TItle: Quake 4 Developer: Raven Software Publisher: Activision Music Composed by: Clint Walsh Release Date: October 18, 2005 IntroductionBack in 2005, crowds cheered wildly at QuakeCon in response to id Software's unveiling of the fourth installment in the Quake franchise, a series that arguable helped birth the modern 3-D first-person shooter. The mixed reception of Doom 3 the previous year had left fans in a bit of a sulk, and they were eager for something to take their minds off the failings of the attempted reboot. Now, with the unfortunate benefit of hindsight, it's accurate to say their hopes were misplaced. Quake 4 might've impressed on release, but time has been less than kind to this unfortunate corridor-shooter. Now, to be fair, Quake 4 was not the sole product of id Software, who enlisted the aid of Raven Software to help in production. That said, the game still bears the marks of the studio's ill-fated efforts to take its biggest money-makers in a 'more realistic direction', to quote Kevin Cloud in his appearance on the documentary 'Doom Resurrected' by Noclip. While the developers are to be applauded for trying to step outside the box, the failure of Doom 3 should've served as a clear sign to the team that trying to capitalize on the Quake brand in a way that failed to properly honor the series' roots was a bad, bad idea. But I digress; Quake 4 is available on Steam for 14.99, though you can generally grab it for much less during QuakeCon season, when the annual sale is on. Take my recommendation and wait. That way you're more likely to get your money's worth. Storyid Software has never been strong in the story department. John Carmack, one of the studio's founders, is known for saying 'Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important.'. Obviously he's not entirely correct, or the Mass Effect trilogy wouldn't have become one of the most popular sagas of all time, but he's not entirely wrong either. The 2016 reboot of DOOM had very little plot, yet it was delivered in a tongue-in-cheek, slightly humorous and campy manner that made it fun and a decent garnish that sufficiently added to the stellar gameplay while never eclipsing it. And that's OK! Some games aren't about the story. Unfortunately, while Quake 4's story has about the same level of complexity as most of id's other titles, it doesn't have good gameplay to fall back on, and it isn't very well-executed or presented to boot. The plot hearkens back to the franchise's second game, which pitted the player against the Strogg, a cybernetic alien species which has invaded Earth in a plot to harvest humanity for the creation of an organic power source known as 'stroyent'. in Quake 2, the player finishes the game having not only taken down the defenses of the Strogg homeworld, opening it to a counter-attack, but also having killed their leader, the Makron. Quake 4 picks up immediately afterwards, with human warships warping in to deliver some righteous ass-kicking to the evil half-machine aliens. Hey, wait a minute...I've seen this movie before! The asteroid hits Buenos Aires, right? You play as Matthew Kane, certified badass of the Space Marine Corps, who in the best tradition of id's protagonist never speaks, and has the emotional range of a block of wood. Granted, people get attached to Gordon Freeman of Half-Life fame and he's virtually the same, but he has the bonus of being an everyman character which makes him much more relatable. Kane is the a cookie-cutter individual with little to no history and no purpose except to shoot things until they die. Again, this wouldn't be a bad thing, were it not obvious that Id was obviously trying its hand at a more cinematic Quake, without grasping the lessons of similar games like Half-Life. The writing is also pretty poor, at least in regards to what the developers were hoping to achieve. The first twenty seconds made references to Starship Troopers, Babylon 5 and The Outer Limits. Granted, not everyone's going to pick up on that, but it only accentuated the cliches for me, which continued to roll in non-stop for the remainder of the game. I also got the feeling that there were things that had been cut for time or the sake of pacing which shouldn't have been. For example, in the opening cutscene, Kane's dropship is shot down, crashing on the surface of Stroggos where he drifts in and out of consciousness while people fight on around him. I expected this to be followed by a sequence where you get trapped behind enemy lines and need to fight your way through. Instead, you simply wake up next to your squadmates, who send you on your merry way. Said squadmates are also about as interchangeable and dull as your guns, which I'll get to in a bit. My biggest gripe with the story is the execution of the big plot twist that comes about halfway through. It wasn't much of a surprise to be fair, given it was advertised as a selling point during the game's marketing stage, but it was full of potential nonetheless. During a mission, Kane is captured by the Strogg and taken to one of their medical facilities, where the full scale of the alien menace is laid out as he is 'recruited' for lack of a better word, awakening on a conveyor belt transporting captured