Even though I had looked forward to it with some enthusiasm, Quake failed to rock my world. Recently reincarnated this franchise had an offering called Quake Wars. One of the first websites that I worked for in gaming had an all female Quake clan. That was years ago when Quake was mostly a PC game. Right from the beginning the character creation and customization isn’t there. Even worse there isn’t an option for a female avatar. Inexcusable. The single-player campaign was just plainly lacking some of the things I’ve now come to expect in an FPS. I could not help comparing it to Unreal Tournament 3 and ticking off the disappointments. They are different types of games, but the ease of use in Unreal 3 was way above the limited story and mission briefings in Quake. With Unreal being a fantasy world, the colors are more appealing and the user interface is so much easier to adapt to. The grittier ones that are similar by comparison, such as Call of Duty 4 and Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 are much more detailed, thoughtful and involving.

The textures and environments looked really brown gray and washed out. The scenery wasn’t done very well and didn’t add much to the games’ appeal. I wasn’t expecting such a lackluster port from this franchise. The graphics are dated looking as if they were working with specs from the PS2 instead of the PS3.

It is big, there are the twelve maps, each one has more than a square kilometer on size. There are only five different classes, such as medics, engineers, covert ops, and field ops. If you want to play this game you have to have cooperation from friends to coordinate everything. But if you are a seasoned FPS player this might not be the game that you and your friends want to spend $60 US on.

Because there isn’t real single-player content, there isn’t a solid method to teach you how to use all the complicated equipment like what the hell is a ‘dark-matter strike’? The single-player game just consists of the maps with bots on them. It doesn’t appear that they even thought about this essential stage of gaming. When you look at the tutorial it leaves you wondering.

The game seems superficial. Because it is clumsy the learning curve on the game is just too steep. I imagine even for veterans of first-person shooters or those who are just curious about the Quake name. I give Quake the magnitude of 4 out of 10 on the Richter scale.