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Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
Author: Joe MartinPublished: 3rd October 2007
Resistance is mostly pretty useless
So, as we previously mentioned, there are two available teams in Quake Wars – the cyborg Strogg and the flesh-bag humans. At the start of each game players choose a side. You can swap your team during the game, but in our experience team swapping isn't very common.Players tend to build up a preference for a particular side and will play as them whenever possible. Myself, I prefer the GDF side because I think all the Strogg weapons look a bit ugly. It's as good a reason as any.
Either way, once you’ve selected a side you then choose a role in the game and a primary weapon. There are five classes available for each team, all of which are fairly standard. The soldier and aggressor are the grunt classes, for the GDF and Strogg respectively, then there’s the medic, spy, engineer and scout classes, all of which also have a Strogg equivalent.
The classes themselves are all well balanced and there’s no class that really stands out as being able to do everything, which forces players to get comfortable in a number of different roles if they want to win. The classes themselves aren't particularly groundbreaking and they all do the usual stuff – engineers build, scouts resupply, medics heal and spies hack. In fact, there are only a few differences between the teams as far as classes go.
The main difference between the GDF and Strogg is in the support classes and how players respawn back into battle. While the GDF medic can use defibrillators to instantly revive downed team mates if he can get to them in time, the Strogg Technician has to spend much more time reviving allies, leaving him more vulnerable to attack. The system is well balanced though and the Strogg can compensate by turning enemy corpses into spawn points for their team if they get the chance.
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One of the nicest things about the class set-up is the way the game monitors the current state of a match and, if you jump into the middle of a match, the game will suggest the class that is most useful to your team’s current situation. If your team needs more firepower on the frontlines, for example, the game will subtly suggest you switch to a soldier class, whereas if your team is dying a lot and losing ground then it will let you know that a medic would be useful to get soldiers back on the battlefield faster.
I am watching you
The match monitoring aspect actually plays a large part in the game system and the game is forever making more ‘personalised missions’ available to each and every player. To call these missions personalised though is a bit of an exaggeration as they're never anything particularly dramatic or emergent. A lot of the time they're nothing over and above ‘Destroy a radar dish’ if you're a soldier or ‘Deploy mines’ for engineers.My experience of the personalised missions was such that I often didn’t bother to try them after the first few matches. Sure, they’re a fun way to keep yourself entertained if the main battle isn’t going anywhere fast, but the XP payoff often isn’t worth it when compared to the primary objectives and unless you select the mission specifically you won’t even earn the full reward.
The XP system actually feels a little worthless in the end because of this and completing tasks to upgrade your character is never really a major pursuit. There are only four upgrades for each class too, mostly limited to the usual faster movement rates or larger ammo supplies, and none of them are selectable – you'll simply progress through the four upgrades in order.
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As such, upgrades never really feel like they're worth the effort and you might spend ages dying and respawning in an attempt to complete a mission only to get a reloading rate decreased by half a second, assuming your XP reward nets you an upgrade at all.
Which brings me to the next problem – difficulty. Put simply, Quake Wars is not an easy game to get to grips with. By default, the HUD is filled with text and information and it took me a fair amount of tweaking to get rid of a lot of the chaff – though the plus side is that it’s possible to do all of this tweaking easily.
The levels are often quite large and complicated too, which would be great if it weren’t for the fact that the map is so filled with dots and tags that it can be difficult for a n00b to navigate out of his own base. Basically you’ll find yourself dying quite a lot and having to sit still for 30 seconds before you can respawn (unless you get revived by a medic, which is fairly uncommon in my experience). I must have spent at least a quarter of my play time simply tapping my fingers and waiting to respawn after a momentary encounter with an enemy.
Once you get the hang of a level though, this obviously becomes less of an issue and you’ll find yourself lasting a bit longer. The problem is that to do this you have to spend a while getting to grips with each and every class, which can take a while and be a rather frustrating experience.
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