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Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (PC DVD) | 
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| From: Activision
Category: Video Games
List Price: £34.99
Buy New: £1.98
You Save: £33.01 (94%)
New (24) Used (8) from £1.85
Rating:  24 reviews
Platform: Windows Xp
Genre: sci-fi-action-games
Media: Video Game
Number Of Items: 1
Age: 11 - 18 years
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.4 x 0.6
EAN: 5030917035876
ASIN: B0009RW87M
Release Date: September 28, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.co.uk Preview
The release of Battlefield 1942 for the PC in 2002 was a milestone for online gaming, creating a highly popular middle ground between traditional first person shooters and massively multiplayer online games. Like Battlefield this new game is essentially online-only, featuring huge battles between opposing forces of humans and aliens, with each side possessing a completely different set of vehicles and weapons.Although it's set in the Quake universe the connections to the other games are not important. As you might imagine the overarching plotline is not the going to be winning any literary awards either, but actually the game is much better at telling a story than many of its contemporaries. Instead of just capturing flags or anonymous control points all of the game's levels have a very complex series of interconnected objectives. For example, you might be assaulting a based requiring you to first bridge a gorge, then knock out anti-aircraft batteries, before taking down the base's shield generators. Character classes are just as involved, with engineers, field ops and the rest all having a very different range of weapons and equipment. As complex as all that sound though you can still choose to ignore it all entirely and just play as a soldier and run around shooting bad guys. Although developed by British team Splash Damage this includes the latest in graphical technobabble from original Quake creators iD Software, in the form of MegaTextures. The idea is that texture patterns are never repeated and there's no fogging or pop-up at all. Whatever the technology used though the game is hugely impressive to look at and after the mild disappointment of Battlefield 2142 looks certain to become the next big thing in online PC gaming.
HARRISON DENT
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| Customer Reviews:
 Half the reviewers here have never played the game! October 24, 2007
JULIAN HIRST (UK)
26 out of 27 found this review helpful
I've heard people say "turned into Quake 3 death match with vehicles", rubbish.
I played the demo for an hour didn't like it, it was only when I read the manual and had another go whilst off work with flu that I realised what I was supposed to be doing. Here lies ET QW's main flaw (from a marketing point of view at least): it's quite complicated for a shooter; and it's quite different to most shooters so it's not immediately obvious how the game works. Hence some of the unjustifiably bad reviews on here.
Unlike BF2142 (to which it is often wrongly compared, the games are nothing like each other, though there are some similarities in the graphics) this is no 'team death match with flags'. Each game has a time limit, during which one team must strive to complete a series of objectives whilst the other attempts to thwart their efforts.
Players can choose to be one of 5 classes, each comes with a selection of weapons (e.g. the soldier can be either a heavy machine gun or rocket launcher guy depending on the selection you make before spawning). Classes for each of the game's sides are subtlely different, e.g. GDF medics can revive players instantly with shock paddles whereas the Strogg take several seconds (but the Strogg get to create 'spawn hosts' from the corpses of their fallen enemies, allowing players to respawn mid-battle field).
Similarly, the vehicles used by the two are far from identical e.g. the strogg have the 'icarus', a sort of jetpac type thing, where GDF have high speed quad bikes.
As a game progresses players earn experience by completing missions (these can be anything from the game's main mission objectives, such as driving/escorting a mobile command base to it's destination, to repairing vehicles, constructing defensive turrets or blowing up troublesome barriers). Experience is earned in several categories (e.g. vehicles, light weapons) depending on a player's actions. As they earn experience their abilities in each of these fields increase, e.g. weapon magazine size increases or the player can call for vehicle drops in the field. This is all enhanced by 'campaign mode' where groups of three maps are played and each player carries over rewards from one map to another.
Much criticized is the lack of VOIP support*, in its place is a plethora of 'prerecorded' messages that can be selected using an easy to access menu system. The advantage of this system is that anyone can use it with or without a microphone, it doesn't clog up your bandwidth with voice data and it allows you to communicate with anyone, independent of language skills. The disadvantages, of course, are that selecting an item from a menu isn't as quick as using voice and that even though there are quite a number of well thought out phrases to select from they aren't going to cope with every situation (e.g. there's no "he's over there behind the second anti-vehicle turret, watch out he has a rocket launcher"). Still, all in all it works well.
Anyhoo that's pretty much it, the two sides spawn repeatedly and charge towards the current crunch point(s), shoot at each other and duke it out until either one of them completes all the required objectives or the timer runs out. Oh, and it's all quite good fun! Hope that helps
Not for everyone perhaps, some people just don't 'get it' and games are long (1/2hr+). I'd recommend you try the demo before you buy. Bizarrely, the excellent tutorial videos that shipped with the alpha of the game were pulled from the final product. They're worth watching, search youtube for 'quake wars tutorial' and you'll find them.
Take the time to work it all out and, like me, you might just end up hooked!
*VOIP coming in the V1.2 patch!
ET:QW a complex shooter, but fun October 26, 2007
Kev Patrick (Scotland)
9 out of 11 found this review helpful
So where to begin?
The main reason i got this game was cos it was the first decent looking shooter since bioshock (fantastic game but is this the driest summer for games or what?)
so i was expecting a run-of-the-mill single player shooter with some online stuff, and man I was annoyed when it wasn't.....so annoyed i was planning on taking it back.
