With the game kicking-off on Kane's first day of frontline duty, you're forever being told what to do, where to go, and to be quick about it. One thing is clear: brown is back, and it's browner than ever, and as we quickly descend through the linear path of rubble into the linear bowels of the linear Strogg base, Quake 4 starts as it means to go on: by ordering you around like the underling you are, in formulaic, linear fashion. Am I alive? Where am I? 'Get over here marine!' Lazy line painter Jane Strange things, these Strogg. With typically spectacular Doom III-powered aplomb, the scene's set. But things don't get off to the best of starts when Rhino squad are shot out of the sky and most of the team perish in the ensuing crash. You're thrown into the fray as Rhino squad's new recruit Matthew Kane, and the game kicks off in typically macho big-space-marines-with-even-bigger-guns-and-we're gonna-kick-ass sci-fi style with your ship heading for a final assault on the pesky Strogg. But enough of that for the moment let's start at the beginning. It needs its own stamp, its own personality, and that's most crucially where Quake 4 lacks. This is the crucial point, because in a genre as saturated as the FPS there needs to be some element of surprise, some sense of the unknown to drag you through, or else you end up feeling like you could be playing any number of other shooters. Well, it doesn't exactly fail at anything it does, except perhaps do the things that you'd expect a next generation shooter to do, to do something, anything, that a bunch of other games haven't done to death already. It ticks all the right boxes: decent, chatty buddy AI, a semblance of a storyline, 'thrilling' on-rails sections, a fine selection of (upgradeable) weapons, an interesting plot twist, some 'intense action', mech combat, tank combat and all wrapped up in the most powerful graphics engine the world has ever seen. In summary, Quake 4 is a textbook example of 'how to make a highly competent first-person shooter using someone else's new engine'. But so much so that most of the veteran shooters among us will be rueing Raven's overly formulaic approach to something that we were all hoping would amaze us.

Because everything about Quake 4 is in its right place. Whichever opening salvo you prefer, the general message appears to be one of 'don't be surprised'. Best dust off the Alienware mouse and stick it to The Strogg one more time, eh? Far from being thrown into disarray, the Carmack, Willits and co regroup and build the new, more powerful Doom III game engine and commission long-term cohorts Raven to churn out a game that picks up where Quake II left off. That's definitely the case with Quake 4, with Valve's great foe, id, undeterred by being too busy working on other stuff to get around to making another game in the Quake series. Old franchises never die, they just return in time to show off new gaming technology. Best take that one out as well then, eh?ДЄlternatively, the opening paragraph could have just as easily have gone like this: Far from being thrown into disarray, the cybernetic warriors regroup and rebuild a new, more powerful Makron. That's definitely the case with Quake 4, with Earth's great foe, The Strogg, undeterred by the loss of their leader, the Makron. Alien menaces never die, they just return in time to show off new gaming technology.

Quake 4 kane