Quake 4 - ARGH

I just got done playing Quake 4. It was good in some areas, but really annoying, frustrating and unfun in others. Overall I don't think it's worth buying at full price. Wait to find a used copy if you can. I'll try to go over the good and bad points ..

Good Stuff:

Squadmates are a good addition. Having them act like more than walking cannon fodder is nice, and they last through quite alot more punishment than usual. They're a great way to conserve ammo .. just sit back and let them do the dirty work :P

The vehicles are pretty cool, blowing stuff up real good with them is fun. Reminds me of HL 2.

The sound and music is really well done. Voice acting is good.

The game looks great, even better than Doom 3 in some areas.

Shooting stuff is fun, and Quake 4 has lots of it. There were some good fights and the bosses were generally good.

The atmosphere of living stuff + technology is really freaky, especially the people hooked up to machines etc.

Bad Stuff:

If you thought the tech base theme was repetitive in Doom 3, Quake 4 will have you begging for mercy. It's nothing but tech for the entire game, with little variety. By the end of the game it just felt boring.

Quake 4 requires an even beefier system than Doom 3. I've got a Radeon 9700 Pro. I played Doom 3 at 800x600 just fine. I had to play Quake 4 at 640x480, and I still ran into plenty of slowdown.

Enemies:

Enemies deal insane amounts of damage. You get the feeling they made up for the medicore AI by pumping up the enemy damage to ridiculous levels.

Most of the enemies look and sound the same, to the point that it's very difficult to tell what you're up against until it's too late. You don't have time to take a good look at them, or you're allready dead.

There's just not enough health to cover the damage you take. I felt like the general strategy was enter battle, find what enemies are there, reload, then play it through correctly. Some areas were so low on health, I had to reload an autosave from the beginning of the level!

The Blue Lightning guy deals way too much damage. If he hits you, you might as well quickload .. especially where there isn't alot of health. You can go from 100 to 35 health .. very lame.

The Elite strogg w/ hyperblaster or railgun takes off an insane amount of health. I've done battles perfectly, then been hit by one of these and had to quickload because my health was wiped out instantly. Totally unfair and frustrating as hell.

Flying thing that shoots blue rockets is impossibly annoying. Takes WAY too much damage, dodges your shots easily, and if even one rocket hits you, you either go flying into a wall or you're dead. Also has the annoying hyperblaster. I can't seem to figure out any strategy to beating him. And yes I know you can shoot the missles before they hit you. I put on God mode and shot him point-blank with 8 grenades, and he still didn't die. That's just fucking stupid.

Weapons:

Switching to the flashlight, then switching it off, doesn't switch back to your previous weapon like Doom 3 did. This is really annoying if you just want to turn your flashlight on for a second.

If you switch to an empty weapon, it doesn't automatically start reloading it.

The Railgun is practically useless, even after the upgrade. Only good against big enemies that don't move very fast. The reload time makes it even worse. You might as well be shooting them with the blaster.

The Nailgun eats so much ammo it's empty almost half the time you've got it. And it takes forever to reload.

Grenade launcher, rocket launcher not safe to use due to melee enemies and teammates. If you switch weapons you get slaughtered, and if you fire the launcher you blow yourself up.

The shotgun, like Doom 3, is hopelessly innacurate, and only really good for close-range. Which really sucks, since most of the enemies will rape you if you get anywhere close to them.

The armored mech shield depletes in seconds, leaving you with the annoying warning buzzer even though you aren't really in any danger.

Deathmatch:

Yes I suck at Q3A Deathmatch, but is it too much to ask for some sort of 'noob setting' so you can join servers that only have lower-level players on it? I'm sick and tired of trying to play and getting stomped by tons of Q3A freaks.

I thought the game was great and worth buying at full price I have never been bored while playing it and I have a radeon 9600 pro and it runs just fine.

Hmmm...

I thought most of the enemies were underpowered considering the game throws so many at you. I never had a problem staying healthy either. What, with half the maps giving you squadmates to give you full health and armor.

The blue lightning guy? The berserker? He can only do that at a fairly close range anyway. Every single time I encountered these guys I'd back the fuck off and take them at a distance. I'm not sure what enemy you're refering to with "blue rockets". The makron?

Also, I found the grenade launcher useful almost everywhere. That and the hyperblaster really. I do agree on the lack of nailgun ammo however.

The Iron Maiden type enemies totally make up for all those Single Player annoyances.

udderdude said:

Deathmatch:

Deathmatch has the usual Q3A gameplay .. you spawn and get killed by the freak w/ the rocket launcher over and over, with no chance of winning. People who have been practicing Q3A for years jump on this and immediatly have a huge advantage. I tried playing and immediatly got killed by any number of insane freaks who play the thing all day. Is it worth practicing for hours, to get anywhere near good at it, so you MIGHT get 3rd place someday? No. Unless you're a DM God, you might as well not even bother.

