If there's anything to take away from my recent play-through, it's that it's just okay. It reviewed well when it came out, but today it feels like it's lost a lot of its snap, though not in a "this is a complete failure, avoid it" kind of way. It's very much a product of its time, and for that it's worth picking up just for that glimpse into a bygone gaming era. If you're a Quake fan (or just a completionist), there's no real reason not to with how cheap it is, especially when it goes on sale.
The spouse asked me what the difference was between DOOM 3 and this game. Visually, the games are very similar in multiple sections, and given the traditional ID Software arsenal that these games mostly share, much of the gunplay mechanics overlap. Many half-jokingly refer to it as a DOOM 3 mod, and I can't really deny that, though I don't think that should count against Quake 4.
Art direction-wise, I feel that DOOM 3 is the more coherent, better-looking game because its creators knew what the engine was and wasn't good at. Raven Software's Quake 4 was id Tech 4's first foray into being an "outdoor" engine, though barely so. If I recall, Quake 4 wasn't quite the debut of ID's infamous Megatexture technology; that would come with Quake Wars, and, of course, RAGE. Lacking virtual textures and baked lighting, it feels painfully obvious that the great outdoors is something the engine isn't equipped to handle, and there's a significant shift in quality between indoor and outdoor environments, with indoor environments having all the greasy, techy, tube-and-fan-filled fidelity this engine really excels at, versus the simplicity of outdoor environments like the devs were worrying whether or not this thing would even run on a PS2.
I did appreciate the bump in quality for the skyboxes, though, which take on a kind of Giger-esque industrial vibe.
It still remained a big marketing bullet point that Quake 4 wasn't as dark as DOOM 3, which, in retrospect, was absolutely absurd, and I have no idea why gamers went so hard against DOOM 3's darkness given that it's such a non-issue today aside from half-hearted milk-aged memes (ha-ha, DOOM 3 dark). We just love making mountains out of molehills, I guess? Anyway, gaming magazines wouldn't shut up about how the engine could now do ambient lighting like they were apologizing for the existence of shadows, but the end result just didn't look as good as it could have. In fact, that's my significant complaint about the visuals of Quake 4: that peculiar DOOM 3 sheen that is laid bare and naked with the addition of an ambient light pass collides head-on with my memories of what the Strogg war was really like.
Quake 2 couldn't do any of that fancy shader stuff, understandably, so I grew up with this idea of a rusty, dusty, Brutalist-architectured, matte-shaded Stroggos experience that was completely steamrolled by the greebly, Phong-y plastic-metallic sheen of Quake 4. It's a nitpick, for sure, though I do think about how this game might have turned out if the light interaction shader was dialed back to mimic a Quake 2 look, but this now runs into problems of what a gamedev faces when handed the rights to make a sequel to a 90s-era game in the mid-2000s.
Of course you'd want to play with the new tech available at your fingertips, so I dunno how else this could've played out, but it definitely feels like something was lost, and the war on Stroggs mutated into something else.
Story-wise, Quake 4 rarely took the time to slow down to develop much of anything besides, "shoot everything in sight."
To be fair, it wasn't like Quake 2 was a fount of deep story, either, but I was fresh off of the DOOM 3 experience, and I personally loved slowly picking my way through an ill-fated research base on Mars, reading the e-mails and listening to the audio logs of its doomed inhabitants.
Quake 4 has almost none of that. Most of the "storytelling" was related through little moments of marines dying in horrific ways, which I guess is a good metaphor for the marine experience (join today!). There was a bit more immersion in being able to walk around the dropship Hannibal during downtime (yes, this game has downtime) listening in on conversations or peeking through windows into the medical bay, but it doesn't go much beyond that. This might be a gameplay plus for you if you didn't enjoy the PDA method of story progression from DOOM 3, but its absence in Quake 4 was palpable for me.
Honestly, the entire trajectory of things in Quake 4 was confusing, even more so than Quake 2.
Quake 2 had the problem of mission objectives just kinda existing, and a player can literally go through the game without ever checking the mission computer. It straddles this weird line between having mechanics and music that promote a mindless slaughterfest, but also having that Zelda-fairy nagging of a vaporous story that loosely correlates with what the player is doing. Teen me thought this was all still pretty bad-ass, as it still felt like I was a gun-toting gremlin just running around fucking up alien machinery, but replays are mostly coasting on nostalgia, I've learned (with a heavy helping of Sonic Mayhem's rocking music; seriously, don't play Quake 2 without the music), and I've taken to preferring the abstract nature of Quake's maps.
