Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
October 15,2007 - Enemy Territory for Wolfenstein back in 2003 was a hell of a deal. It was large in scope, offered excellent gameplay, and best of all, it was free; assuming you had Return to Castle Wolfenstein, of course. Now Quake gets the once-over with its own version of Enemy Territories. It’s bigger, it’s better, but it’s not free. That’s okay, though; Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is one of the year's best shooters; and in a year with Halo 3, The Orange Box, BioShock, and the rest of them, that says a lot.

If you played Enemy Territory before or the Quake Wars demo then you know what you’re getting yourself into for the most part. It’s not at all like past Quake games, in respect to either the single player or multiplayer aspect. You do no corridor crawling and there’s not much twitch shooting, although you can play that way if you want to. It’s more like Battlefield 2 meets Quake, with a little less Quake and a bit more Battlefield. It works for the better.

Mission, team-focused gameplay isn’t often a strong point for most multiplayer shooters. In Quake Wars that’s the only point. You’ll have two factions, the Global Defense Force and the Strogg. The Strogg are the alien race bent on destroying mankind and the like. You’ll have five major class types to choose from for each faction, and they’re relatively similar across the board minus a few tweaks here and there. The soldiers are all front line grunts that are best at offensive attacking, you’ll have medics, engineer types, and others similar to that. There are major similarities between all of the classes but each faction breathes enough difference in to each set that it makes it different every time you play as the other side.

The way each mission plays out is very objective based. You’ll have something specific to do when you first parachute down on the map, but as you progress you’ll find yourself getting different objectives as each is cleared. Naturally that makes sense, but it goes forth at a very fluid pace so you never feel like you’re waiting for something to happen or unclear of what to do next. Each team has a primary objective that needs to be fulfilled but there are also class specific tasks as well, and these things are pretty simple, like healing your teammates and other things of that nature. While that may seem pretty redundant, the overlying task is the most important thing so all of these other micro-management tasks feel second nature and more or less just come to you.

There is a little bit of role-playing that can be done in Quake Wars. As you play on ranked servers you’ll begin to gain experience points and will thusly be able to upgrade your character with things like the ability to run faster or have better weapons. Not too crazy, but it does the trick and keeps you coming back. As there are clear directives in the mission structure you’ll find the competition gathering together in specific areas to either go about fulfilling their task or stopping you from doing yours and it gets to be a lot of fun because of that.

As you may or may not know, there has been a little controversy around the game not supporting voice chat at all. It’s tough to say whether or not it hurts the quality of the game, because it's a completely tolerable experience without it. Unfortunately, it is pretty much an expected feature these days, and some gamers may feel restrained. It makes a big difference in some games and while you aren’t going to be completely upset that it’s not available to you, it would be nice if it was there.

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