Quake 4 -- The Review by djRoME

She's finally here! The review of Quake 4 you've all been waiting for!

OK so I wasn't exactly prompt with this review, but let me tell you I'm glad I waited. I've just gotten in a new video card, the BFG GeForce 6800 GT OC, and it has made my overall gaming experience SO MUCH BETTER.

Quake 4 made me make the purchase, even though I've been meaning to finish my computer upgrade for quite some time. Anyways, ON TO THE REVIEW!

Quake 4 is breathtaking, even from it's presence on the shelf at the store. I managed to talk Best Buy out of a copy of the DVD Special Edition a day before release because of a typo on their website. Yay, Quake a day early! When I first fired it up, there was about 57 servers (theres over 1000 today, 100 of which ping UNDER 50 to me), and a couple hundred players on. My first experience with Quake was on my old video card, a GeForce FX5200. While the game ran well, there was nothing I could do to achieve a higher framerate than around 35 with that video card. Lots of work for my old card (that FX5200 has been great for me for 3 years or so), and it was obvious that if I wanted to experience the true nature of what the new Quake is about, I needed to upgrade.

Enter, BFG Geforce 6800 GT OC. AMAZING. Quake 4 has a completely scalable video setting that will allow you to run the game on an archaic video card, or one of the top of the line models, and completely max either of them out!

Ultra High Quality in Quake 4 will easily max out the memory on a 512MB video card. Needless to say, Medium video quality is plenty, and the rest is gravy.

The install went very smooth, and unlike other game titles that are rushed to the consumer, this version of Quake 4 seems largely without bugs. I'm sure they'll find plenty to patch, but let's just say this is WAY better than the first version of BF1942 for those of you who remember that.

The motion graphics in the GUI are amazing right off the bat, the player interface is very intuitive, and all settings are changed quite easily.

The first thing I tried was multiplayer, as I hate most single player experiences. The multiplayer is largely like Quake 3 Arena, and is probably best described as "what Quake 3 Arena always should have been." The game has the familiar movement, fast strafe jumping, no hanging on textures, and plenty of rocket jumping! FINALLY, A GAME THAT ISN'T TRYING TO BE REAL LIFE! If I wanted a game that was real life I'd go buy The Sims or something.

All of the familiar weapons are in, the netcode seems about as solid as netcode can possibly be in the first release, with special recognition to the hitscan weapons, GREAT registration of hits here. Your crosshair even changes color when you score a hit.

The action is fast, there is built in TDM as well as CTF, and a new mode, Tournament Mode that allows servers to act as small 1v1 tournaments, producing the brackets, and crowning a king of the hill, all on a PUB SERVER!

One aspect of the game which I found to be a con at first was the built in 60 FPS cap. After a bit of research, I've found that there's a built in FPS lock similar to what Quake 3 had. 62.5 FPS is the speculated cap, and that holds true from my experience, bounding between 60 FPS and 64. The reasoning is that player and server ticks are all the same at 60 FPS, and nobody gets any kind of advantage by being about to go faster than 60 FPS like they used to.

After every waking minute to this point had been spent in the multiplayer, and tweaking settings, I decided to hop into the single player. I'm not much of a single player buff, but I will say this. Quake 4's single player (tho it does resemble the Doom 3 single player a bit), is FAR SUPERIOR to Doom 3's. When I tried Doom 3, I noticed that the entire single player game was based on one formula:

1. Enter dark room.
2. Monster jumps out of the darkness.
3. Shoot monster.
4. Repeat.

This formula has been thwarted by a well put together single player experience. The maps aren't quite as dark as Doom 3, and the monsters don't just jump out of nowhere every time. The game isn't quite as scary this way, but it's still plenty fun. I haven't played it much more than about an hour or so, and haven't made it very far, but unlike Doom 3's single player, I will continue this one.

The server list just spiked in numbers today, due to the release in Europe. There's now over 1000 servers up, and growing by the minute!

CONS:

I was a little wierded out when I found that I had to restart Quake every time I changed a video setting, that just seems a little old school to me. If Valve can do it, ID had better be able to change resolutions on the fly.

The machine gun sound is quite possibly the most annoying sound ever. It seems the volume on that sound itwself is much higher than the other gun sounds, and that may be what's getting me. I await a patch for this problem, and I also await the newbs getting a different gun out than the machine gun.

The multiplayer is alot like Quake 3 Arena, but it doesn't seem to jump into the 21st century like the new games nowadays are. Still the same old Quake, but this game is the game that hooked me into gaming in the first place.

BOTTOM LINE:

Quake 4 owns, it's a must have, it ships on DVD as a special edition with Quake 2 bundled, and oh yeah, ITS QUAKE!

This was the biggest game release for me since Half Life 2. Quake 4 will bring lots of old schoolers back to life, and make alot of players in their late 20's upgrade their P3 1ghz rigs to something a little more suitable for Quake 4. Good thing I already have!

9.3 out of 10.