After a reasonably successful showing (well I liked it, at least) on the PC, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars has finally found its way over to Xboxland.  First person shooters aren’t exactly a rare species on the 360, but Quake Wars does have a certain amount of sophisticated depth that your average FPS can’t touch.

Good. Bad. I’m the one with the gun.

The premise is mercifully easy to comprehend even if you’ve never touched a Quake game before.  There are humans and the there are Strogg (which are kind of like aggressive techno-zombie humans).  They don’t like each other very much so players choose sides and go about eliminating their hated enemies by achieving certain objectives on the battlefield.

While the premise is simple, the gameplay is far more nuanced.  Each side is divided up into a number for player classes.  On the human side, you can pick from characters like medics, soldiers, engineers, field ops, and covert ops.   The Strogg have similar classes but they are a people who just love wacky naming conventions like oppressors, constructors, and technicians.

The class structure in Quake Wars is very robust and certain ones like field ops and coverts ops take a good deal of time to learn to play effectively.  It’s unfortunate that the game makes none of this easy on the player.  The tutorial only covers basic combat, and the HUD doesn’t present the player with nearly enough information to figure out just how some of the more complex weapons and tools work.  As you gain experience during a campaign, your character class will level up granting you certain upgrade.  But these are represented by cryptic icons with no accompanying explanation.  So it’s off to the manual to go in order to figure out what should be readily apparent from within the actual game.   After a while it does start to sink in, but at first, you’re in for a rough ride.

This is not to say that it is all bad news.  Controls for structure placement and demolitions have been simplified without sacrificing any functionality.  And it appears nearly every major feature from the PC version made it over to the 360 intact.  The game has a number of different play modes, but the bread and butter here are the four campaigns.  These are comprised of three large maps, each with multiple sub-objectives which must be completed in a specific order.  There’s a good amount of variety with these objectives, many of which can only be completed by certain classes.

Where did my missions go?

Gone from the 360 version is the cool optional mission feature from the PC version where players could pick up side missions that were dynamically generated based on what the other side was doing (like sneaking around and disabling enemy spawn points or blowing up enemy turrets).  You still do all these things in the 360 version, but the game no longer does much to point you in the right direction outside of the main objective.

Alas, the visuals in Quake Wars do not stand up.  The basic environmental detail and things like explosions just don’t look all that convincing.  In fact, it looks worse than the PC version.  If the game allowed for large scale conflicts, the graphics could be forgiven, but Quake Wars on the 360 only allows for a maximum of 16 players in a game.  That’s really the bare minimum you’ll want to play with.  Anything less and the battlefield just feels deserted. The other sore spot is that there’s no new content here.  Granted, the twelve maps offered are quite large, but it would have been nice to have some exclusive content to mess around with, especially considering the asking price for the game.

Quake Wars is primarily a multiplayer game, and that means braving the cesspool that is Xbox Live.  As always, we recommend finding a steady group of online friends to play with.  That advice is extra helpful for Quake Wars which really comes into its own when teams start using, you know, teamwork. If you’re more of a solo player, Quake Wars does offer some extremely effective bots to fill in the blanks, but let’s face it, it’s just not the same.

Less of a Quake.  More of a Tremor.

Quake Wars is a bit of a disappointment.  It’s a great game on the PC that lost some luster thanks to a less than ambitious porting job.  Still, it’s a good game, providing you can get over that initial difficulty hump and you have a solid group of friends to play with.

Review by: Greg Bemis