#Quake 4 hd youtube movie
#Quake 4 hd youtube series

Behind the scenes, all Quake 4 is doing is steering you efficiently from one firefight to the next, with no real opportunity for individual tactics or out of the box thinking. Firstly, all that following orders can’t disguise how shockingly linear the level design is. In other words, this is a game that’s desperate not to be just kill, kill, kill.īut all this pseudo-sophistication is really just a smokescreen covering the antique game mechanics underneath. Whereas Halo’s Master Chief is The Man as far as your fellow marines and The Covenant go, in Quake 4 you’re just a grunt a beefed-up gopher on orders to get this door open, escort that guy to his objective, or take a hovertank to the regroup point and meet up with your unit. What’s more, the game really does try hard to give you variety in your missions.

#Quake 4 hd youtube movie

With their differing accents and hardnut looks, they seem just like characters in a clichéd war movie of your choice. The enemies are varied and unrelenting, and your own comrades give the action a strong sense of personality. Quake 4 specialises in throwing wave after wave after wave of baddies flying at you, and in the large portions of time when you’re too busy shooting to think, it really does a great job of convincing you that you’ve enlisted in a space-age D-Day. You might have seen the central elements – the fans, the glowing tubes, the weird machinery – in Doom 3, but it doesn’t mean they don’t look fabulous here.Īnd unlike Doom 3, the pacing is superb. Admittedly, their taste in interior design has not improved much (brown industrial is still THE look on Planet Strogg) but when the level designers really put their imaginations to work there’s some beautiful alien weirdness on display here. The Strogg were always a deeply unpleasant bunch, and they’ve only become more so with their new makeover: all the torn flesh, grotesque techno implanting and ghastly rending and tearing implements looks even less wholesome this time around. Let’s make no bones about it, this engine produces the most stunning indoor environments and lighting effects around, and lends itself to the most detailed horrific and macabre creatures you could hope for. In many respects, this is the game’s biggest selling point. For large chunks of the game you could simply be playing Quake II remixed with the Doom 3 engine. Raven has had the sense to steal some new elements from the likes of Halo and Call of Duty, but Quake 4 has neither the emergent, open gameplay of the former or the tough, squad-based dynamic of the latter. It’s really, really intense stuff, with enemies coming from all sides and even bursting through the scenery to get at you, and if it lets up for a few minutes here and there, it’s only to give you enough time for the next big shock. It follows on almost directly where iD’s classic left off, features a very similar weapon set and enemies that are clearly from the same gene pool, and has action modelled very clearly on the Quake II model.

This is Quake II – a gung-ho science fiction war movie of a game – taken to the max. If Quake 4 didn’t look so damn cutting-edge, we’d have to label it a retro game and be done with it. But then it goes and fumbles the second part. It couldn’t be any more like Quake II if it had been designed by the exact same people immediately afterwards. The thing about iD and Raven’s Quake 4 is that it absolutely aces the first part.

#Quake 4 hd youtube series

But at the same time, it has to take the series somewhere new – pull the characters and their story into new territories and new situations embrace new ideas and bigger themes. On the one hand, it has to be faithful to the original to have something of the old feel, a few old characters, and a few common threads to pull the two stories together. A sequel – whether it’s a movie, book or game – has two duties.