Reviewed by: Timothy Tebeau
Date review published: 3/7/2021
In Retrospect Quake 4 is a game that still sends shivers down my spine and can still hold that claim to fame today. Once the marine in space spins around you know exactly what kind of game this is. The enemy will be relentless and the struggle you face deadly. It’s a game that was reviewed decently when it came out, but I feel has been largely forgotten. At the time it was just an arena shooter, but I feel with some spit shine and polish, you have a real gem on your hands. A Quake 5 is begging to be made and after finishing this game, I was only left wanting more of the Quake franchise. This is partly why I chose this to be the first review on the website.
In terms of story, the game continues right after Quake 2 in which a lone unnamed marine takes down the Strogg defense systems allowing for an invasion force to land. You are corporal Kane the newest member of Rhino Squad and you’re squad is here to finish what that lone marine started, ending the Strogg and preventing them from ever attacking Earth again. Your drop ship gets shot down when entering the atmosphere of Stroggos (the Strogg homeworld) leaving you incapacitated and your squad scattered. You wake up and begin to link up with the squad member by member while pushing through Strogg territory. The first act does this well while giving you several objectives one after another and lets you know your squad members while completing these objectives. Throughout the campaign, you are the tip of the spear attempting dangerous missions that no other squad would even remotely attempt. It’s through the actions of your squad that offensive measures are taken throughout the war. The rest of the troops have issues just barely holding the line that they’ve got.
Eventually, you secure a landing zone and allow a ship call the Hannibal to land. Once you’re on board the Hannibal it serves as the base of operations for the marines on the planet. You’re asking to report to the briefing room to prepare for the next mission but the amazing thing is the amount of hidden dialogue and detail hidden in this area. A few guys in the walker hanger are attempting to troubleshoot what’s wrong with the walker taking a few steps forward and back trying to figure out exactly what part is causing the issues. If you pay attention you can hear a few soldiers talk about how his grandfather served on the Hannibal. Then it hits you: This ship was expendable and something that could be spared. The walkers in the hanger are breaking down it’s all on the verge of collapse. It’s pure luck the human forces have gotten this far. You need to end this war and it needs to be done quickly. Luckily once you report to the briefing you find out that the higher-ups have just the thing: Operation Advantage.
The Tetranode is the system that delivers orders to all the Strogg. If you manage to knock it out with an EMP you can leave the enemy forces scattered and disorganized. You set out with a convey and overcome a few obstacles along the way. You reach the Tetranode only for things to go wrong and as a result, the EMP gets destroyed and you lose a squad member. You seek an alternate way to destroy the Tetranode only for the leader of the Strogg the Makron to show up and incapacitate you.
You wake up strapped down on a conveyor belt and the horror of becoming a Strogg is unveiled to you through your own eyes. You watch as your legs are cut off by saws. You see your hands go from human to machine. The worst part is there’s a guy in front of you that is experiencing what you’re about to go through in 10 seconds just ahead of you. The last thing someone is going to feel before their individuality and their humanity is the feeling of being in immense pain and being alone. Each of these men was captured alive. Each of these men either had their entire squad killed or were thought to be dead hence no one came back from them. The thing I enjoy a lot about Quake 4 is it simply shows you the horror and for the most part lets it speak for itself. I remember in the game a soldier that is new to fighting the Strogg look at the hacked-up humans that are half-conscious stuck to the wall and remark: “Jesus! We’re like Cattle to them!” To your squad, the horror of the environment your in never gets brought up. You are all used to seeing such atrocities committed by the Strogg and everyone you see is a reminder of what will happen if you fail here. The stroggification process is the embodiment of that statement. At the second to last step of stroggification, you get a chip directly implanted in your brain. Initially, when you looked at displays they were nothing more than foreign glyphs. The Techs were able to read them with training but for the average guy, they were illegible. The last step is turning on the chip in your head fully making you 100% Strogg and leaving you without any free will. The moment before your chip is turned on you’re rescued by your squad and have to fight your way back to the Hannibal. On your way back you lose a few squad members and have to fight the squad leader who’s in some experimental battle suit. He’s not fully stroggified as he still has the ability to tell you to run however he can’t control the suit and stop it from trying to kill you. Once he’s dead you’re able to board a dropship to get back to the Hannibal.
Once aboard you’re checked again to make sure you’re not Strogg and are given a clean bill of health and once again report to the briefing room. You’re going to do a desperate attack on the Strogg Nexus to take out key systems. You are exactly what humanity needs. Due to the fact that you’re Strogg, you can get through security and use the systems that would kill an ordinary person without any problem. It’s been decided that you and you alone will attack the Nexus Core which will stop the problem at its source. You fight your way to turn on each of the data streams in separate towers to allow you to enter a teleporter to go straight to the heart of Strogg territory. You’ll have support up until you go through the teleporter but after that, the fate of humanity is in your robotic hands. Once you teleport to the Nexus Core you fight your way to the room with the Makron and kill him and then destroy a giant brain that controls all the Strogg.
