Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

aka: ETQW
Moby ID: 30407
Windows Specs
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Description official descriptions

After they had fought out their civil war on their homeworld called Stroggos, the Strogg ventured out into space to conquer other planets and study other races to integrate them into their own. In 2060 they enter space above their next target: Earth. The Global Defense Force (GDF) is completely overwhelmed by the attack of this highly advanced force but they don't give up and fight for their survival. Ultimately Earth will fall into the hands of the Strogg and the events which lead to the beginning of Quake II will unfold but until then, you'll be an important part of this last battle for control over the planet!

As a successor of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, Quake Wars focuses on objective driven gameplay rather than just capturing flags like you do in the Battlefield Series. This means that on every map one team needs to fulfill an objective while the other needs to guard it. For example on the map "Valley" the GDF needs to build a bridge, then drive a MCP over the bridge to a nearby outpost, hack a Strogg-shield so that the MCP can fire a missile into the Strogg base so that the GDF can enter it and destroy a generator.

To make it even more complex, most objectives need to be completed by a specific class. On each side are five classes and each class has special abilities. The engineer for example can build the bridge on Valley, repair damaged vehicles or deploy identities while the Field Ops supports his teammates by handing out weapons and deploying artillery systems. Since the maps are all pretty big, you also have access to several kinds of vehicles ranging from little quadbikes to helicopters.

Unlike most multiplayer games, the teams in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars don't just have a different skin but are actually completely asymmetrical balanced from classes over weapons to vehicles. This means that while both teams have a medic, they both function differently. The GDF medic for example behaves like every other medic by instant reviving his teammates but the Strogg technician needs a few seconds before his dead companion is alive again. To balance this out, the Strogg technician can turn dead GDF soldiers into spawn hosts. So if he dies, he respawns at such a host (if it hasn't been destroyed).

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Credits (Windows version)

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Average score: 78% (based on 95 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.5 out of 5 (based on 41 ratings with 2 reviews)

Enemy Territory in the Quake universe. What a great idea, and what a horrible implementation

The Good
Not much to like about this game, the idea behind such game is very good, however, not all is like you would expect.

There are 2 sides, humans and stroggs. Both races have unique weapons in their arsenal, as well as unique vehicles. While humans have an arsenal of standard (yet futuristic) assault rifles, shotguns, sniper rifles and so on, the strogg have their own guns from the Quake universe, such as a Lighting gun, the Railgun, blasters and such. Humans can pilot tanks, helicopters and armed jeeps while strogg have notably more advanced hoovering tanks, big walking robots and other outrageous killing machines.

Like in the technical prequel, ET: QW has also different classes between the sides: besides from ordinary troopers, there are engineers, medics, and the new spies. A cool thing with the spies is that after an enemy soldier gets killed, they can camouflage themselves into the victims flesh, later on running around and looking like an enemy. There are also soldiers who can deliver artillery/automatic turrets to where they would like, so they would shoot the enemy.

These new additions are all great and give some variety to the gameplay.

All the maps take place on Earth, every mission usually looks like this: there are 4 spots on the map behind enemy lines, which have to be conquered or destroyed. If a team completes that before the time runs out, they win, if they can't manage to complete the job by the time, they fail.

To rewind all the good stuff about the game in a shorter sentence: a nice tactical warfare in the Quake universe with elements from the great game Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory.

The Bad
This is probably the first game in the history, which is created by using an engine from id Software, and which I blame for the graphics. I really don't like the look of this game, the graphics just don't cut, the effects are blind, the vehicles, world, and every item and model just look like a peace of crap. To be honest, I think that even Quake 4 looked better than this. Mainly because the player models and the weapons in Quake 4 looked beautiful, unlike this game.

The sound is almost as bad, and the voice acting just makes my ears bleed.

Then we go to the ruined gameplay: not too much variety in maps and absolutely no variety in the objectives given in them. There isn't also a wide choice of maps and there's only a couple of game types.

It may sound like there aren't many problems here, but actually, this game is horrible.

