded of how much fun we used to have with that game. The producer of Quake Wars from id Software hinted to be about the progress of the next Wolfenstein game but for now we will just have to be satisfied with the game in front of us. At the start of the game players will be shown objectives, depending on which side they are on, and completing those said objectives will secure a victory. These objectives are varied but range from blowing up different things (gates, buildings, generators, etc.) to hacking an enemy computer. Over the course of a couple hours we never once felt like we were doing the same thing over and over again, or being forced to repeatedly battle with the opposing team.
The character classes represented are field ops, covert ops, soldier, medic and engineer and each one does not differ all that much in normal combat but matter a lot when it comes to completing the challenge at hand. The levels are large enough that it’s rare to find yourself trekking over the same path more than once. Each one of the different “zones” can be captured and then teammates will be able to re-spawn closer to the enemy objective, giving your team a decisive advantage in the overall battle. In Quake Wars specific objectives can only be completed by a certain player class, requiring chess-like strategy to be implemented when choosing your soldiers desired specialty. For example only the covert-ops class can hack the multiple computers on a map or the engineer being the only class that can blow up the enemies generator.
