Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is an eight-month-old PC game that looks and plays like a five-year-old PC game. It’s pretty difficult to pick out particular faults in it, as it has no specific flaws. But it is, across the board, oh so horribly dated. Looking at the screenshots on this page, you can probably see the jagged, angular modelling, blurry, fuzzy textures, and absence of any decent lighting or particle effects for yourself. Well, in this case, the shots certainly don’t lie. The animation is on a par with the cosmetics – not bad as such, just really, really old-fashioned. We’re getting used to seeing characters that look like they have weight and momentum, and it’s a bit of a blast from the past to see space marines and alien invaders looking like they’re floating slightly, never making any convincing contact with each other or the environment around them.

It all sounds and feels similarly flimsy and sparse, too. We were left with the distinct impression that Nerve kept the technical demands of the game to a minimal level in order to ensure that the game would run as smoothly as possible when being played by a large number of players with varying PC setups, and that it’s just been left that way for the console versions. Not good enough. And we say a ‘large’ number of players, but Enemy Territory: Quake Wars only accommodates a maximum of 16 players per game, which is actually a very small number for a game that’s supposed to be about large-scale warfare. Not good enough again.

We’d also attribute a couple more of its shortcomings to its PC roots. It has a habit of overcomplicating matters with stats and data and information and text and numbers, most of which are as necessary as three of the four ‘ands’ in the first part of this sentence. But at the same time, it often neglects to explain or contextualise things, and fails to signpost and highlight important stuff with sufficient clarity. On one of the Campaign levels we were thrown into total confusion when our entire team went through a transporter to a completely different map while we were somewhere else entirely. We didn’t see anyone else use the teleporter, and it wasn’t marked as our next objective, so we had no idea where anyone else was or how we were supposed to get there. To confuse matters more there was an objective marker at the edge of the map that made it look like we could get to the objective by travelling in that direction, but when we got near the edge, we were warned to go back to the battle. By the time we figured out what we were actually supposed to do the battle was all but over. Presumably we had been given the information we needed at some point, but it was buried, disguised and camouflaged among all the totally unnecessary stuff.

You can get away with this kind of stuff on a PC title, especially one that has essentially evolved from a mod, because PC gamers are accustomed to putting in time to learn a game, and a title like Quake Wars will always have a strong online community on the PC, which can be a big help when learning the ropes. But on a console the game itself has a very clear duty and obligation to show the ropes. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars just doesn’t do this.

And the really annoying thing is that once you do get the hang of it, you begin to realise that so much of what you thought might be depth is just a load of smoke and mirrors. Eventually it begins to become clear that your objective always boils down to one of two things. Either go up to the big flashing thing and hold Square, or stop the other team from going up to the big flashing thing and holding Square. Where Battlefield: Bad Company presents a very simple premise, which is cleverly designed to allow complexity and sophistication to emerge naturally within it, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars does the opposite. It presents a sophisticated front in an effort to belie its basic, dated nature.

The best thing we can say about Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is that it’s fundamentally a functional, competent game, and that if you managed to get together both an organised team to play with and some similarly organised teams to play against, then you probably would get a decent amount of enjoyment out of it. But we just don’t fancy your chances given that Quake Wars is so obviously a backwards step for the genre and is unlikely to attract a decent sized crowd of players prepared to stick with it. The only alternative is a single-player campaign with AI so bad that we were killed by allies almost as frequently as by enemies. You really, really don’t want to go there.

Gavin Mackenzie