Or maybe you're just not good at Quake? Last time I was playing Q3A was on an 8MB stock video card that didn't support 3D rendering; the colours were broken and I was averaging around 20FPS, but I was a top scorer within perhaps a week.

Buy my Q3A training tape (just $19.99US) and you too can be cool like I.

I liked the old iron maiden better, the new one lacks the orgasmic squeal when firing.

I assume 'blue rockets' refers to the floating tank guys that fire incredibly slow homing missiles at you, and also have a kind of mini hyperblaster. I didn't find them that bad as long as you stay in cover, and then charge at them with the shotgun or something, then hide again. There isn't a single situation in the game where you meet one without adequate cover. The bit at the end where you fight 3 at once is kind of annoying, though.

Having only played on lieutenant I can understand some of these points, although I'm not sure how they apply to lower difficulty settings. A single shot from a tactical's hyperblaster does around 50 damage without armour. The explosive weapons just don't seem to do as much damage as any of the others, except to you, and the rocket launcher's mod is entirely useless since you have to stand out in plain view of the target to guide the rockets.

I actually found the nailgun very useful with the lock on mod, but you can also kill yourself in less than a second by accidentally strafing behind a crate or something while firing it. The only issue I have with the berserkers is that their blade arm seems to have a ten-foot invisible spike on the end which can hit you from the other side of the room. Other than that, they aren't too difficult to take down with a few shotgun blasts or repeated bullets in the face.

Also, I think the network guardian must be the easiest boss fight in fps history.

Wtf? There was shitloads of health. Several times I came down to <10 health from a battle, and manages to stock back up to near full reasonably soon. You do realise that in the latter part of the game you can use the Strogg health machine things on the walls right?

And about deathmatch - Uhm, K. So you suck at deathmatch. DM is virtually the same in any game. Your DM skill will be the same on most 3D games. You can either hit people, or you can't. I played a few games of Quake4 DM, and I enjoyed it. There's a decent mix of skill in there, and of course you get the people who are just awesome at the game and will destroy you. Didn't stop me from placing 1st a couple of times. And I'm not THAT good.

The rocket launcher was great, IMO. The way you could fire off 3 quick shots is excellent, means you can deal a really heavy amount of damage nice and quick. As long as your enemy isn't very nimble, cos those rockets are pretty slow, as in Quake2.

The 'Blue lightning guy' I assume is the guy with the ball on the end of one arm (I dunno the names of these guys either :P) and yes, a fairly damaging close-range attack. What do you expect for letting one of the more advanced Strogg units get too close? A bouquet of flowers?

This reply is already longer than I intended.

Okay, I've said this in another forum (Doom3 one), but I can say it again:

Weapons: They mostly suck. Unoriginal designs, and some are useless. How could they decrease Railgun's damage so much? It's not the most recognisable one-shot-one-kill weapon anymore. So it's not the same Stroggos anymore. Grenades fly shorter distances than an anemic child could hand-throw them, forcing you to fire while jumping. Kinda lame, if you asked me. Shotgun copeis the mistakes done in hundreds of games. Inacurate as hell, which is completely unrealistic. The best shotgun range is the same, that you get killed by a berserker with one hit if your health was below 80. And that leaves me thinking, how the hell did he reach 3 meters far with his spike arm, huh?

The best weapons are: Blaster, Mgun, Nailgun, Rocket Launcher in both their usefulness and design. Just ignore the fact that nailgun was never used in Quake 2, heh.

Monsters: I don't mind if they are hard or not. Though I wouldn't say they were really difficult to beat. Player is just forced to use various weapons thorughout the game. Grenades are very useful for taking those Strogg commando out of their cover, despite their range being so annoying.
But the mosnters are very constant in their designs. They all run around like crazy (aside from Gladiators, which are the best characters in the game), shoot hundreds of various projectiles and make sounds that are almost irrecognisable. They would more fit in Mars facilities, than industrial Stroggos.

Overally a nice game with some flaws, and begginfg for more variety. But the Quake2 reference is completely PHAILED.

While the railgun does less damage, you can actually zoom in on targets and pick them off from a distance with great accuracy.

The shotgun is the shit for close range. There's some parts where you can just run in the heat of battle and rambo those strogg bastards. I think a neat concept would've been 2 ammo types for the shotgun: Buckshot for close range, and one ounce slugs for distance, but then we wouldn't need a railfun that you can zoom with would we?

Every weapon shines when you use it for it's intended purpose. If you don't assess the situation and switch weapons on the fly in the heat of battle your dogmeat. I found the most effective strategy for indoor close combat is to rambo in there and dance circles around them emptying out the shotgun, then backpedal to a safe distance with the machinegun, nailgun, or hyperblaster. Course that's just me.

Smoking them out of their cover spots is fun too.

The reason behind weapon unoriginality is for the games namesake and the Quaker fanbase. The DMG is pretty neato, but it's no BFG.

I find there's plenty of health, perhaps just a tad too much in some parts. My biggest complaint is some of the stroggs sound like Teletubbys.