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Bow the knee, Quake 4 is here.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: May 19, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Lets start off with a disclaimer: There isn't a lot here that you haven't seen before. If you've played Quake, Quake 2 and Quake 3 you already know a lot of what Q4 is going to give you. Quake 4 didn't reinvent the wheel (gotta love those cliches). They just made the bloodiest, meanest, and most addictingly fun wheel on the market.

The Breakdown:

GRAPHICS - Beautiful! The difference between Q3 & Q4 graphically is more like the difference between Q & Q3. All the textures look silky smooth. The charater models look gruesome and fluid. The blood sprays in all directions with every gunshot and impale. The one drawback is that you computer has to be high-end. Don't fool yourself into thinking that you can run this game on anything less that the listed requirements.

SOUND - The sound effects are creepy and always appropriate. The soundtrack sounds epic. It makes you feel like a hero even if you are just running through some trenches.

GAMEPLAY - If you like Quake-Quake 3. You will not just like the game, you will love it an see it to completion. It is better than the other Quakes in every area. I will admit that I haven't played any multiplayer in Q4, but if CTF is anything like Q3 I won't be disappointed.

If you didn't like any of the previous Quakes then don't even consider picking up Q4. You won't like it! So shut up and don't give the game [...] just because it plays like a Quake game and not like a photocopied military clone.

Joke 4: The Death of OpenGL

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 11 / 35
Date: October 26, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Back in the mid to late 1990s two major Application Programming Interfaces managed to dominate the PC game scene - DirectX and OpenGL, so much so that graphics hardware developers like ATI and NVIDIA built hardware around these APIs. OpenGL seemed to enjoy a life with game developers who used Silicon Graphics workstations (SGI) to create models and animations for games and film. We could buy high-end OpenGL graphics cards that where up to 64mb back in the days when 8mb cards where mainstream. Even the Nintendo 64 built some of its architecture around OpenGL graphics. In the year 2004 the high end 256mb cards where quickly bought up to enjoy the power of games like "Half-Life 2" and "Doom 3" (in fact "HL2" was the only reason for the upgrade). "Doom 3" is an OpenGL game and looked amazing. "Half-Life 2" used DirectX 9 where previously Half-Life 1 offered both OpenGL and DirectX support. Because "Doom3" was so dark it led many to wonder that if the game was brighter, would it reveal something questionable about the quality of modern OpenGL graphics? "Doom3" also had an option to use 512mb cards that have only been released in the autumn of 2005. Valve's choice not to support OpenGL further fuelled speculation that OpenGL may be badly lagging behind DirectX 9. "Quake 4" is confirmation of this problem... and it is more serious than previously thought. "Quake 4" is built on the "Doom 3" engine. Since "Doom 3" was mostly occupied with hiding you in dark places you never got to see the full quality of a brightly lit OpenGL first person shooter. Now that "Quake 4" has had to come up with a sequel to "Quake 3", ID software handing over development to Raven software, the horrible truth has come to light. OpenGL is simply leagues behind DirectX 9... and we are talking a big difference here. "Quake 4" offers absolutely no reflections. Instead we are still in the world of mapped reflections. Texture detail is the equivalent of "Half-Life 1". Polygon shapes are clearly visible even with every setting maxed out. Bump mapping is hardly visible. Steam and smoke is displayed as big successive blocks of floating transparent maps. Fire is "Duke Nukem" quality, fat orange blobs of quickly changing pixels. The shading and textures of the weapons look terrible. Again, no reflections on the guns, but we do have shadows. The facial expressions of your space marines are an attempt on matching "F.E.A.R" or "Half-Life 2" but you must turn up the Anti-Aliasing to round them off. Sadly even on a high spec gfx card this results in an even lower fps. You are a space marine that must run through the alien enemy complex, usually to meet up with a special marine who you must bring back with you, or to defeat an enemy outpost. The enemy AI does not exist. Everything is scripted. The enemy, the Strogg, instead moves exactly the same, coming in waves of two or three and you can see them move like clones of each other, getting blasted up the same way and dying the same, every single time. Not good. Lighting looks extremely blurred and the sky background is just one big map that does not even move except for the odd ship that flies around the place. Even the PS2 has better graphics than "Quake 4" which when on a PC at this quality begs the big question - what will the XBOX 360 have to offer if the PC version looks like a pre-millennium first person shooter? This is terrible news for everyone. The Quake series has been ruined. Multiplayer is the same quality as Quake 3. There is absolutely no need to upgrade. OpenGL is now officially dead! Only "Doom3" could mask its failure. Now we know why Valve did not support it. The XBOX 360 is faced with marketing a bad port to show off absolutely nothing that the 360s architecture can handle. Various tweak scripts have been released for "Quake 4" on the internet. These seems to have a little bit of an effect on improving game play ever so slightly, but sadly do not help much. You simple can't get what isn't there and that is the bottom line. To add further trouble to the mess is the fact that these poor quality OpenGL graphics are so demanding that even high spec card users will find themselves turning off lots of features and running the game at a low resolution. That is why "Doom 3" and "Quake 4" have a 512mb option... because it takes a juggernaut of a graphics card to actually round the graphics off and even then we are nowhere near looking at something as good as "Half-Life 2". Things are really that bad.

