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Quake 4 is the ﾑtrue sequel' to Quake II, the excellent 1998 first-person shooter. It is also a sequel to Quake III, a landmark multiplayer game. That means it focuses on the single player experience, while also delivering robust multiplayer. id Software brought in veteran PC game maker Raven Software for the development tasks. It uses id's Doom 3 graphics engine, giving it the capability to deliver one of the best graphical experiences ever in a game. Unfortunately, despite the huge amount of firepower applied to the task, Quake 4 is simultaneously one of the better PC games of the year and one of the most disappointing.
There are many things that are very well done, making the game enjoyable and engaging from start to finish. The story, while necessarily simplistic, unfolds with interesting characters and scenarios throughout. You are part of a team, and your teammates play an occasional role in your success. Many have interesting and amusing personalities, and help you along the way. The graphics, as expected, are superb throughout the entire game with excellent variety in the settings end environments used. The voice acting, music and sound effects are all excellently done, and provide a very immersive environment. The game wraps itself around you, and while it comes down to you to save the worldﾗjust like in every other first-person shooterﾗthroughout the game there are other battles and situations going on outside of the player's sphere of influence. You feel like the game has a large scope and are part of an epic struggle. It is very effective.  However, there are a large number of issues that nag at you throughout the game. The biggest problem is the core combat gameplay. It feels dated while looking modern, making it seem even more dated. The control set is limited. You cannot lean around corners and there are no secondary firing modes. There are not even grenades for softening up the enemy. The enemies are almost exclusively unintelligent brutes that charge directly at you, firing without tactics. Throughout the game you meet new, larger brutes that absorb more fire before dropping. The enemy possesses one type of intelligence: they know you're in a room and charge, and also find you regardless of you sneaking or hiding. It's out of place in a modern game and limits the combat encounters. These issues are particularly noticeable early in the game. Later on, the intensity is upped to the point where you seldom have time to think about it. These later areas also use sound and visual cues rather than waves of enemies to create effective tension. It forces you to enter new areas slowly and tentatively. This works, and makes those later stages the most entertaining part of the game. It all lasts a fairly standard ten to twelve hours, and is augmented by a strong multiplayer mode. This includes Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, an Arena Capture the Flag variant featuring ﾑsingle use' power-ups, and the interesting Tournament mode. Tournament is a one-on-one survival battle among multiple players with a single champion. The multiplayer modes are immediately identifiable as ﾑQuake-brand' and better than most multiplayer games in recent memory. The weapons are well balanced, allowing for some excellent battles. The mapsﾗnew and remadeﾗare well designed and detailed offering loads of challenge and entertaining gameplay.  Quake 4 treads too much familiar ground. By making a game that is graphically excellent and advanced, Raven has only further focused attention on the dated feel of the gameplay. Despite intense action and an engaging story, something is missing. That something is a sense of cohesion and purpose. It's no longer enough to run through a game shooting everything in sight, waiting for the door to turn green so you can move to the next room. The juxtaposition of beautiful graphics, wonderfully done characters and interactions next to old-school run-and-gun ﾑone against the massing hordes' action is a poor contrast that creates some intense excitement, but ultimately leaves you cold. 
Quake 4 is a violent and gory game. The Strogg tear humans apart for use in various grisly ways and the game shows it all in realistic graphical detail. Nothing hereﾗincluding multiplayerﾗcan be recommended for kids. It's very appropriately rated M, and might even turn off some squeamish adults.
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