humans through a sickening assembly line that transforms them into cyborg soldiers like the ones you've been fighting the entire time. The whole thing is chock-full of body-horror, made all the worse (or better, depending on your views) by being forced to watch everything you go through happen to the guy in front of you first. It's a shocking, grisly turn of events, and at the end, I found myself wondering if this meant I might have to fight my fellow marines now too. Of course, I should've known better than to expect such literary creativity. In another cliched turn of events, Kane's control implant never gets activated, a rescue party arriving in the nick of time I dun told you not to hire that shifty surgeon Jake! Did ya even check his credentials! Gosh darn, now we gotta go find yer damn liver! See boy, this is why you don't employ a guy with more limbs than degrees! Now, this is the part I hate more than anything, because from here, it all just becomes so blase and boring. You fight your way out of the Strogg medical facility and return to your ship. The doctors give you a quick examination, with zero ethical dilemmas about taking you apart being raised, followed by a jaunt to the briefing room like nothing's wrong. The other people on the ship barely seem to notice your repulsive transformation, espousing one-line reactions before going about their duties. It's so frustrating, not because id isn't good at writing, but because they tried so hard to be different and failed so monumentally. This from a guy who actually sort of enjoyed Doom 3's plot, which I've often heard scathing remarks about. Perhaps things might've been better if this wasn't one of their staple series they were trying to experiment with. As DOOM proved last year, and Dead Space before that, once you create a franchise with a set tone and style, people don't react well to change. Granted, if anyone could've gotten away with it, Quake could have, given until Quake 4, none of the games had anything to do with one another from a storytelling standpoint. Still, they were shooters, based on blazing-fast action and shooting many bullets, and they were famous for it, to the point of earning spots in the all-time video-game hall of fame. In a way, the real issue might not have been the series identity now that I think about it, but the studio identity. It just goes to show when you're good at something, people tend to have very narrow expectations, and react poorly when they're challenged. GameplayOf course, at its core, the real issue is the gameplay. Quake 4 does do some things right, with multiplayer hearkening back to the good old days of Quake III: Arena, where you ran, you shot, you died, then repeated. No loadouts, no perks, just pure and simple shooting. Unfortunately, there is reloading this time though, which feels somehow alien in a game trying to be as fast-paced as Quake 4. Again, it's part of the studio identity. Until Doom 3 and Quake 4, the only reloading any id game ever featured was shoving fresh shells into your double-barreled shottie. Doom 3 got away with it by focusing on a slower pacing, given it was a horror game. Quake 4 doesn't have that excuse to lean on, and it gnaws at the experience like Nidhogg on the roots of Yggdrasil, disrupting the very roots of the experience. That said, the shooting is much more satisfying than Doom 3's. It's not perfect mind you, but at least they get the shotgun right. Even now, years later, watching a Strogg marine cartwheel into the wall after swallowing some buckshot remains a very satisfying experience. Gibbing enemies (making them explode into meaty chunks) doesn't quite have the same 'oomph' unfortunately, but I'm willing to put that down to engine limitations. Of course, while the guns are cool, they don't really get a chance to stand out from one another, all of them eventually feeling like shiny death-hoses that you point at foes till they stop moving. The Nailgun and the Hyperblaster are probably the best example of this, with both firing non-hitscan, high-damage projectiles that feel as though they're almost identical in function...almost. The industrial environments are great, but they get old fast. Not even the spicing of human torsos plugged into machinery that turn up later can really make up for it... The extremely cramped level design makes most of the heavy stuff feel pointless, much like it did in Doom 3, and I found myself never once compelled to use the game's BFG (it's called the 'Dark Matter Gun', but anyone familiar with id knows it's a rose by any other name), save at the end, where it pretty much trivialized the final boss. This is actually a problem that's persisted through many of id's works. where the player finds themselves in possession of a super-weapon, yet almost never feels compelled to use it, because the need is simply never there. They solved this magnificently with 2016's iteration of DOOM, and it's just a shame they didn't think of it sooner for Quake 4. Another thing I'd like to complain about, which I also feel was solved in DOOM, is the false sense of progression. Throughout the game, you'll run into techs who upgrade your various boomsticks in ways that range from useless, such as making your Hyperblaster