As "Quake 4" was duel released with "F.E.A.R", a fully fledged DirectX 9 name, I would point gamers in the direction of that first person shooter instead and to also keep an eye out for "Call of Duty 2". OpenGL IS DEAD. QUAKE IS DEAD! ........noooooooooooooooo!!

Pros:
- Absolutely NONE.

Cons:
- Shockingly sub-par graphics.
- Poor graphics still demanding high end system specs
- No enemy AI.
- Nothing new. Same as "Quake 3"
- You must quit and restart the game every time for graphics settings to take effect.
- Same price as better first person shooters out there.
- It will break hearts.

Be warned, this game absolutely TEARS through disk space...

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 15
Date: November 17, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Although this game looks really fun, I cannot get it to work right. The game is so slow it's like a slideshow, everything is green, and the graphics quality is decreased. I am so frustrated because I can't get it to work right. Even if I change a setting, it doesn't seem to affect or change anything, so I don't know... But at least I got this special edition, which includes Quake II, The Reckoning, and Ground Zero. So at least I got three games that work right. But with games like this, you might as well buy a whole new computer for it to run properly, because trust me, this game will eat through memory like chocolate. I'll write another review for this game when I do get it to work right, then I'll talk more about the game itself.

HUNDREDS OF YEARS LATER, SOLDIERS FINALLY LEARN HOW TO ATTACH A FLASHLIGHT TO A GUN . . .

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: January 17, 2006
Author: Amazon User

First off, I want to say that I've only played the demo of this game, but the first thing anyone will notice upon playing Quake 4 is the fact that now flashlights come standard with your futuristic weapons.

The demo only has two levels, but another thing you'll notice is that, unlike Doom 3 (which I'm currently playing) there are quite a few bright outdoor environments to run around in.

The weapons are great, too. In the demo you get a pistol, a shotgun, a machine gun, and even the nail gun. Yes! I liked the machine gun best though as it has a flashlight strapped to it and more importantly because of the zoom feature which comes in really handy.

Seeing that only 50+ people have reviewed this game I can only conclude that is because not too many people have had the time or money to upgrade to their dream 3GHz computer yet. So for those of you with computers that are less than that I want you to know I played the demo on an AMD XP 2000+ with 1GB of DDR RAM and an Nvidia Geforce 4 with 64MB and it ran smoothly at 1028 screen resolution on medium graphics level. Even on low graphics the game doesn't look too bad.

As a comparison though, my computer can run Doom 3 on Ultra high graphics at the same screen resolution without being a slideshow. Actually runs rather well. So if Doom 3 runs well, it will run slightly less well on Quake 4. Keep in mind that Doom 3 doesn't have huge outdoor environments with tons of enemies filling the screen like Quake 4 sometimes does.

Hope this review was helpful to those of you with non-3GHz systems.

Brings back fond memories of Quake 2

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: January 16, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Playing Quake 4 brings back memories of the old Quake 2. Quake 2 was the FPS that got me hooked on FPS gaming. I had finished Quake 2 and all of its expansion packs long ago.
It's amazing to see how detailed the old familiar Strogg opponents looked in the new Doom 3 engine. Quake 4 has some of the old "computer sounds" from Quake 2, Strogg insignia/logos and the Strogg kind of sound the same. Quake 4 runs faster than Doom 3 on my PC-a pleasant surprise. I agree with other reviewers that the guns look and sound very cool. It's great to see in games like Quake 4 and Half Life 2 how far computer games have progressed. If this is an indication of what Enemy Territory Quake Wars will look like, I'm going to get that game, too.
PS:This game supports 16:9/widescreen monitors through the config screen and also through a tweak in base/autoexec.cfg file.

