Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

June 5,2008 -

Celebrating its success on the PC last October, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars migrated over to consoles on May 27 courtesy of Nerve Software, who was responsible for other console ports like Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Tides of War on the Xbox. This quick paced, strategic shooter remains addictive on the consoles as well, but we can’t help but feel like Activision shortchanged us by charging full price for a one-trick pony.

Quake Wars is a multiplayer-only type of game. No, not like Fuzion Frenzy. It’s multiplayer-only in that there’s no real story going on here. The Strogg are trying to invade Earth and blah, blah, blah; just like all the other Quake games. Except the other Quake games had something called a plot. It’s understandable that ETQW was, and always has been billed as an instanced, single mission game, but considering Activision had over six months to port this baby to consoles, one could wish upon a star that the “campaign” mode was more than three of these instanced missions with nearly identical objectives on a few continents.

That said, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is great fun. Forgiving the fact that you’re paying $60 for what’s usually the add-on of most games, Nerve Software has really preserved the intensity PC gamers felt when they popped the disc in seven months ago. The graphics have been re-touched, the AI has supposedly been improved, and game controls are very user friendly.

What makes ETQW so addictive are the hundreds of choices available to your team of eight. Unfortunately, this diversity doesn’t involve maps and objectives; there are few of either. Like many first-person shooters, Quake Wars has you select a character class before spawning. Your entire team must be careful when doing this, because a good balance of medics, engineers, special ops, and soldiers is an absolute must to guarantee victory. After spawning, you can choose to respawn as a different class, which is great news because you don’t want to be stuck as a soldier when the enemy plants explosives on your shield generator. Even then, though, you need to also pick the right primary weapon for the job.

Soldiers can go with a balanced assault rifle for short and medium range encounters, a shotgun for indoor defense, rocket launcher for anti-vehicle, or heavy machine gun to push back a charge. The other classes don’t have so much weapon choice, but the devil is in the details.

There are two main things that make ETQW a fun, balanced, strategic FPS: equipment and vehicles. The former, equipment, usually mean the difference of whether an objective is completed or not. Engineers can deploy anti-personnel, anti-vehicle, and anti-air emplacements, as well as disarm bombs and repair vehicles. Oftentimes one side needs to advance a large vehicle known as an MPC to a designated location, and one or two anti-vehicle turrets can make it nearly impossible to do so.

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