shots bounce around (nope, never really saw the point of that) to awesome, like giving your Nailgun a scope mode where it fires seeking bullets. The unfortunate truth of this system is that it either feels lazy, like 'Why didn't it just do this from the start?', or pointless. There's no effort involved, no searching for secrets in the level's nooks and crannies. You don't feel like you've earned anything, and while it makes the guns stand out from one another a bit more, it's not by much. Sound & DesignThe sounds of Quake 4 are far from impressive. A lot of the ambiance and noises are obviously recycled from Doom 3, which I don't totally hold against the developers, but a lot of other stuff sounds like it was taken directly from the public domain. I have to struggle not to criticize every little thing, given that this is now a very, very old game from a very different time, but it's just too easy. There are nice flashy set pieces that fall short of compensating for the annoyingly familiar corridors you continually waltz through, while the excessive use of darkness makes the overall atmosphere feel like it's borrowing too heavily from Doom 3 (though you do get a gun-mounted flashlight this time...but only on your Machinegun. So close, id, so close.). It does lend itself to an oppressive, industrial atmosphere, amplified by the Strogg habit of grafting human body parts into machinery like the cover of a Front Line Assembly album, but it's not hugely scary, not after the first time. Sometimes it's like id intended to make Quake 4 into Doom 3's faster-paced, action-packed brother, but got the execution wrong, with an excess of monster-closets. Here we see the USS Patton coming in for a landing. You go here twice in the entire game, and I'm pretty sure after the second jaunt, it gets blow up. That's okay though, because everyone on board is a meaningless drone anyway. The A.I. is also pretty boring too, though again, I feel tempted to put this down to engine limitations. Enemies take cover and tend to gang up, but that's as complex as they get. Maybe I've just been spoiled by F.E.A.R., which came out around almost the same time. Regardless, with all the ammo you inevitably get weighed down by, the whole thing becomes a bit of a chore. It's no wonder that id had to sell out to Bethesda Softworks in the end. I've also noticed the game suffers some nasty visual and audio bugs on newer machines running Windows 10. There's nothing I can really say about that, given that Windows 10 is unkind to a lot of older games, and the bugs only show up when I played on my new machine, but still, it's a sign that the inevitable wall of incompatibility is rolling towards Quake 4. Final VerdictOverall, replaying this game years later with a more critical and experienced eye has been...enlightening. I used to think Quake 4 was a lot of fun, but in retrospect, the think I enjoyed most was the art style, since I'm into cybernetics and weird stuff like that. It was creative and my experience limited, so naturally I thought good things about it. It's only now, with my critic's eye, that I see what turned so many people off to it. If you're a completionist, an avid retro-gaming fan, or just looking for a quick and easy way to relieve stress, go for it. If you're seeking something a bit more meaty though, I suggest looking elsewhere. This is one alien invasion story that's outlived its welcome. Minimum System Requirements
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- Operating System: Windows XP (or Compatability Mode) Processor Capacity: 2.0 GHz DirectX: Version 9.0c RAM: 512 MB Hard Drive Space: 2.8 GB --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
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TItle: Chrome: SpecForce Developer: Techland Publisher: TopWare Interactive Release Date: June 2, 2005 IntroductionThe original Chrome, not to be confused with Google's famous search engine, was Techland's effort to create a high-intensity military shooter in a sci-fi setting. By all accounts they succeeded, with some false steps here and there. Chrome: Specforce was an attempt to build on their success. Given I was unable to get my copy of the original Chrome to work, which speaks to just how poorly the game has aged (more on that in a bit), I will avoid making any kind of comparison between the two as much as humanly possible, and attempt to judge the game based on its own features. Also, if you really want to get it, you'll have to do some digging, as it's no longer offered on the Steam Store. The most likely place to reliably obtain a hard copy would be Newegg, at a mere $7.58 as of this writing. Truthfully, if you do enough searching among the many, many purveyors of retro and bargain-bin games, you're bound to come up with a copy, sooner or later. With this in mind, there's usually a reason that games like Chrome: Specforce end up in their obscure state, and that's because they don't age well. While I have fond memories of playing a demo back in the day, they did not resurface when I booted the game up once more for the first time in years. Whatever this game once was, it's a mess now, and while it still has some parts that I enjoyed, the bad far outweighed the good from