But at least Quake 2 was very clear about what the goal was right at the beginning, explicitly stating so in the intro cinematic. Quake 4 doesn't really tell the player what's going on until they reunite with the Hannibal several maps into the game. A plan is hatched to EMP-blast the Strogg communication network (the time-tested "of course the enemy would design a single point of failure"), but that objective gets tossed aside, and Rhino Squad is sent on a lead-filled goose chase to try and cut off the communications capability of the Strogg in other ways that ultimately results in a somewhat bland boss battle. I'd argue that it's really hard to design a good boss battle these days, so maybe they should be excluded from consideration from all games.
Increased NPC interaction was definitely new, and in a refreshing turn these NPCs were actually useful in combat. True, many of them were still slaughtered, but they could be just as lethal as the player, and could at least take out a few Strogg before they were cut down, which was immensely valuable on the most difficult setting. Almost none of them were essential, either (though keeping medics or technicians alive helped to keep one's armour and health topped off), and I can only think of two instances in the game when there were hard-failure escort missions.
Your fellow soldiers still weren't all that interesting to be around. Some attempts at giving a personality were made, such as Strauss' diva attitude, but so much of it fell flat, and aside from Strauss, I can't really remember any other NPC by name.
Therein lies the problem with Quake 4 on the story front: It was trying to be something that it wasn't. As much of a well-oiled misfire that Quake 2 was, its vibe was undeniable when coupled with its soundtrack, and it's a stand-out to this day. I'm struggling to find words to describe it, so I invite you to simply acquire Quake 2 for yourself, make sure to grab the music files separately (they were originally only available on the game CD itself), and use a source port capable of playing that music.
Quake 4 really tries to be heroic with its Hollywoodesque orchestral soundtrack, and in chasing that spirit of heroism, it only succeeds in being a competent "me, too!" sci-fi military shooter from the mid-2000s that you might have found on a shelf at Office Max or Walmart. Silves, that sounds absolutely brutal to say. I'm not selling this game well at all, am I?
The human reactions to Kane after he was stroggified were interesting, though. That was something I wish I could've seen expanded upon, but this is a game about pew pew explosions, not metaphors for race or transgender relations.
Surprisingly enough, Quake 4 has a tiny yet reliable multiplayer community. I remember briefly popping into multiplayer shortly after the game's release in 2005; it was a ghost town, which made sense to me at the time because this game's multiplayer was pretty much Quake 3: Arena, but in the id Tech 4 engine (and with the addition of crouch-sliding).
I was still taking my time coming around to appreciate Q3A, and I felt that everyone in the shooter genre had moved on from vanilla arena shooters, so I never felt a loss here. 2005 saw games like Unreal Tournament 2004 going strong with crazy game modes featuring big vehicles and mayhem, so the Quake purist stuff didn't hold anyone's attention outside of esports.
Older and wiser, I am drifting back to old arena shooters, and after being surprised with Quake 4 multiplayer's continued existence during QuakeCon 2022, I'm popping in every now and again to get some frags in. I feel some responsibility in keeping the torch lit, because there's still fun to be had here.
Taking a step back to look at it all, the single-player campaign is worth a play-through, and is sufficiently challenging on higher difficulty levels to earn a few restarts, which is more than DOOM 3 was capable of delivering. Some of the set pieces were very enjoyable, such as the drop pod sequence later on in the game, or the whole "reject" facility that waxed strong on the creep factor. Although the story and objectives themselves are a bit muddy, the gunplay and enemy encounters are solid enough to keep the player moving forward to the end.
And if multiplayer is more your thing, you're in luck!
However, if you aren't a fan of outdated mechanics like check-the-box-off vehicle/turret sections, or you need more a solid connection to story or characters in your military glory simulator, this game likely isn't for you. Quake 4 was surrounded by other games that have a much stronger pedigree of military glory (Halo or Call of Duty), and Quake 4 really does feel like getting dropped into the middle of a much larger game and story that no one wrote up a GameFAQs for.
There's also a lot of body horror in this game, so if despite being super into shooters, the sight of random body parts being repurposed for mechanical things in disturbing ways is disconcerting for you, this might earn a hard pass, especially because of a certain infamous sequence that everyone remembers and talks about whenever this game comes up in conversation.
All of this has made me want to do yet another play-through of Quake 2, so I'm sure when that happens I'll get around to writing my thoughts on that as well.
Till next time!
