Enemy Territory : Quake Wars

Here is to the first post of this blog.

I recently came into possession of two copies of a game called "Enemy Territory: Quake Wars", mainly because it was cheap. I got two copies of the game, one for the PC, and one for my Playstation 3 (which I had been neglecting, and felt bad about). I saw the back, and it isn't an old game, but when any videogame is priced down to such a low price, we know not to expect much. But I was pleasently surprised.

Right off the back, I find one major problem with alot of online PC games, and that is many of them, new or old, tend to lack alot of people who play online. And when that happens, the developers tend to skew away from updating and maintaining the game servers.. which inevitably leads to people running hacks etc. (I do realize there are alot of old and new PC games which have ALOT of constant online users. But lets be honest. How many DON'T have alot?)

Now before I get into the pros and cons of the game, there is something I want to mention. The game has two "main" modes of play. Single-player campainge and Online. I went into the single player, because I never go right into online play on a new game. That's just asking to get killed off and t-bagged, then laughed at. The single player was NOT what I expected. Instead.. it was a massive multiplayer style map, with computer AI acting as "other players", and this portrays the feeling of an "online match" There is no "story" to follow, nor is there any "progression" through the game. You select you're game options, and play an online based game, with computers. Now this is something I have NEVER in my life seen before, and it was awesome to play on single player. I figure that many games already have that, but to me, that was a new discovery, and an excellent one at that. This game was also the average "one race against another race" first person shooter. Nothing special.

After killing off the computer AI for about an hour, and learning the controls, I jumped online, and found a room. I wasn't all that surprised though, when I found few rooms with alot of people in them. There was maybe only four-five rooms up in the middle of the day, with five-six people in them, which was dissappointing. To say the least, the game is much better on single player.

Well, after that dissappointment, I poped in my PS3 version, and was ready to role. HOPING that there were people online. And there were. I only ran into one "tiny" problem while playing the game on my PS3. Even with "Look sensistivity" up all the way, the look speed reaction was, in one phrase, a giant pile of crap in a frying pan on high heat. The controls were slow, you could not look on an angle (you had to move it up a bit and then over to properly aim in a diagonal direction, which would result you already being dead). This purely killed all interest in the game for me at this point.

Picking into the actual gameplay itself. You're basically just completing objectives and killing the other team. You have a list of pre-assigned classes which boast different weapons ETC, and there is really no customization at all. I understand that this keeps online play balanced. But come on, that's just stupid. Both sides have different weapons (though being the same in a way, i,e assult rifle class is the same for both, one just has a different weapon), and odds are, you and someone else are going to be running at an enemy, and he's gonna be thinking "What the fuck. Two of the same guy!", then he's gonna look beside him and say "Holy shit! A double of me now!". This game is a whole lot better to play on single player, and you can test out different tactics and such without the fuss of going from room-to-room.

I dunno how to recommend a game like this. I'd say, if you wanna play an FPS (first person shooter), and you are new to them. Grab this game if it's cheap, and just whore out the single player. It's basically what you're going to face in actual online games, and this way you can set the AI difficulty to you're own level, and get a feel for FPS' ".