an objective viewpoint. StoryWhen I first played Chrome: SpecForce, long, long ago, I was too engrossed with the joy of shooting things to really work out the plot. Now, almost twelve years after the fact, I took a good look at the plot. While I won't say it's a bad one, it's not an exciting one either; certainly nothing we haven't seen before. You play as Bolt Logan, a member of an interstellar tactical special operations team equipped with advanced powered armor. Your first mission places you and your AI-controlled partner Ron 'Pointer' Hertz in enemy territory to investigate an off-world facility being run by the nefarious LoreGen Corporation, who is suspected of manufacturing and selling a new kind of weaponized stimulant on the black market. Needless to say, things do not go well, and Logan and Pointer become stranded when things go south The game features vehicle combat, including three types of bipedal assault walkers with varying armaments. They all move quite quickly going forward, but can't turn worth a damn, which is frustrating beyond belief when you're surrounded... From there on in, the story is pretty bland. It's not bad, but it's very predictable for those experienced in this kind of genre. It strives to be realistic, yet the tale it tells is somehow minimalist, and smells strongly of the tropes we've come to expect in narratives dealing with off-the-books operations involving badass soldiers. There are no cutscenes, and most of the story is conveyed via text in the mission briefing screen preceding each level. The voice acting is...okay, I guess. Logan hardly ever opens his mouth, so it's mostly Pointer who ends up talking. He's good at his role, so I'll give him credit for that. There's no character development to speak of, and the villain only really makes his presence felt in the final couple levels. Then again, to be fair, this was developed as an expansion and not a full-on separate game. Still, I feel the developers could've held themselves to higher standards. GameplayOn the gameplay side of things, Chrome: SpecForce works a lot like the older Battlefield games, but with some extra nuances. Logan's power armor comes equipped with four abilities, including a speed booster, an active camo cloak, a bullet-time mode and a set of damage-reducing shields. Unfortunately, while innovative for its time, the game's execution of these powers is lackluster. The movement booster only increases your base running speed, and nothing else, which seems rather boring. it would've been nice if it affected reload times too. The bullet-time also has issues that are a bit more nebulous. I can't really say what rubbed me wrong about it except to say that F.E.A.R. handled it better. The shields seem like something that should've been built in right from the start, perhaps as a tactical trade-off; armor that regenerates the more you move around, being powered by piezoelectric batteries, but which forces you to chose between cover and moving in the open. As for the invisibility, well...I can only assume it's broken. Every time I tried it, the AI shot me dead like I was wearing an orange jumpsuit instead of high-tech camouflage. All of these abilities are dependent on an energy meter that drains constantly when one or more of these powers are active. To recharge the meter, you have to scavenge supplies off dead enemies. This goes for everything really, including grenades and ammo. I found this to be an invigorating style of gameplay that blended with the feel of the plot rather well; trapped behind enemy lines, scavenging guns and firepower off their fallen numbers. It's also a nice touch that the corpses never go away, though it can start to drag on your frame-rate after a while, given how huge some of the levels are. Beyond this, the actual fighting is very standard for a first-person shooter. You're more fragile at higher difficulty levels, so cover is crucial. Peeking out of cover to spot your enemy's position is also crucial, but the game's leaning system seems somehow flawed, and only works when you're right up against an object. Plus, the way it tilts the camera makes it...less than useful. It's very frustrating, especially since spotting the enemy even when outside cover can be a nightmare. The levels are populated with dense brush that never seems to hide you, but always serves to hide your foes. I can't count the number of times I got gunned down by unseen enemies from distant cliff-sides, even when I dropped to a prone position and tried to crawl to cover. The game can get really unforgiving with this kind of thing the deeper you go. The difficulty spikes drastically about three missions in, and it's so sharp that it can easily make you want to just quit and not play for a while; a bad thing for any game to do. I also didn't appreciate how quickly using my powers seemed to deplete my energy meter. More often than not, I simply didn't use most of them, for the simple reason I was either out of energy, or I felt it wasn't worth the effort. SHHHHHH! Be vewy, vewy qwuiet...I'm hunting spehs mareens. As if the enemy AI weren't bad enough, your companions can also have you ripping your hair out. One of the final missions kept me busy for nigh-on an hour trying