Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

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.