Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Although the Strogg are more technologically superior than humans, it doesn’t mean that humans have the disadvantage. Or does it? Will the Global Defence Force be able to defend our world or will the human race become food or worse, biological parts, for the Strogg? The fate of Earth and the human race are at the mercy of you and your fingertips. Let’s find out how this game stacks up.

INTRODUCTION

Image compliments of www.target.com 

 GAMEPLAY

There are two races to play.  If you are familiar with Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory then you will be familiar with this game.  The allies are now GDF and the axis are the Strogg.  They each have 5 classes to choose from and an assortment of weapons and vehicles to use.

 

The more you use a certain weapon, class, or vehicle, the more experience (XP) you will earn and start unlocking cooler more useful tools and abilities that can aid you in your fight.  The maps in this game are designed in a way that cover is prevalent and is spacious.  Unfortunately, there are not many maps.  Four overall maps with three objectives (sub maps) each.  In case you can’t add, that is 12 maps total.  The positive side to that is that you get to know the maps very well, which will help in playing online.  Over time this may become slightly menotenous and boring.  In my two weeks of playing this I have reached that boring state. 

There is a “single player” mode but it is actually an offline multiplayer game with bots.  Mediocre at best.  It will allow you to get use to the classes, weapons, and vehicles.  I wouldn’t suggest playing single player just because the real world experience will benefit you more.

 

COMBAT

Combat is focused on capture points, along with constructing and deploying places and items.  There are different vehicles to choose from including, land, sea, and air, with multiple combat positions including driver, gunner, passenger and even commander.  The vehicles were hard for me to fire from, either to slow to keep up with the person I am tracking or too jittery to keep the target on.  I like to stand, crouch or prone and shoot if I need to.  

Quake Wars: Enemy Territory can be played two ways.  Either ‘run and gun’ or slow and methodical.  Run and gun is what most people do though.  It is hard not to.  I found that unless you are a sniper close combat is going to be the most successful.  The closer you can get to the target before shooting will usually result in a kill.  It is too hard to jump and shoot and be accurate at the same time.  That is one of the things I did not enjoy about this game.  It was, for me, way to hard to shoot at a target from a distance off and hit them while running.  I have played games like Call of Duty 2 and 4 and it is much easier.  Map size could be an excuse but I think they need more accurate guns.

Deploying defense measures was fairly easy as the engineer.  That was probably the funnest class to be for me as it is needed the most.  There are always things to deploy or fix.  One of the things that perturbed me the most was that explosions from missiles could kill you when you were either on the other side of an object or on the interior side of a wall, like in a building while someone from the outside was firing missiles at you, bullets though could not penetrate the wall.  Go figure. 

Finding a server that has low ping and high occupancy but not full is usually hard to find.  They are always full with a max of 32 players.  You are going to want a server with a low ping and high occupancy because the more people in there the more people or Strogg to fire at, making it a more enjoyable experience.  The two pictures below show some of the vehicles that can be comandeered.  By the way, a Strogg can not jump into a GDF vehicle and vice versa. 

 

 REQUIREMENTS

Minimum Requirements
OS	Windows XP
CPU	Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 2.8 GHz or AMD(R) Athlon(TM) XP 2800+ (Pentium 4 3.0GHz or equivalent for Windows Vista)
RAM	512MB RAM (768MB for Windows Vista)
Hard Drive	750MB of free disk space, plus 200MB for Windows swap file
Video	128MB NVIDIA(R) Geforce(TM) 5700 or ATI(TM) Radeon(TM) 9700
Sound	DirectSound Compatible, DirectX 9.0c
Peripherals	Mouse, Keyboard
Broadband connection and service required for full gameplay and downloads. Features may change without notice.

 From www.enemyterritory.com site

SOUND & GRAPHICS

In the graphics arena, there was some great texture detail present in the game including the terrain, vegetation, sky, and vehicles, but other areas were found banausic (bland), like the interior of buildings and the player skins.  I had my graphics setting on high with an HD2600 XT 256mb card mid-ranged card and had no problems keeping up with the game.  This also makes it a good choice for people with low and mid-ranged video cards. 

The sound was not my favorite.  A lot of the sound got to be repetitive and annoying.  “MCP disabled, repair our MCP” was said a lot, I mean a lot.  It is a necessity but gets on the nerves.  The game has limited pre-recorded phrases and taunts that can be spoken in game.  This can be fun and vexing all at the same time.  There aren’t many options to choose from in the game options for sound.  There are some VOIP check boxes and slider bars and of course slide bars for the music and sound but other than that it is very limited.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars has some nice effects like bullet hits and the detail and intensity of explosions are impressive.  Although most of the time you’ll be shooting from far enough away where you’ll just see the friend-or-foe indicator, the model detail was intricate. The vehicles look futuristic, and the game’s overall theme of near-future combat looks good enough to be true.

CONCLUSION

This game, for me, took a little while to get use to and understand.  I stuck with it for a couple days and slowly got the hang of it.  The upside to the slow learning is that I got to know the 12 maps very well.  I enjoyed playing both races.  After figuring out how to play GDF, Strogg wasn’t too hard to figure out. 

I enjoyed playing this game but it got old.  I recommend it to anyone that can’t afford a more expensive game like Call of Duty 4.  It still offers the strategy and frenzied killing everyone likes, but at a reduced price.  Quake Wars: Enemy Territory does have down sides.  It has repetitively annoying audio commands (MCP disabled, repair our MCP), explosions from missiles could kill you even when you are on the interior side of a wall, and finding a server that has low ping and high occupancy but not full can be hard to get into.  Those issues aside I give the game an 8 out of 10.   Waying the good and the bad, it still serves as a visceral killing game. 

For further details about the game that I may have skipped, please feel free to go to www.enemyterritory.com to find tutorials and decriptions of what classes, vehicles, missions or deployables might be available.  Remember always look for updates as is in any game, each update will fix a number of problems.

 Pros:

+  Graphics
+  Big guns
+  Game play Objectives
+  Detailed maps
+  Price

Cons:

–   Some audio repetitive
–   Map frequency
–   Finding low ping servers that are not full