to protect my buddy while avoiding a bunch of rocket-happy soldiers who kept killing me from across the map. The whole scenario also really put the effectiveness of the game's inventory system to the test. Trying to switch weapons while your pals are pushing forward feels like torture, as you struggle to rearrange your gear to make the new gun fit. I have to wonder why the developers didn't invest in a better inventory-management system, especially since compared to Dungeon Siege, a game that came out five years prior, the whole loot-arrangement system is garbage. Of course, all of this pales in comparison to the biggest issue of all: movement. At it's release, Chrome: SpecForce was a high-demand game when it came to PC hardware. Its framerate, for some bizarre reason, has no upper limitt, which presents a problem when you try to play in that it constantly feels like you're slipping around on ice. Hitting a movement key will cause you to build speed, and letting go causes you to drift to a stop. It's immensely immersion-breaking and irritating as hell. For some reason it gets worse indoors too. According to online forum posts I dug up, you can cure this by setting a frame-rate limit of 60 FPS using your graphics controller, which will vary depending on whether you have an ATI or Nvidia card. I was never able to solve the problem despite my efforts, but you can look here for how to solve it with Nvidia cards. Sound & DesignOverall, Chrome: Specforce's environments are actually quite gorgeous. Granted, most of the brush and wildflowers turn to 2D sprites if you get too close, but they shift and deform as you pass them, which is a nice touch. Every environment has its own atmosphere and color palatte, though greens and browns are the main theme. Still, it helped things stay varied when I went from the deep grays and blues and almost-black greens of a swamp to a verdant jungle mountainside. It kept the world feeling alive. Granted, the art-style is nothing special, but it does it's job well of making you feel you're out in the wilderness surrounded by enemies. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of the sound. I encountered a few bugs, but while they were easy to pass over and far from game-breaking, the overall audio of the game itself left much to be desired. The guns all sound very dull and tinny, and the enemies don't seem to generate sound from their footfalls, making picking them out of the landscape even more of a hassle. The game's environments still manage to look quite decent, though that doesn't mean the overall experience is the same. A good artist can make a picture worth a thousand words, but a bad development team can make a game that isn't even worth remembering... All in all, a lot of the issues I had with the experience lay in the gameplay. The actual look, sound and feel of the game itself are good, or at least passable. I didn't really like the user-interface to be honest, given it didn't label the symbols meant to inform you which of your powers are active don't get labeled with the names of the keys they're mapped to, which had me pressing random buttons more than once in the middle of a firefight to bring up my shields. However, while irritating, this may simply mean that I didn't put enough effort into memorizing the keys. All that having been said, I doubt that even in it's heyday, Chrome: SpecForce would've won any awards for looking unique. Its appearance only seems to add it is 'bargain-bin' feel, keeping it trapped in an era of games long-since past. Still, there's a bit of fun to be had, if you're willing to look for it. Final VerdictThere's nothing wrong with being 'average'. Plenty of perfectly fun but forgettable titles come out every year, often made by studios with much better tools than Techland had at the time of Chrome: SpecForce's development. However, there are games that are 'average' and then there are those that are doomed to sink into obscurity because they can't cut the mustard over the long haul. Sadly, Chrome: SpecForce is one of the latter. Forgotten by its community, it no longer has anyone to repair its ailing code, meaning the bugs that arise with time have overtaken it. More than that though, when balanced against other games of the same period, it becomes clear that for all its struggling, it was never destined for great things. Perhaps that's why we never got Chrome 2, despite a trailer now almost as old as SpecForce that promised otherwise. I don't dislike the game, but even with nostalgia's rosy glasses struggling to help paper over the cracks that I now see, I can't help but feel disappointed. Once, you were fun, Chrome: SpecForce...but now? Now I think I have better things to play. Minimum System Requirements
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- Operating System: Windows XP (or Compatability Mode) Processor Capacity: 1.8 GHz DirectX: Version 9.0 RAM: 1 GB Hard Drive Space: 2.5 GB --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- |
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I'm a blogger. I review games, mods, or whatever else I feel like, and voice my thoughts for your entertainment (and my portfolio). Reviews
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