Other than that, though, single-player was pretty straightforward and hassle-free. You'll hear female voices in the radio chatter, but the only female character model I saw was on the Strogg side). I never died as a result, but I did get hit a lot harder than I would have if my guys had been more responsive. If a friendly is standing right behind you, he'll stand rooted for a precious second or two. Which you'll need to do, because some of the enemies can take an impressive amount of punishment - and dish it out, too. Unfortunately, while their pathfinding was solid, they don't do much to get out of your way if you need to pull back quickly. And over the course of the game, you'll meet techs who will give one of your weapons an upgrade, like increased magazine size, projectile ricochet, or target tracking. Sometimes they run ahead before you can get yourself in good tactical position, though, and sometimes they hang back in front of a door while you stand there for several moments before you realize that the scripting requires you to take point. They hold their own pretty well, doing more damage than we're used to seeing from game-controlled teammates, and taking even more punishment than you can, on some occasions. Sometimes you'll be accompanied by game-controlled team members - typically a technical officer who can repair your armor, and/or a corpsman who can heal you up to full health. You'll crash land in the middle of trench warfare, and it's off to the races as one superior officer after another sends you off to retrieve people, destroy key locations, and infiltrate deep behind enemy lines. You'll take the role of Corporal Kane as the Marines attempt to basically annihilating their Borg-like nemesis. The Quake 4 story picks up where Quake 2 left off, with the Space Marines fighting the Strogg, this time on the enemy's home planet, Stroggos. For one reason or another, the franchise's priorities have zigged instead of zagged, and what we have now is MP maps with a 16-player cap, with only the Tournament Mode distinguishing it from the usual setup of deathmatch, team deathmatch and CTF. In fact, so much effort was put into the single-player presentation that the amount of multiplayer seems to have suffered as a result. Unlike previous installments, single-player is there in a big way, with a winding plot, a cast of characters voiced by Hollywood actors, objective-based gameplay, light squad tactics, and countless set pieces. However, in the long run, the game is not quite what we've come to expect. And multiplayer has that same feel we've come to know from Quake: hectic, chunky, and bombastic. You'll see some things that Doom 3 didn't indicate its engine was capable of - some of which we saw in the Prey E3 demo video. The game has a good share of "gee whiz" moments, with huge monsters, huge explosions, and huge vistas. These guys are no slouches, and the production values of Quake 4 prove this beyond a doubt. For Quake 4, they handed the reins to Raven, who themselves have worked with id and its engines for over ten years now. Id Software has been there the whole time, particularly in multiplayer. And with players actually competing for money these days - some of them earning enough to avoid having to actually work for a living - the FPS has become a force to be reckoned with. With companies like Epic, DICE, and Valve in the mix, we've been spoiled with a wide spectrum, from awesome single-player, huge multiplayer battles, and last-man-standing tournaments. As someone who's been playing id software games since the Wolfenstein 3D days, it's been intriguing to watch shooters go from genre diversion to one of the most compelling reasons to play games on a computer.
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