The long, dark corridor should really have served as a warning of things to come, as should the two marines I picked up dropping back, but I was suckered in. Straggling marines you save from abduction follow you, taking defensive positions behind numerous pillars and crates, peeking out from around the sides to snipe at targets - but not me! This is a cakewalk, and I’m up ahead, stealing all the kills for myself. It’s with smugness and confidence that you plod onwards, even discovering a handy machine gun to drop foes all the quicker. The cover is plentiful, and the targets dumb enough to provide ample chance for a string of head shots. Space-age doors slide open with an obligatory ‘swoosh’ to reveal simplistic grunt Strogg with simplistic weapons like pistols, machine guns and shotguns grafted where their arms should be. Your first encounters of the Strogg are just seconds away, and, even armed with the game’s weakest weapon, you’re able to make easy progress. Getting back to your feet and finding a weapon (an inexhaustible pistol that can be charged up much like the plasma pistols from Halo) will get your wounds seen to and your armour patched up by your surviving forces, who then promptly throw you into a light-choked outpost to check up on the status of another battalion. Quake 4 is more ambitious: it wants you to think the forces you are up against are too much for an entire army. You black out to the sounds of sporadic gunfire and the crumpling of metal.ĭoom 3’s cinematic introduction of wandering almost randomly through claustrophobic corridors wanted you to feel like the hellish forces that jumped out of dark corners like small children at Halloween are too much for you to take on your own. A medic tries to help you, but is cut down messily with a wave of bullets. You fade in and out of consciousness, alert enough to see the stalking nightmares that the sturdier marines try and fend off: building-tall arachnid mechs that fire endless gouts of plasma dominate the alien skyline, blocking out sections of the planet’s three moons, alive enough to recognise the screams and cries of the marines that fall prey to its onslaught. The transporter you board is promptly shot down, and your invasion starts with the bumpiest of landings. It’s hardly a Kodak moment.īut it is very much a sign of things to come. Cataract eyes stare blankly at the debris of long-destroyed crafts that share the velvet skies with them. The start of the game doesn’t paint a very optimistic scene for your invading forces: preserved perfectly in the vacuum of space, long-dead marines float almost serenely past the fixed camera, cleaved clean in half, trailing intestines dangling where their legs should be. Following on from where Quake 2 left off ( Quake 3 was the obligatory ((and awesome)) arena title) the Strogg have been forced back from Earth, and humanity is able to take the fight to them. The Strogg are your typically violent alien species that survive by stealing biological samples from other races then wielding on cybernetic implants, and have targeted humankind as their next supply stop. Like Doom 3, the opening section of the game is filled with other humans, but in this case, instead of chilling out on the Mars space station and doing nothing more threatening than routine maintenance, they're preparing for WAR! Unlike Doom 3, the other humans rushing about the place actually serve a purpose. Then Quake 4 came along, and right away you can tell it was the kind of game that Doom 3 should have been. I won’t lie some people perhaps unfamiliar with the game of old loved the new veneer of pizzazz the rest of us walked through a game seven shades too easy and shed the hypothetical tears that we're all far too manly to actually offer. There was just you, a senseless flashlight gimmick, too many health and/or ammo pick-ups, and perhaps a gathering of five targets at a time. There were no desperate firefights, no clinging to your life by a single thread and no realms of secrets. Swarms of hell-spawns, mutants and zombies that once patrolled the areas in waves were replaced by singular shit-brown imps that sprang from closets attempting to give the player a cheap scare (spoiler: they fail). iD’s maniacal level design had been thrown to the wayside to make room for flat, linear maps. It was not an enhancement, a step forward or even a particularly good game in its own right. It was not an improvement on the two games before it. But then, iD decided to get with the times. iD used to have a pretty good handle on this back in the day Doom 2 was significantly better than the original, for instance, and even the early Quakes showed nothing but marketed improvement with each chapter released. There's these things in video games called legacies, and they can work for or against you.
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