Review for SinglePlayer only. Haven't tried Multi yet.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 10
Date: October 20, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I can't help but compare this game to HL2 and RTCW, since those are my last two single player games. This particular review is only about the singleplayer as I have yet to launch the multiplayer. I am running an AMD 2000 Ghz = 3200+, ATI Radeon 9800 128 MB, 1 Gig RAM.

The game is only 4 CDs, so it loads fairly quickly. After launching the game, I went into the settings portion of the game to set up my graphics, ctrls, etc. I immediately noticed the following:

-setting up the game
Customizing the graphics using the settings menu is largely simplified. You can select your resolution, otherwise you can mainly only select low, med, high, ultra quality. You cannot fiddle with bi,trilinear, lodbias, etc. settings. The advanced settings are a joke. When you make significant graphics settings, you must EXIT the game for them to take effect! I can only run in 1100? x 856? with high quality to get a decent frame rate. With my system I get an FPS from 40-120 FPS, with 60 average.
-50 million keys for guns, but no sprint key? Or am I blind? The NPCs in the game can sprint, why can't I?
-The console is hidden, just like in Doom3. CTRL ALT ~
-Additionally, setting low mouse sensitivity is a bit tricky.
To get a good setting, I had to use the console.

FIRING UP THE GAME
-Graphics
Compared with HL2, the graphics seem sub par. Even when I had them turned up, I wasn't as impressed as with HL2 or COD2 demo. Most places are pretty dark so I just leave my flashlight on a lot. I also have gamma turned up a bunch so that may be affecting things.

-Sound
Sound seems ok, but I'm not using speakers. One thing that bugs me is that I can't turn the music off in the game menus. I hate playing FPS games with a soundtrack. Am I watching a movie or in the action? The music isn't constant, but it comes on in places where the fighting is trying to build tension. I had to edit the config to turn off the music in game. Well, I think I did. I haven't heard music since.

-Movement
If you are looking for Q3/RTCW strafe jumping, look someplace else. Player movement feels faster, than say CS:S or Swat 4, but I can't seem to do much bunny hopping like in Q3A or RTCW. This is disappointing because because I had heard that ID wanted to keep the jumping physics for Q4 relatively the same to please the old Q3 players. Maybe in multiplayer?
Jumping feels similar to HL2, in that it's unlikely you will be able to jump more than a couple of feet high. It feels like the gravity is set quite high.

-Linearity of levels
This game has no surprises in the ability to wander around levels. It's just like any other FPS single player game in that you have to follow a fairly set path. Although thus far, they haven't made me back track too much when I've had to return to a certain point. Cool beans there.

-Stability
No crashes yet, unlike with the COD2 demo and HL2. Definite plus there. COD2 demo crashed about 10 times before I beat it. No exageration. HL2 crahses about every 45 minutes on me. Same with CS:S.

-Difficulty
I think this game has pretty good difficulty. The action doesn't feel as intense as with COD2 demo or some of the HL2 scenes, but there have been some trouble spots for me already. I think the difference is that the hits from the enemy take a significant amount of health (so long as you aren't wearing armor). A close hit on you might cost 100-150 health out of 100 (think knife attack) wherease a direct hit with the blaster weapon MIGHT take 25 health. All guesses.
For a challenge, go pistol only!

-Physics
Holy crap, you can't pick things up in this game. You can push them, but you can't pick them up. I guess I got used to that in HL2.
-Weapons
The shooting feels decent. Although the SMG comes with a scope which I think is kind of lame. Especially as it feels fairly accurate and does way more damage than the HL2 SMG. The Q4 SMG feels more like an RTCW SMG to me. Maybe between Q3A and RTCW for spread and damage. Again, this is just by feel.

-Fun
Is this game fun and worth the dough? Too early to tell. I needed a new drug badly so I picked this up. I think if I were you, I would try to get it on sale. I might be a bit happier if I could resolve some of my graphicsal disappointment (especially when compared with COD2 demo and HL2).

