Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (PS3)

Quake Wars' shaky transition to another platform
6/5/2008 6:17 PM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 2

Quake Wars is easily one of the best team-based shooters you can play. It's a slick and carefully crafted experience with lots of variety for lots of different types of players, with bots good enough to make it a great single-player game, and online support good enough to make it a great multiplayer game. At least, that's how it is on the PC. Unfortunately, the PlayStation 3 version is an also-ran, bound to disappoint those of us who've played on the PC and confound those who haven't.

This is a mostly straight-up port, minus any new features that would have been an incentive for Quake Wars fans to migrate from the desk and mouse to the couch and gamepad. A new map, for instance, would have been a great draw for those of us already playing it on the PC. No such luck.

What's more, there are some significant bits lost in translation. The gamepad is about as good as you'd expect. A discreet auto-aim means a player jumping wildly is less likely to score a kill than a player who stops and kneels. Take that, bunny hoppers! Dividing weapon and tool selection between two separate buttons is a handy shortcut from the PC version.

Unfortunately, there's far less precision involved when you're using thumbsticks. This is particularly galling to the covert ops classes, whose sniping is seriously gimped. It also means friendly fire is a much more common occurrence, which leads to a fair number of games with friendly fire turned off. But Quake Wars wasn't built to be played with friendly fire turned off. For instance, it unbalances the maps if you can call in artillery fire on your engineers while they're building an objective. With friendly fire turned on, however, close quarters battles are terribly, terribly sloppy.

Underground Software's PlayStation 3 port is a much more faithful recreation of the gameplay than the Xbox 360 version, which streamlines out some important details, including the proficiency system. Pretty much everything missing from the 360 version is present here. Devotees who insist on playing on a console will find fewer compromises on the PlayStation 3.

Unfortunately, even though it's a faithful adaptation, it's a technical disaster. The graphics are distilled down to a horrible, low-poly-count, ugly, washed-out morass. The special effects, from explosions to foliage to lighting, are almost bad enough to look like they were lifted from a PlayStation 2 game. What's worse, the frame rate jerks and stutters, especially during frantic firefights. Quake Wars on the PlayStation 3 is damn near unplayable.

There's a 10-minute install when you first put in the disc, which seems like it's becoming increasingly common in PlayStation 3 games, but in this case, the install does exactly nothing to reduce loading times. In fact, I timed the Area 22 map on both the 360 and PS3; the PS3 version took 54 seconds, whereas the 360 version took 46 seconds. The difference isn't that big a deal, but you have to wonder how long it would take if there wasn't a mandatory pre-install. You also have to wonder why the developers didn't do a better job taking advantage of the PlayStation 3's hardware. There's no reason a next-gen game with an established engine should look this bad and run this poorly.