In the end, it’s a massive win for humanity. You’ve pulled off the impossible. You get back to the Hannibal where you’re immediately told that you’ve got more work to do and the game ends on a cliffhanger.
Moving onto the subject of the gameplay style of Quake 4 is fast and frantic. Enemies come at you from every direction and there are usually many ways to dispatch enemies. The game throws you guns through the first half of its campaign and follows them up by upgrades at certain points throughout the second. My favorite upgrade is the one that allows the lightning gun to hit multiple enemies at once by bouncing the lighting from one enemy to all the enemies around it. The shotgun is just simply an awesome weapon to use as it sends enemies flying back when they are killed. The grenade launcher is awesome to use especially if you can bounce them off walls.
The way the game creates such an awesome gameplay experience is how it uses its future setting to allow for creative enemy types. They may fall into standard archetypes, but the cool thing is how the designers mesh it all together. The key thing is knowing what enemies to take out in which order. The designers will often throw quick-moving enemies that flush you out of cover which will allow for ranged enemies to open fire on you. The game has several different troops that have the same basic archetype such as ranged or melee, but their attack patterns and silhouette are always different allowing for easy distinction. The Grunt is deranged and will have no qualms about ripping your arms and legs off with its bare hands while the Berserker is tall and quick and will try and get close and use an AOE (Area Of Effect) electric attack to soften you up before goring you on its long spike. Both the Grunt and the Berserker serve the same purpose of flushing you out into the open but if you know the nuances and keep in mind different ways to deal with both you’ll survive.
Several choices need to be made in the heat of combat and every one of them matters. Should I swap to my rocket launcher in a firefight to take out the mid-ranged but heavily armored support? What if melee troops enter close range? The blast will damage me as well and I really can’t spare the health right now. All of these are thoughts that are running through your head constantly while in combat. Much like any good Quake game standing still for long periods of time will result in your death. Aside from corridors many of the Strogg environments are built to allow for some kind of limited mobility and experimentation with your weapons. The vehicles in the game don’t have this strategy to them and that’s what really drags down those sections in the game. I’m fine with a vehicle section if I have interesting tools and weapons at my disposal.
Quake 4 builds on the shooters of the time by actually splitting up the soldiers on the battlefield into various classes. Other shooters, I’ve played rarely differentiated soldiers from another aside from weapons. Quake 4 isn’t your average shooter. As a result, the different soldiers you have assigned to you will open up different strategic options to you. The general uniform is green for just a normal soldier while the medics wear red and white and have the ability to heal you. The soldiers classed as “Techs” have the awesome ability to repair your armor whenever you command them to. Just like you, they will die. There’s no way around it. If you have a Medic or a Tech around you could be more reckless in the way you engage in firefights soaking up as much damage as possible to keep the soldiers behind you alive. Most of the time they stay out of your way and don’t get in front of your shots. You’re not teamed up with them often and most of the combat throughout the campaign is done with you alone but when you are with them it’s a welcome addition to mix up things.
While I’ve covered the mechanical differences between troops you’ve probably noticed I haven’t touched on Rhino Squad or any other character yet because I’m not quite sure what to say about them. The majority of Rhino Squad is one-note and I struggle to think of anything that distinguishes them in any meaningful way. They all are hardened specialists as it’s hinted you guys helped save Texas in Dallas (my kind of guys) but that’s it. I know Rhodes likes to blow things up but aside from that, I don’t know anything else about him. I didn’t feel much when many of them died other than a momentary sadness at the amount of paperwork Kane would have to fill out explaining what happened in the field. Even when the leader of the squad Voss was Stroggified and I had to put him down I didn’t feel anything aside from the initial shock of seeing him Stroggified.
The only character that I find wonderfully entertaining is of course Strauss. He’s the Tech for Rhino Squad and man is his interactions with everyone else entertaining. He’s a certified genius and he knows it. Naturally, he’s an arrogant prick but as the campaign goes on he slowly respects Kane. Not as much as viewing you as an equal, no that’d be below him instead he views you as marginally more useful than the rest of the idiots he has to work with. Considering that I’d never want to be around someone like Strauss in real life that’s perfectly fine with me.
In the end, Quake 4 knows what you’re here for and it delivers the goods all these years later. It’s absolutely a game you should take the time to play and you can generally pick it up for dirt cheap if the standard price of 15.00$ USD is too much for you. I’d argue that it’s simply a wonderful time and if the new DOOM games weren’t enough of that old school style to scratch that itch this would be a wonderful place to experience that magic again.
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