OTHER NOTES.
-Loading games from the quicksaves after a death is unnecessarily cumbersome. From autosave is fine, but not quicksaves.
-So far, the people in my squad (when I have a squad) are fairly competent. They don't get in the way like in HL2 and COD1. A definite improvement.
-No knife!!!! You start with a pistol, but I don't think there is a shank weapon for humans anyway.

-One thing I like is my goal is clearly defined in this game. In HL2 I felt like I was just running though a maze. In Q4, I know what I'm supposed to do and that helps keep a plot going. HL2 SP is immensely fun, but I felt the story was lacking quite a bit. The Q4 goals are fairly focused. Almost Ritalin focused.

Let's just say it's Doom 3 with the Quake name

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: November 02, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Quake 4 is a lot like Doom 3 except a little bit better with graphics and (finally) a flashlight attached to a gun or 2, but still not all guns have one. this game has a little team-based action in it too. I am not crazy about this but it's still great. Probably one of the coolest things ever in a FPS is a shotgun with a clip instead of putting individual shells inside. I am not going to spoil you but there's a brutal scene of your character turning into a strogg. but you don't turn completely evil, you just have adjusted stats and look cooler than before. If you like Doom 3, this is the game to get. just make sure you have a good computer and make sure your video card can handle this game because I had a Radeon 9250 and it made everything green but once I got a GeForce FX 5500 256 MB video card installed in my computer, it made things normal.

Excellent!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 4
Date: October 24, 2006
Author: Amazon User

The graphics are great, the story is well done, the enemies are a healthy challenge, the atmosphere certainly sets the mood. I love this game. I've had no issues with it :)

Great graphics and weapons

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 4
Date: January 11, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Nice game, fun to play, great graphics, poo poo online gaming community.

All I purchased this game for was online play. I don't really care for the single player stuff.

As it turns out, the online community for this game doesn't really exist. No matter when I try to play, there are usually only a few games going at any given time.

If you are looking for something with a great online community to play against, this is not the game for you.

A DOOM 3 repeat...nothing new !!!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 15
Date: October 25, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I would take a guess and say the ONLY people that will give this game a high rating will be kids 16 or younger.

If you have played DOOM 3, then you have already played Quake 4!

I was wondering why this game slipped out onto store shelves and was released to retail without any great fanfare. Now I know why! It is basically the new Doom, except the weapons have flashlights. I am not impressed at all. I beat this game on the hardest setting no problem. The enemies are not particularly clever, just greater in number. Talk about predictable...this game was that in spades. Sadly, you can finish this game in 10 hours or less....YUCK!

Quake 4 is built by the same team using the same graphics engine. I didn't like DOOM 3 much either but it was a great deal better than this. Yes, the graphics were average. I have a AMD 64bit 4000+, an NVIDIA 7800 256MB GTX, 2 sticks of Corsair 1GB 3200 DDR modules, and a Viewsonic 19 inch VP191b monitor. And with all that power, and with Quake 4 video settings cranked up to the highest settings...it still was rough and mediocre looking!! However, the Quake series was never known for its stunning graphics and beauty. Mainly, I felt there was nothing hard to accomplish or figure out. Basically this game did not fill the 1st person shooter void within me. I am a huge fan of id software and have played every Doom or Quake title they ever released, when they were originally released. Yes, I have been playing computer games since my old Commodore 64 was delivered!!!

This is just my opinion though. Download a demo version and give it a whirl but I doubt you will want to pay $50 for it.

That said, I bet multiplayer on this will be a blast after some MODs are created and released. I have hosted 5 different lan parties for this game and we yawned through it until we gave up and switched over to Battlefield 2 or UT 2004! MUCH BETTER MP ACTION!!!!

In summation -
Enemy AI is lame, graphics are weak, a few cool "factory" scenes but no reason to go crazy for this title, gameplay is predictable, weapons are mediocre, limited interactive environment, nothing thrilling, exciting or shocking that will keep your tension levels cranked up to 11.

Half-Life 2, Battlefield 2, UT 2004, GTA: San Andreas even the older and outdated Medal of Honor and Call of Duty games will keep you stressed and excited better than Quake 4.

Save your money...spend it on Call Of Duty 2, which comes out this week anyway! F.E.A.R. is already out, PREY is coming out soon. Much better uses of $50

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