omeday, some mad genius is going to whip up an innovative shooter with fluffy bunnies instead of cadaverous slack-jawed half-machine thingamajobs. Until then, there's Quake 4, the latest in a venerable line of "help us, Obi-one-man-army, you're our only hope" games that pit players against a hurricane of bloodthirsty superhuman creeps with Really Big Guns.
The Quake series has done some narrative leapfrogging since its inception in 1996. The original Quake, with its edgy Trent Reznor soundtrack, defined the concept of architecture and ambience over story, and Quake III was a multiplayer-only battle royale with players fragging each other for spots on a scoreboard. Quake II, on the other hand, actually had a story about a cybernetic race of necrotic flesh-hunting aliens called the Strogg invading Earth to harvest human flesh. After years of war, their resources depleted, humanity (perhaps insanely) makes a desperate bid to counter-invade the Strogg's home planet, and by the end of that game, players had to defeat the Strogg leader (aka the Makron).
As Quake 4 opens, the Strogg have regrouped and created another, more powerful Makron. Players assume the mantle of Matthew Kane, member of the elite Marine Rhino Squad tasked with spearheading an assault on the new Strogg muckety-muck. Though Kane never speaks, his teammates are whooping chatterboxes, and the story is conveyed through their banter as Kane progresses along a series of checkpoints toward the inevitable endgame.
New to the series are medics and technicians, support crew who will occasionally accompany Kane and who can heal or patch up his armor. Kane's arsenal includes long-range options like the machine gun with an under-barrel flashlight and short-range standards like the powerful eight-round shotgun, and these can be tweaked up later in the game by individuals Kane encounters. Though Quake 4 mostly plays on foot and in narrow corridors, Kane will occasionally be able to pilot tanklike vehicles in outdoor scripted shooting sequences with limited objectives like "take out all the turrets." Multiplayer is similar to Quake III's and includes Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Tournament, Capture the Flag and Arena Capture the Flag.
Mediocrity can look marvelous
You can make a reasonable argument that id Software develops game technology, not games, which might explain why their tech demos always look terrific but have the depth of a rain puddle. Raven Software, on the other hand, does make games, and using id's red-hot Doom 3 engine, they've succeeded ... at making a decent one, anyway.
Quake 4 is a little like a cheerier version of Doom 3. Instead of tiptoeing down pitch-black tunnels as everyone except you gets supernaturally butchered, the assault on Stroggos is more like waltzing down some long red-carpet event where your friends and family cheer you on. Marines clog the coruscated metal passageways here like nesting ants, and players will spend as much time jogging down monsterless corridors getting boo-yah'd by buddies as gunning through steaming monster-filled ones. Humanity clearly acts as if it has the upper hand this time, and, as in the movie Starship Troopers, any sense of hopelessness the game might convey is immediately countered by an equally fervent dose of Semper Fi.
So is this just Doom 3 with a better story? The answer is "mostly, yes," though you've got to give credit for little touches like squadmates who can follow and fight with you intelligently, a few sequences with flashlights that look amazing and a general sense of hustle and bustle during a command-carrier sequence that's only rivaled by the game Quake 4 so desperately wants to be (yep, Bungie's Halo). OK, so there actually is a cool plot twist toward the end, which just goes to show what a little clever storytelling will buy you. If only it were the case throughout.
It's probably pointless to hammer games like Quake 4 for being shallow and repetitive, because for a majority of gamers they're still wildly addictive (sales figures prove this time and again). Sure, it's still just a glorified shooting gallery on wheels, but what a pretty gallery it is, filled with spry, muscular, orange-eyed aliens, gyrating machinery and hulking tentacled boss monsters that fill the screen several times over. Don't expect greatness or innovation from Quake 4, but sometimes familiar, reliable, good-looking and "good enough" will do, just the same.
Come on, can you blame me for feeling ambivalent toward a genre that hasn't changed in over a decade?
—Matt
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