Quaking in my boots. (Quake 4)

Quake was and in some ways still is my favourite multiplayer shooter of all times. I do mean the original quake. We used to play it at my first job and a lot of it too. Staying in after hours for a hour or so to take on the accounting dept or blow up your manager can be a lot of fun let me tell you. :-)
It also was a fun singleplayer experience. Plenty of levels and solid gameplay. (although given the choice I played more 3D realms games such as Shadow Warrior, blood and duke nukem 3D.)

Quake 4 is somewhat of a disappointment to me. For one the system load is unreasonable and sloppy coding. It might get better with some patches and tweaking but that shouldn't be needed. Considering how well everything else plays on my main gamebox and that it uses the doom3 engine which runs fine on itself. This game in no way looks better to me. The levels feel very small and cramped. There is hardly any direct interacting with anything apart from some barrels you can shoot. I say some and i mean some. Even a rocket launcher or grenades cannot destroy non flammable barrels. Jammed doors stay jammed and apart from the odd jump and crouch action you spend your time with both feet on the ground.

Combat is pretty straight forward too. You have a large arsenal at your disposal. However the more interesting weapons only become more effective later in the game when various techs upgrade them. Except the shotgun which in my book got ruined. It gets turned into a clip using version while i rather liked being able to reload it after every shot or so to always have a fully loaded weapon handy. The snipers amongst us will be disappointed. There is no pure sniper rifle and the only weapon that comes close is the rail gun, but that doesn't get powerful enough till later on too. Not that the game offers you many chances to pick off enemies. Usually threats come in the form of either overcrowded rooms or things rushing at you. Most of the time I ended up sticking to the basic rifle with scope you get at the very start of the game. It has a decent balance between rate of fire, power and enough ammo around. The shotgun is your friend when walking around corners or anywhere you expect something might run at you because as always it is quite deadly close up and personal. (Anyone ever wondered why it is there are human weapons, Armour and ammo all over enemy alien bases?)

The story isn't anything special. There are plenty of scripted conversations that at least makes the place feel more alive. However some are rather buggy still. you could trigger the same event several times in a row just by exploring a room. The game is too short if you ask me. This is compounded by the fact that the later levels are very much alike. You have to go into 3 towers and these are almost identical maps. Just with different scripted events each time and some debris here and there. What really ruined this game for me is that the ending makes you wonder why the hell you bothered. All you did was complete 2 missions in a war. You get some comments from your teammates and new orders for another mission. I mean seriously what is up with that? I know it is a way to sell a sequel but this is getting out of hand. Almost every game now does it. “Half life”, “F.E.A.R”, “Prince of Persia 2”, “Fahrenheit” etc. At least make me win the war. I happen to like saving the world.

The only thing to fear is F.E.A.R itself.

“F.E.A.R” is called a 1st person horror/survival game. Personally I just think of it as a shooter with a story. This story is predictable in the sense that I already knew how the game was going to end after the first *chapter* and i had a pretty good idea what way things would be going during the first level. There are some elements here from other games. Such as the “Max Payne” style shifts into *flashbacks* or visions. Such flashes have always been a handy tool for telling stories. However I prefer them as a way of clearing up certain points or giving some background information to a certain subject in a story. FEAR had too much of the same. Instead of repeating the same sequence over and over again some extra background information on the lead characters would have been nice. As it is you can't really care for them because you know hardly anything about them.

The voice acting isn't bad and it isn't great. Clearly they felt the need to use more profanity. Now the first time you toss a grenade and you hear the soldiers say "FUCK!" it's amusing. It gets tedious when it keeps happening. The number of enemies is rather limited. For some reason you have no female soldiers, guards or the like. On the interaction level there is nothing great here. You can access the odd laptop and somehow you download information from them. Your team lead will give you a quick summery of what was on the laptops. There are no paper files you can read, no videos, no regular computers and not even cell phones with interesting numbers/sms/email.

This game uses the 3 weapons slot system forcing you to swap weapons if you want to carry a different firearm. This is most likely done to force you being a bit more careful with your ammo since you aren't walking around with a complete armoury. It doesn't quite work that way because walking back and forth a bit you realise that there are by far more bullets in your area than things to shoot them at.
You are often given the chance to play tactically. That is to say you can go round a group of guards. Snipe/toss in a grenade followed by doubling back and taking the other way round to take out a few more. Usually there are places you can snipe from and that adds to the fun. You could do the berserker thing but usually that ends you in a bloody puddle on the floor. To me the most useless weapon in the game was the shotgun. it is slow, inaccurate and weak. The simple truth is that if you got in range to properly use it melee attacks were by far more effective and deadly.

All in all it is a decent game when held to current standards. It looks ok, plays pretty well and at least has a story. Although it gets too freaky near the end and you don't really get a clear explanation as to why. The ending is .. fuzzy and open.