Verdict: Uninspired and hard going initially, but worth persevering with.
The competition between online shooters is becoming vicious, with three heavy hitters doing battle this autumn. Team Fortress 2 (TF2) and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (ETQW) are currently slugging it out, and will soon be joined by Unreal Tournament 3.
While both TF2 and ETQW are team-based shooters, in which players are able to choose from a variety of character classes with different, complementary skills, visually, they're very different. Compared with TF2's distinctive, attractive cartoon approach, ETQW is grim and bland - like Kwik Save, only without any colour and with more guns. The Quake universe has never been a richly imagined one, so it isn't surprising that ETQW, despite being the fifth full Quake game, doesn't look distinctive. There are the Global Defence Force (GDF), generic human military dudes, and the Strogg, generic alien types, which fight each other over 12 maps that range from a generic desert town to a generic rainy town.
The graphics are technically less than brilliant too. The engine, clearly descended from Doom 3, doesn't handle big outdoor levels brilliantly, but characters and vehicles are detailed and move well. The lighting is also striking, particularly the shadows of aircraft, which slip menacingly among the buildings.
ETQW's less than distinctive atmosphere is reinforced by its very reactive feel. The gameplay has clearly been designed by people who spend a lot of time playing other online shooters - in particular, Battlefield 2. ETQW has a lot of structural elements that attempt to impose rhythm and sense on the usual chaos of large, vehicle-strewn battlefields. This means that each map has a series of objectives that are augmented by additional missions generated during the game. The GDF's overall target might be to steal the Strogg 'data brain', but they'll also need to take out some anti-personnel turrets if the Strogg put them up.
The missions are available for each player to see, and they yield experience points when completed. The bigger and more difficult they are, the greater the number of different character classes needed to complete them successfully.
While this means that there's no excuse for not knowing what your team is trying to achieve, the downside is that it makes the interface incredibly cluttered. Icons and triangles clutter the screen, along with lots of text in a range of colours that would shame most high-street Christmas lights. This adds to the sense that the game isn't very intuitive. The volume of information thrown at you, the considerations of your character class, and the subtlety and scale of the maps means that there's a lot to take in. The game's dull presentation and cluttered interface don't help the medicine to go down either. Add to this the difficulty level of the game - you'll die a lot at the beginning - and it's hard to describe ETQW as compelling. If you persevere, there's a well-balanced and thoughtfully patterned shooter here but, with TF2's fun approach and UT3's fast arcade action as alternatives, it's easy to see ETQW taking third place. Hardened Battlefield 2 fighters looking for a new challenge would do well to give it some time though.
