18:16, 22 October 2005, Feeling

Well, Quake IV was released to the UK yesterday, and my copy arrived at about 4 in the afternoon. I have to say that I was rather worried that the game would be a Doom 3 clone; simply because it is using the Doom 3 engine, albeit tweaked a bit. When I finally got to play it, I actually thought that they had done an 'almost' OK job with making it feel Quake like. Certainly it's far lighter than Doom 3 ever was, and the addition of larger open spaces in Quake IV is nice. In the single player mode the sound is excellent, providing a lovely atmosphere similar to that created in Quake 2.

However, I then delved into the multiplayer mode - which I think I was anticipating more than the game itself - only to find that it didn't quite feel right. It's hard to explain really, and the only way I can put it into words is that Quake 3 feels 'soft' and Quake IV feels 'hard'. You don't get the same feedback when you actually frag an opponent as you do in Quake 3.

The other problem with the game in general is the power that it requires to run. I wanted to run 1920x1200, but found that this caused the game to run almost always below 60fps. In multiplayer mode it's worse since you usually have larger battles occuring. Eventually I downed the resolution to 960x600(!!) to provide me with a reasonably fluid gaming experience.

All in all, it's a good game, but it doesn't have the same feeling (to me) that the other Quake games had in the past. I don't get quite the same rush from this version, but maybe it will grow on me with time. I certainly hope so!