Video Games Suck

Quake 4 is pretty much what DooM 3 should of been like. Just don't bother with multiplayer.

Please, god, not the multiplayer.

Since this is the first game that I've played in about 4 years that isn't fucking unbearably terrible, I think i'll change the review styling around a little to make the high and gay points more easy to understand, rather than just stabbing brutally at the infected underside of the shittiness of it like I do with pretty much everything (and everyone) else.

Firstly, the preview text sums up a lot of my thoughts on Q4. It's like they took DooM3 and made it suck less, to the point it's a genuinely enjoyable and pretty damn long game. The additions are pretty numerous - now some of your guns have flashlights mounted on them (not that you need them, since the general darkness is a lot less prevalent), your guns can be upgraded during the game (meaning that you don't get stuck with a too repetitive weapon selection), and the architectual style of Q2 is mostly preserved for the majority of the game.

However, it's kind of shit that pretty much none of the enemies and items look anything like their Quake2 counterparts, with pretty much everything looking different. Wether you like this or not is up to a matter of taste, but I don't.

The singleplayer is about twice as long as DooM3's by guesstimate, with a bit more variation in gameplay owing to the addition of squad-based and vehicle-based gameplay. More or less like Half Life 2, minus that gay-ass gravity gun and with guns that don't sound like silenced .22 pistols, and with vehicle areas that don't make you wish they'd be over sooner.

Now that most of the extra blabla is over, I'll continue onto the usual sections...

Gameplay: Thankfully, unlike any of the other semi-recent FPS games (DooM3-time ones), I didn't get bored as hell about half way through the game; the aforementioned weapon upgrades at least gave you something new to play around with every now and then, and shotgun-to-the-face combat has a certain lasting appeal to it that nothing else does. Like absolutely every SP game experience the gameplay pretty much orientates around the same thing, that is, 'run around-shoot things-find switch-win', so for some people this'll probably get repetitive, but it's not like you didn't do the exact same thing in HL2 for 10 hours anyway.

Sound: Sound's a mixed bag, but it does the job. The shotgun finally sounds like it's not a bag of fags, but the blaster sounds like a peice of pork piss compared to the Q2 one, and the railgun sounds kind of like a dying giraffe. Monster sounds are okay, but what the hell happened to the Q2 sounds? Even the guards speak in wierdass guttural bitchspeak like they're trying to impersonate goths or something, compared to the "irritated, constipated, gorilla demon" noises of Q2.

Graphics: Being the DooM3 engine, Q4 is pretty nice looking while having decent performance - on the PC I reviewd it on (AMD643200+, 6600GT, 1gb ram), I noticed no slowdown whatsoever during the whole game w/ resolution set to 1024 and detail on medium. The weakness of the DooM3 engine (IE, low polycount on some objects) is still there, but seemingly less noticeable now.

On the level-design side of graphics, Q4 is in quite a few places a fairly decent representation of Q2's stroggos, but kinda fucks up worse than a tourette's syndrome sufferer trying to recite hail mary in a couple of places.

Special Note: Multi-mother-fucker-player: Well, you'd best wait for a fucking patch, because MP is fubar. Q4's multiplayer is currently a little worse than HL1's was when it was first released. Basically, this means it's so terrible, that it transcends shittyness and becomes one with a special layer of abysmality that's only other occupants are the creators of 'family guy' and hitler's stupid moustache.

The actual shitness of the netcode really has to be seen to believed. Essentially everything is in place for a non-shit game - decently balanced weapons and decent levels. But soon it starts to fall apart like a 1984 honda CRX that just hit a semi trailer.

For one, the shot lag. You can expect, with even a sub-30's ping, to have up to a whole second of lag when firing any weapon. Yes, this includes to railgun.

That noise you heard was probably your brain committing suicide.

Worse, there's some sort of fucked up mouse filtering that only becomes apparent in existance when you play multiplayer games. worse still, some of the character models have little or no CTF 'colors', meaning they look they same no matter which side they're on. worse still still, there's a huge drop in FPS in multiplayer for no reason. And Worse Worse Still Still, in the three days it's been out there's already hacks for it.

I could go on and on about how much the MP fucking sucks right now, but it's not neccesary. It's like writing a 50-page essay on richard simmon's blatant homosexuality.

Score: 9.5/10 (for the singleplayer)
DEREK SMART!!!!/10 (for the multiplayer)
8.5/10 (overall)

Fix the fucking multiplayer and it'd be a 9.