After months of playing, I finally got to write this review for the highly anticipated Enemy Territories: Quake Wars on the Mac. First impression: It’s everything I wanted from a successor to Wolfenstein: Enemy Territories. Quake Wars is a very solid clas-based multiplayer online FPS that takes its predecessor’s legacy to the next level. It’s super fun to play, suits both newcomers to the FPS as well as veterans, and has enormous potential for its player communities.

What I Like

One of the reason Quake Wars and its predecessors are so successful is their diverse Class System. Classes differ from each other by not only weapon types, overall gameplay style and (to a certain extend) required skills from the player. For example, the Medic’s job is to heal/revive players, the Engineer’s to repair/build structures, and the Field Ops’ to provide support fire and resupply the team. Those unfamiliar with Quake Wars won’t find themselves too far out of their comfort zone, and the seasoned veterans can really take advantages of the Class System to complete missions efficiently.

Besides its complex Class System, Quake Wars is a very straightforward FPS with classic controls: W-S-A-D to move, space to jump, and so forth. There are class and vehicle specific controls to handle special actions like deploying structures and flying planes, but they’re pretty simple, reasonably defaulted, and can be customized easily.

Building on top of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territories’ objective driven missions, Quake Wars takes it to the next level with larger maps, more variety in the objectives, and side-missions. Also, thanks to the introduction of pilotable vehicles, battles in Quake Wars can now be fought on so many different levels, it really puts you in the game. Check it, this is you:

LIFE IS CHAOS! I’m in the middle of a very large battle, and there are so many things that’re out of my control and are none of my business. I MISS MY FAMILY! I should just go ahead and complete my objectives. WHAT’S THE POINT OF ALL THIS DEATH!?

What I Don’t Like

One of the things I don’t like about Quake Wars—and I’ll admit I can’t really blame them for—is the lack of a single player mode. Wolfenstein: Enemy Territories didn’t have a campaign, so I guess it’s okay… but ET was about WWII so I kinda know what’s going on. Sometimes when I played too much Quake Wars in one sitting, I’d start to wonder: “Why am I doing this again?”. I know Quake Wars sort of follows the story of the original Quake, but I’d still like to have a single player mode so I can get the story’s delivery better (that’s probably just me).

One other thing I can blame Aspyr for is the unbelievably sloppy performance of the Mac version on my MacBook Pro (2.2GHz Core 2 Duo, 128MB GeForce 8600M GT, and 4GB of RAM). To avoid the threat of constant murder and slowdown I have to play at 800×600 with almost every setting turned to its lowest level. I understand this is a very complex game with very, very large maps and tons of stuff going on, but I’d expect my MBP to be able to do better than that.

Final Thoughts

I would very much like to see this series grow to a level of popularity as high as Counter Srike’s, kicking off a thriving community of ladders and tournaments. The advantage Quake Wars has over Counter Strike is it’s scale of battle. It would be absolutely epic to watch 32 players battle over a huge map. Will it happen? Who knows, but I remain ever hopeful.