Assault machine guns also appear to have a little undesirable spread to them, even when firing in controlled bursts. Despite this, infantry combat is hectic and intense, with the decent 1-4 second encounters you would expect.

Throughout campaign and online play, experience points (XP) are rewarded for successful actions in combat. Accruing enough XP will give you rewards, typically boosted abilities. Independent of XP however, are the persistent military ranks received from team play. Besides letting you know if the guy in your crosshairs is a danger-man, you can also check out the proficiency paths of others at the mission end screen.

Following the lead of the Battlefield series, Quake Wars also includes fire teams, where you can assemble a squad comprising of different classes to move through waypoints and attack objectives efficiently. Players in a fire team gain experience points whenever any FireTeam member completes a mission. But disappointingly, during online play not much of this was used to its full potential. The inclusion of VoIP would improve the situation, however its not clear whether Splash Damage have any plans for it.

But the most beautifully executed aspect of the game is the objective-driven map play, which sees all the elements mentioned above coming together. In the Valley map, this consists of the GDF pushing forward to eliminate the Strogg contamination facility. Along the way, critical mission objectives, such as building a bridge, escorting a command post and disabling shield generators, call for serious teamwork.

You’ll find yourself deploying defense turrets and heavy artillery to gain a stronghold on your position while other team members frantically try to clear the ground. Ultra-heavy bombardment devices (such as Strogg’s Dark Matter Cannon) keep the ground shaking as troops move in. Secondary mission objectives allow for even more tactical maneuvering, by making primary objectives easier.

It’s gameplay like this that makes you forget about the visual element of the game. The character and vehicle models are brilliant to look at, and the explosions (which reportedly got a facelift since Beta 1) are spot-on. While Valley is fairly bland open map with little vegetation, it also showcases the incredibly deep draw distance in Quake Wars – making it possible to take out an enemy hundreds of meters away.

Conclusion

For such a complex game, id have had to balance a multitude of gameplay issues to keep everyone happy. The huge range of unit abilities have meant that weapon damage needs to be tuned to perfection. There’s plenty of noise being made on the Beta forums about this issue in particular, but aside from this, Quake Wars Beta 2 is right on the money.

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This entry was posted by Justin Arulnathan on Saturday, August 11th, 2007 at 11:37 am and is filed under PC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.