A very interesting title in retrospective. A game that came out in 2004, that feels like a late 00s-early10s blockbuster from the PS3-Xbox360 era. This game was kind of a precursor to all Gears of War and Resistance games. It indeed feels like "AAA from the future" in terms of presentation, style, and visuals.

Graphics are nice for PlayStation 2, and for 2004 in general. It is completely different from the early titles on the same hardware. And I can understand why it was so hyped back in the day.

Sadly, because of the hardware limitation, hard cuts should've been made to fit it all and it shows. This game has all the sins of ps3-gen FPS titles, but much bigger. Small levels, big loading times, slow character movement, 2-3 types of enemies on the whole game, re-use of sections of the levels.

More than that, the game starts with spectacle, but then kind of half gives up and turns into a regular average corridor shooter with spongy enemies you need to pass. And bosses, if I can even call them bosses, are no different.

Still, it is not entirely boring, it tries hard to change the environment and do the plot and cutscenes, but be warned that it might get very tiring in the 2nd half.

A mediocre first half is mostly made up for by a stronger second half in this mid 2000s FPS.

Following the multiplayer focused Quake 3, Ravensoft takes a stab at the Quake franchise with a continuation of the story of Quake II in humanity's war against the cybernetic Strogg, taking place immediately after the events of the 2nd game. Using the id Tech 4 engine, Quake plays very similarly to Doom 3 though with much less of an emphasis on horror. Whether this is a good or bad thing is up to debate.

Quake 4's biggest issue is that the first half of the game is a slog. The plot is very basic sci-fi military stuff and the game play isn't very engaging. The player character moves like they are walking through molasses and the experience is brought down by poorly implemented backtracking and hand holding. There is a specific event that occurs roughly midway through the game in which you gain improved movement speed, but more notably the plot becomes a bit more interesting and the game starts to actually feel like a Quake game. The latter half of levels are more varied and bring more interesting combat sections that almost make you forget the tedium you just went through.

Shooting feels pretty good though the explosive weapons feel noticeably weak. There's a decent amount of enemy variety as well even if some enemy types felt underused. Quake 4 can get very dark at times so the decision to make the flashlight only usable with the pistol or machine gun is just irritating. The biggest game play weakness, like many other titles of the time, is the over abundance of middling vehicle sections. There's multiple sections where you either pilot a vehicle or man a turret on one and while some are better than others, they all drag on too long and feel like a large step down from the main on foot game play.

Graphically the game has held up better than I expected probably thanks to the use of mo-cap and a darker ambience. The music and sound design is good as well, but for some reason is mixed awfully. Dialogue is often incomprehensible over background noise and with no subtitle options nor a way to adjust audio levels beyond a master volume control, you'll just need to deal with it. Voice acting is serviceable with a notable inclusion of Peter Stormare as one of the supporting characters.

I didn't play any multiplayer as the servers are pretty much dead, but from what I've researched it sounds like this is one of the weaker entries in the series for multiplayer. The lack of official bot support is disappointing as well given that it can provide an otherwise dead game a method to experience the multiplayer maps populated.

It may sound like I've little positive to say about the game, but I do believe the 2nd half of the campaign is quite good and the first half is fine if not a bit uninspiring. I don't think this is quite as good as Doom 3 and that is probably best showcased by how this game has been somewhat forgotten in comparison to the 3rd doom installment, but if you can grab this game on sale then I'd recommend it for a solid 6 - 10 hours of mid 2000s FPS gameplay.

As soon as I launched this game, I was immediately concerned I installed a generic, asset-flipped task simulator. The high-definition polygonal landscape, buildings and equipment seemed that way.

Digging deeper (pun), it's actually a pretty unique and well-constructed base-builder FPS in early access with some jankyness. I was reminded more of the time I enjoyed The Signal From Tölva, with some caveats.

From an economy-simulator perspective, this is incredibly shallow (pun). All the manufacturing in this game follows a simple: level 1 mineral and level 1 ore make level 1 equipment, upgrades and devices. This goes up to level 3, and the equipment and enemy encounters scale each time in somewhat interesting ways.

I played this game in solo, and a lot of the FPS aspects were very difficult, even on one of the lowest difficulties. The scaling of difficulty is kind of interesting because new weapons and enemy types are introduced, but the final stages depend heavily on throwing dozens of enemies in waves while trying to meet objectives.

There's some minor bugs that weren't too intrusive but worth mentioning. For example, hitboxes on enemies and landscapes sometimes didn't really add up sometimes, and the weapons and some movement over hills feel kind of clunky and sticky.

I could see myself really enjoying this more if I had played cooperative with some friends, running around a base doing repairs while others collect resources or organize a raid on an enemy base. I've played a lot of Deep Rock Galactic, which has a lot of similarities with this, and I would recommend that more for a cooperative miner-shooter.

While it has been in early access for 4 years with frequent and significant updates from what I can see, I don't know what it would need for me to be excited and revisit the game at release. It is a pretty unique concept and looks actually decent, but it doesn't really satisfy me as either a simulator or shooter.