I'm sooo glad i gave it a propper go. First, the offline mode...trying to figure out what I have to do (the bots are brilliant and do the objectives for you so it still feels like a team game) Second, online....diving in, blasting away with one eye on what needs to be done to complete the objective. If you come up against a clan, you pretty much have no hope in hell, but it is fun to see how far you can push em and take the fight to em in the time limit.
couple of things; the vehicles are cool and encourage cooperation to use em (no idea how to fly the jets though:/), the field ops and rocket launcher guys are load of fun, and Stomp..STOMP...STOMP!!! (play it and you will know what i mean)
Have fun Gaming
Kev
I have the demo September 12, 2007
Ben Cousens (UK)
7 out of 31 found this review helpful
I am absoultely loving this game. I would honestly pay 20 for this demo alone. Track down the demo and try it yourself
This game is amazing
 A failed experiment. September 15, 2007
Mr. P. J. Roberts (England)
6 out of 19 found this review helpful
Quake Wars was supposed to be an FPS that really focused on each player being a part of the team. In a game were objectives are very specific, each player needing to be of a specific class to complete them, you'd assume this would happen.
It does not.
Because of the games reward system, players will 'level up' as they achieve goals, this means better guns, more health and quicker movement etc. A great idea, except that the demo showed this caused the word 'team' to be thrown out the window. Rather than have 4 soldiers and an engineer move to an objective that the engineer can complete (with the soldiers offering protection) everyone becomes an engineer and attempts to complete the goal first.
So without the amazing team strategy the game promises, what are you left with? The demo showed a middle of the range shooter in which players are constantly having to switch the class, all of which have limited weapons, no ability to take ammo or weapons from other players and a health bar that is somewhere between COD's one shot and your dead and Warhawks you can take two machine gun clips in the back.
If you really need a shooter, I say wait for UT3, your money will be far better spent.
A 4 on the Richter scale October 1, 2007
Guru Saj
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
ET:QW brings the long-lived "Quake" series up to date, blending the Quake universe with the latest innovations from the FPS genre. Cynics could say that it draws heavily from EA's "Battlefield" series, which has revitalised the FPS shooter by incorporating team-based objectives and realistic weaponry modelling, but ET:QW leans much more towards playability in the old Quake stylee.
The early "Quake" series were individualistic blasters - he who kills most, wins. ET:QW is a different kettle of fish - the snipers camping on the cliffs, picking off unsuspecting victims will be surprised when their team loses the round despite their body count. This time, it's all about working as a team to fulfill missions and sieze objectives - from destroying vehicles, to seizing strategic points and demolishing enemy technology. Vehicles make their first appearance in the Quake series, with tanks, jeeps and aircraft dominating the battlefield. Clearly, Battlefield 2 has been a huge influence here, but QW makes a number of critical changes that make the game more accessible - vehicles can be taken out much more easily, and the actual first-person-shooter element is key to the capture of a number of objectives, rather than a brief interlude between vehicles.
The game pits the original rival civilisations of the human Global Defence Force against the alien zombie-like Strogg, whose superior technology is backing up their invasion of Earth and features in many of the mission objectives. The weaponry and talents of the two sides are subtley different, making for challenging play to exploit each side's strengths and weaknesses. Obviously it's designed for a powerful PC with a broadband connection to support the online multiplayer mode - anything else is just an accessory. One of its key selling-points is the developer's new "megatexture" technology to add miles of beautifully-textured non-repeating terrain to the many different scenarios across the world, from the west coast of the USA to the Lake District, all packed with superbly detailed outdoor and indoor battlegrounds.
At its best, ET:QW is superbly accessible - you can play as a simple foot-soldier blasting away, or as a variety of mission specialists with different weaponry and talents that need to be called into play. A series of missions might require soldiers to blow up machinery (like Counter-Strike's terrorists), then bring in engineers to deploy their own, whilst medics back up the team & infiltrators sneak behind enemy lines to stall their advance. There's actually quite a learning curve to understand how it all works, and it will be a long while before a player has mastered the classes, talents and vehicles - an experience-point ranking system unlocks further weapons and upgrades for the keen online player.
Play can be progressive and frantic, but many of the early maps are actually quite small in area and focus on choke-points in classic attack/defend mode. Some of the maps are actually very difficult to play as the aggressor side, as the objective is right next to an enemy spawn point, meaning a constant supply of defenders and very rare victories. Whilst it's not quite as frustrating as BF2, the game loses some appeal when maps are focused on a single objective behind numerous choke-points, which mean repeated deaths and the same walk from the spawn point to choke-point over and over again. It's not like this on every map, but there's clearly room for development on some of the first-release ones. There are minor niggles like the countdown to respawn, which insists on a space bar press to choose to respawn, rather than a choice to wait for a medic, which would have been more logical & can lead to frustration as you realise you've forgotten to press the key again & must wait another 20 seconds to play again.
Perhaps the only major frustration I came across was the feeling that I'd been here before - perhaps this is the reason it's easy to pick-up and play. The class-based choice of player, vehicles and aircraft, artillery, objective-based mission system and experience-based upgrades could have been lifted straight from Battlefield 2. Despite the wait for this title, much of its innovations are actually things we've pretty-much seen before, with the death-metal Quake imagery bolted on top. However, it remains more balanced and playable than its predecessors, without too much vehicle dominance and the classic "Quake" frenetic blasting left intact.
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