GameSpot's Most Wanted '07

[fate]

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars gets yet another nod as one of the most anticipated PC games of the year.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (PC) - Andrew Park, Senior Editor

We haven't heard much about Enemy Territory: Quake Wars since Activision announced that the game would be delayed until 2007, but that extra time has hopefully given developer Splash Damage a chance to fine-tune the game and really make good on its potential. We last saw the game at E3 2006, where we were shocked by how well the game seemed to strike a balance between depth, variety, and all-out action.

At a glance, the game might seem like a takeoff on the Battlefield team-based shooter series, particularly last year's Battlefield 2142, since that was a sci-fi game with plasma guns and walking mechs. Also, Quake Wars takes place around the time of the events in Quake 4 and Quake II--the soldiers of Earth are fighting the Strogg, a not-that-scary race of aliens that resemble the Borg from Star Trek. However, we had a blast trying out the game's many different character classes for both factions, all of which seemed to be useful on the battlefield and strong enough to hold their own in the right situation. The Strogg also seemed to have some really unorthodox abilities (including the power to heal their teammates by draining life-giving chemicals from human corpses), as well as the ability to disguise themselves as human soldiers, like the spy class from Splash Damage's last game, Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. These abilities aren't all guaranteed to make the final cut, but if the final game looks anything like what we saw, then both sides should be interesting and worth playing.

Quake Wars will offer plenty of different options for each character class, as well as drivable, armored vehicles (plus Strogg jetpacks). But what was probably most surprising to us was that despite all these different features, the game was incredibly fast and action-packed. The vehicle physics seemed pretty lenient, and even though there were engineer players building stationary turrets and sniper players hiding on rooftops, shooting down enemies seemed much more like a hectic deathmatch game of Quake III than the kind of slow, methodical deal you'd expect from a realistic team-based game with in-depth player classes. Obviously, shooters have come a long way since the days of simpler games like Doom, and many players expect more depth and complexity from new games; but not many games have tried to combine in-depth team tactics with classic, arcade-style shooting action. We hope Quake Wars pulls it off.

For the full article you can go here.