The Bottom Line
When I played Quake 4-s multiplayer the first time, I hated it. Later I heard about this game coming up, and reminding of the good old days of Wolfenstein: ET, I thought: "Man, this game is just what I needed!" But, unfortunately, it turned out to be the biggest disappointment I've ever played. For those who wan't a great tactical online FPS game, please, don't pick this up. Even if you want a more futuristic like game of this type, pick up Battlefield 2142. Or, if you just wan't a good online FPS game, which is something like this, download Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory for free and enjoy it, cause its even worth a well bigger price than this.

Windows · by Medicine Man (328) · 2009

Quake meets Operation Flashpoint

The Good
The graphics are superb and scale surprisingly well, so you can play it on older computers as well. Much better than say, U3 or Source. It's really too bad that Id engines aren't more popular these days. ETQW has no annoying copy protection and it doesn't even ask for your DVD to be in the drive to play. A rare thing these days that a publisher doesn't treat its customers like they were filthy thieves that need constant monitoring.

12 maps, 4 per continent, are included in the retail version (but more are surely to come with the release of the SDK), and all of them are outdoors, showing off the improved Doom 3 engine's ability to render firefights in large open areas. And oh boy does it look and feel spectacular.

Gameplay feels great, especially the more down-to-earth GDF side. I rarely play Strogg, partly because the tech looks unfamiliar and not especially inventive, and partly because fighting to eradicate my species feels kind of... wrong. Maybe it's stupid to think like that about a competitive multiplayer game, but I prefer to think of it as the devs having done their design job right.

The single player portion (that is, campaign against bots) is good too. Heck, it's better, longer and has more replay value than a lot of games that focus on single player. The bots are really good. I guess a lot of the actions like laying mines on objectives and the like are scripted, but it doesn't matter. The bots don't cheat either. They have human-like reaction times so if you sneak behind someone and start shooting he won't turn around in an instant and shoot you in the head with godlike accuracy.

This game does a lot of things right, and whatever's lacking will potentially be fixed with patches and mods. In fact it's almost certain to.

Finally, it runs on Linux! Woot!

The Bad
Although Quake Wars is a great game, there are some things which could've been done better.

The two sides are just barely "antisymmetric" and the differences are mostly cosmetic. I can appreciate the difficulty in making two different and yet balanced teams for such a major game and maybe a conservative approach is better, but I can't help but feel there could've been much more done here. The Q3 mod Tremulous for instance did it much better where the two sides were completely different playing experiences.

Playing it, I thought there was too much Quake and too little OFP. Even though it's difficult, it's still possible to bunnyhop around shooting. I don't understand the need to jump at all. I've never been in a firefight, but I doubt anyone jumps 5ft in the air repeatedly to avoid incoming fire. It would be much better if the 'jump' was some sort of context-sensitive hop. As in if you're next to an obstacle, forward+jump makes you hop over but would do nothing when in open space.

Living or dying matters too little. I wish there was some sort of resource system based on kills that would prompt people to be more careful with their lives. Again, it sort of makes sense that it doesn't matter because bad players on public servers might sway the game by simply existing, but the absence of penalties for repeatedly dying makes the game more shallow than it could be.

I'm not sure if it would work, but the vehicle respawns should be increased a lot. It's true that the endless stream of tanks and helicopters puts all those support classes to good use, but it's kind of annoying when you finally dispatch a tank firing at your MVC with grenades only to have it reemerge behind the corner 40 seconds later.

I wish the bots had more thematic names. Although it accurately simulates online nicknames, seeing a bot named SuperJerk or Pure Pwnage (with random colors interspersed) kills a lot of the mood.

Finally, there are some things which hurt immersion, like grenades in your inventory slowly 'recharging'.

The Bottom Line
I'm afraid ETQW has spoiled me with the half-baked realism and objective-centered play and I'll never again be able to have fun playing those arcadey DM and CTF games I used to love.

ETQW is a great game, and a solid addition to the Quake series.

Linux · by dorian grey (243) · 2007

Discussion

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SP and MP or just MP ? Wormspinal (619) Jun 13, 2008

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Sicarius.

Linux added by Kabushi. Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 added by Terok Nor.

Additional contributors: Zeppin, Starbuck the Third.

Game added September 30, 2007. Last modified March 12, 2024.