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Enemy Territory: Quake Wars: More Quake Multiplayer
Company: Activision

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is the port of the PC game of the same name that was released last October, featuring a multi-player gameplay style that tells the story leading up to the events of Quake II.

In Quake Wars, you can play through a series of single-player campaigns as either the GDF or the Strogg, or connect to the Internet to play the same campaigns against other players online.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is not only the prequel to Quake II, but it is also a continuation of id's other Enemy Territory game, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, except of course, in the Quake universe. This means it has all of the features that made Wolfenstein's version as good as it was, but also quite a few added features to make the game that much better.


The basic format of the game has you choosing your side and class; you enter a location with several objectives. For the GDF, it might be to protect the generators, while the Strogg's objective is to take them out. If the GDF fail, then they must fall back to protect another chokepoint, meanwhile the Strogg are allowed to advance and try to overrun the GDF once again.

What Quake Wars adds to the Enemy Territory line is vehicles, larger maps and bots to help fill out the ranks when there aren't enough players. The vehicles are as varied as the character classes. You can drive everything from four-wheelers, hover-helicopters and tanks to Icarus and mechs. While the handling of some of the air-based vehicles feel like they still have some refining ahead of them, the are all easily accessible and full of firepower (well, not the four-wheelers, but at least they are fast).


As for classes, each side has five class types. Soldiers/Aggressors are the military might of the teams, and they are good at shooting and causing explosions, while Engineers/Constructors can call in for anti-personnel or vehicle turrets and repair friendly equipment. Medics and Technicians run around healing their comrades, while Field Ops and Oppressors are the ones that mark targets for bombardment attacks. One of the more interesting classes in my opinion was the Covert Ops/Infiltrator class. These feel a lot like the Soldiers, but have the added ability to take on the look of any dead body they find lying around. This means that an Infiltrator can scan human bodies and look like an Engineer. These classes are also designed to hack enemy hardware so that opposing turrets can be disabled.

While playing the demo copy of this game, I got to try out quite a few different classes and locations, and what's in place seems to be a lot of fun and, for the most part, stable. While I am by no means the best at these types of games (namely the online portions of FPS'), the game's easy accessibility to even the most novice player meant that even I was able to get quite a few kills in. And while I only showed up on the leaderboards a couple of times, it was all fun. I ran into a few connection issues where I was getting knocked out of games, but hopefully all of those kinks will be worked out by the game's launch on May 27th.


-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications
AKA Chris Meyer
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