Due for an early Australian & European release on September 28th, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars has recently opened Beta 2 play. We made a beeline to FilePlanet as soon as we got word that Beta 2 was out, to find out what to expect in the final release of this lightning-speed, objective-focused FPS.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is a prequel of sorts to Quake 2 and Quake 4, with the levels representing key historic battles in the future Strogg invasion of Earth. While only one of those maps was playable in Beta 2, it was more than enough to keep me hooked.
Beta 2’s Valley map is a great map to get grounded in the fast pace of the game. It sees the Global Defense Force (GDF) launching an offensive against the alien Strogg, who are planning on contaminating a major water supply system. There is plenty of open area to take respite from the action and figure what is going on, but you can jump back in without delay. While there is not much indoor combat, you get access to all the vehicles in the game.
HUD messages which immediately begin popping up make you kick yourself for not at least glancing at the documentation before starting - but you can easily piece together that the game is objective driven, with each of the five unique classes working together to progress through the map.
At first glance the classes in Quake Wars will appear familiar to those with experience in other class-based shooters. There’s an assault, medic, heavy support, engineer and sniper classes, albeit with slight twists. When playing as GDF, for example, Covert-Ops (sniper) can assume the identity of a downed Strogg.
Strogg units possess even more unique abilities, further exemplifying the intricacy of the game. Lowly assault classes can self-heal at the expense of weapon energy, for example. Technicians can transform a GDF corpse into a spawn point. Instead of repairing vehicles like a typical engineer, the Strogg’s Constructor class can deploy a small AI-controlled bot that will do the job for him.
The GDF side has the core vehicles you’d expect - a one-man quad bike, a lightly armed 3-man jeep, an APC, a tank, a personnel copter with room for a pilot and gunner and an assault chopper. The cybernetically equipped Strogg side has some more interesting units, like a heavy mech walker that can aim in 360 degrees independent of movement, a jet-pack for extremely mobile attacks, and a deadly bio-mechanical flying-thingy.
Straight off the bat, you will notice the pace of this game. Perhaps not quite matching the speed of Quake 4, this is definitely keeping within the same vein as the original Enemy Territory. Instead of trudging through terrain to get to the first objective, you are there in seconds. There is no stamina meter, so plenty of running and bunny hopping abounds.
As long as you tweak your vehicle controls beyond default settings, their maneuverability is great. But alarmingly, there appears to be no acceleration at all – its 0 to full speed immediately.
At the moment there appears to be a slight advantage in favour of the Strogg, with their weaponry packing a more powerful punch. For one, the railgun blows its sniper rifle equivalent out of the water in terms of accuracy.
Assault machine guns also appear to have a little undesirable spread to them, even when firing in controlled bursts. Despite this, infantry combat is hectic and intense, with the decent 1-4 second encounters you would expect.
Throughout campaign and online play, experience points (XP) are rewarded for successful actions in combat. Accruing enough XP will give you rewards, typically boosted abilities. Independent of XP however, are the persistent military ranks received from team play. Besides letting you know if the guy in your crosshairs is a danger-man, you can also check out the proficiency paths of others at the mission end screen.
Following the lead of the Battlefield series, Quake Wars also includes fire teams, where you can assemble a squad comprising of different classes to move through waypoints and attack objectives efficiently. Players in a fire team gain experience points whenever any FireTeam member completes a mission. But disappointingly, during online play not much of this was used to its full potential. The inclusion of VoIP would improve the situation, however its not clear whether Splash Damage have any plans for it.
But the most beautifully executed aspect of the game is the objective-driven map play, which sees all the elements mentioned above coming together. In the Valley map, this consists of the GDF pushing forward to eliminate the Strogg contamination facility. Along the way, critical mission objectives, such as building a bridge, escorting a command post and disabling shield generators, call for serious teamwork.
You’ll find yourself deploying defense turrets and heavy artillery to gain a stronghold on your position while other team members frantically try to clear the ground. Ultra-heavy bombardment devices (such as Strogg’s Dark Matter Cannon) keep the ground shaking as troops move in. Secondary mission objectives allow for even more tactical maneuvering, by making primary objectives easier.
It’s gameplay like this that makes you forget about the visual element of the game. The character and vehicle models are brilliant to look at, and the explosions (which reportedly got a facelift since Beta 1) are spot-on. While Valley is fairly bland open map with little vegetation, it also showcases the incredibly deep draw distance in Quake Wars – making it possible to take out an enemy hundreds of meters away.
Conclusion
For such a complex game, id have had to balance a multitude of gameplay issues to keep everyone happy. The huge range of unit abilities have meant that weapon damage needs to be tuned to perfection. There’s plenty of noise being made on the Beta forums about this issue in particular, but aside from this, Quake Wars Beta 2 is right on the money.
Impressions: Quake Wars beta
Linear Mode
