Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (Xbox 360)

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. It's got 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 Xbox 360 version will disappoint many of us who've played on the PC and confound many 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 more common occurrence in a crowd, 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. It's no wonder the Xbox 360 version dispensed with the team-kill reporting.

In many ways, the developers at Nerve Software don't seem to "get" Quake Wars, particularly compared to the developers of the PlayStation 3 version. This is ironic, because Nerve Software has a history of working with id engines and Activision properties. But many important details of Quake Wars -- details that are intact in the PS3 version created by another developer -- have been streamlined out of the Xbox 360 port. Some of these are relatively minor, such as the ranking system, the internal views for vehicles, the Strogg power to exchange health for ammo, the mission system, and the ability to rotate deployables before dropping them. None of these absences breaks the game, but they are disappointing and some of them are puzzling.

The most notable omission from the Xbox 360 port is the proficiency system. On the PC, you earn experience points in four separate areas. As you "level up" those areas, they each earn you new bonuses and abilities. Over the course of a three-map campaign, this provides not only a gratifying RPG system, but evolving strategies. It's also an incentive to specialize in one role rather than bopping around, trying on different hats.

Whatever is left of the proficiency system in this 360 port is under-the-hood and entirely undocumented. As you play, every so often a set of three unidentified icons will flash on-screen and you'll earn a star in your classes. Each class goes to three stars. Otherwise, there's no telling what the heck is going on. What does it mean? What do you need to do to get xp? What new bonuses are you earning? Why are there three icons? Why doesn't the xp bar seem to move except in strange leaps and bounds?