"Um," I bark across my tiny flat. "You might want to turn away for this bit." Instead, my girlfriend comes over with a fascinated expression on her face. It's the only defining bit of Quake IV, where Corporal Kane is 'stroggified', unnecessarily bloodily and nastily, from a first-person viewpoint.
His legs are lopped off by a circular saw, a spike is punched through his chest and head, and rivets are shot into every part of him. She hates horror, but there's something so unreal about the once-hyped process of turning him into a cyborg that it might as well be a ghost-train to her. Her judgement on it is terse: "silly."
Of course, Quake IV wasn't developed by Romero or even id, being shunted off to Raven Software, developer of Soldier of Fortune, Wolfenstein and Singularity. The plot follows that of Quake II, with human forces invading a planet of cyborgs called the Strogg. The Strogg are altogether nasty chaps, destroying the environment, pumping crap into the air and killing/assimilating all the wildlife. Um... yeah. I'm not sure this was meant to be parody.
You take the part of Corporal Matthew Kane of the Marines' Rhino Squad, who's part of the assault on the Strogg homeworld (spoilers follow). He gets shot down (the only role of dropships and helicopters in modern games), fights his way back to headquarters (a big space-battleship that was impressive in 2005 and is comically prehistoric now), almost destroys the enemy base, gets captured and turned into a cyborg, is rescued, kills a cyborg friend, and then destroys the Strogg leader and central intelligence (literally a giant brain). He does this with an impressive arsenal of noisy, ugly weapons, which slowly get upgraded as you explore the world.
There are also a few linear vehicle sections, but it's all familiar stuff made without inspiration or love, which can only be described as boring: no fun characters, no wit, no challenge, and no expectation of anything better. It does become much more enjoyable on harder difficulties, merely because resource-management of health packs and ammo suddenly becomes a concern, but the miserly checkpointing can prove immensely frustrating.
Quake IV got about as much love from Activision as an ugly, unfriendly dog. It, amazingly, has never received a patch (even in last year's re-release, as far as I can tell), so today's framerate problems and long load times are the same as yesteryear's. The multiplayer faced similar problems, its glitchy shooting coming a distant second to later XBLA release Quake Arena Arcade.
Comparing Quake IV to modern Xbox 360 games makes you appreciate why so many developers chose to use Unreal Engine instead of idTech. The game is slow-running, ugly and clunky, and seems to have killed off the Quake franchise. At the end of the game, Corporal Kane gets a message sending him off on a new mission - but it looks like he had to settle for a quiet retirement instead.
8 comments so far...
Johnbhoy69 on 26 May '13 said:
I remember picking this up preowned in 2008 for around £8, playing the 1st section for around 15-20 minutes then never playing it again.
Glad I never bought it when it first came out as that would of been an immense waste of money
jimbosolo on 26 May '13 said:
While I am a fan of the Doom series and its indirect sequel Quake, the irony of Quake 4 is that even the original Xbox could run the game as it was running off of the Doom 3 engine. So it never really showed you what the x360 could do back in 2005.
j85360 on 26 May '13 said:
It came with my original 360 back on release night, not bad for a game you guys rated 8/10 over 7 years ago
Johnbhoy69 on 26 May '13 said:
OXM was easily pleased back then evidently
Im expecting more than a few mediocre games will receive better than good reviews in the first few months following the Xbox One's release. Its kind of an unofficial tradition with new console launches
Darquess on 26 May '13 said:
I was going to say that this game is a silly little hark back to a time more than ten years ago when people were willing to buy this sort of ridiculously cheesy experience and call it 'extreme' and 'bloody'.
However, because I have never actualy played any of these games, I stopped judgement untill I played Quake 3 and Doom 3.
I can now state that these game are so cheesy and dated you can smell the decrepit corpse of it half way down the street.
Still, they are bloody good shooters, they do not care about realism, they give two raised fingers to moderation and tact and always, always make murdering other species fun and exciting.
I then sat back down to play the latest Medal Of Honour game, a title so hypocritical I tore it off the cover of the box.
In it, (if you have never played this garbage), you shoot brown men on a brown backdrop for no reason what so ever...
The first death happens within seconds of starting the game and you have no idea who you just killed or why.
Modern shooters.
I prefer the crap 90's stuff.
Johnbhoy69 on 26 May '13 said:
Warfighter?
Ive seen it pretty cheap and was thinking of getting it, you wouldn't recommend it then?
Metalrodent on 26 May '13 said:
to be honest not many people would, there's plenty of youtube videos of people raging about it (Totabiscuits is particually good).
As for that first kill, yeah... the rest of the game continues in that way
Sandbwoy on 28 May '13 said:
I still have hope that one day we'll see another Quake game. Preferably handled by id rather than Raven.