After the relative success of Splash Damage’s Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, Splash Damage has finally completed the sequel to the multiplayer shooter. For those not familiar with ET, ET was a class based multiplayer spin-off of id software’s Return to Castle Wolfenstein. It involved objective based missions similar to that of Unreal Tournament’s assault game type or of that of single player shooter campaigns. The game pitted the Allied forces of WW2 against the Axis defenders, and most missions involved the Allies attacking the Axis, with the Axis only having to prevent the Allies from completing their objective. This time ET, is based off of id software’s Quake universe, pitting the GDF versus the alien Strogg. The game now boasts large landscapes, vehicles, and abilities akin to that of the Battlefield series.

The game uses a modified version of the Doom 3 engine using “MegaTexture” technology, which apparently uses one large texture for static terrain for every map. The textures are stored on your hard drive and are streamed according to whatever is going on, saving lots of RAM, or at least that’s what Splash Damage says. Overall, the game runs rather smoothly and looks great on a low/mid rate gaming machine. The game pretty much looks like any other high-end shooter and looks fairly generic. Other than that, there’s not much to say about the game’s graphics besides it looks like Quake 4 mixed with Battlefield 2.

Game play wise, the game is similar to the original, but still very different. The most prevalent difference is that the teams are no longer symmetrical. The Global Defense Force, or GDF, pretty much play like the original ET classes, with some of the class roles interchanged from the original. The GDF uses modern day military technology and are much better suited for attacking. The Strogg are an alien/cyborg empire that have invaded Earth and are similar in terms of class roles, but play much differently. Although the Strogg still have independent health and ammunition meters, the Strogg use a single resource called Stroyent to heal and resupply themselves. Because of this, the Strogg can reallocate between health and ammunition at a poor exchange rate. Strogg weapons function similar to that of the alien weapons from Halo, in that they do not have to reload, but can overheat, forcing the player to cool the gun, which takes about as much time as a reload. Besides overheating, damage and accuracy wise, the Strogg weapons are essentially the same as those of the GDF. The Strogg are much better suited for defense, as they cannot revive unconscious players instantly like the GDF medic, and some of their vehicles can deploy into an immobile ‘siege mode’ in which the vehicle can fire twice as fast.

There are five classes in the game for both teams. Between the two teams, the classes are pretty much symmetrical besides a few differences. (For simplicity’s sake, I will just use the original class names for both teams). The Soldier pretty much specializes in destroying vehicles and deployables and killing people, using an assortment of heavy weapons. The Soldier is required to complete destroy objectives, which is done by planting a HE charge on whatever needs to be destroyed. The Medic is the essential support and attack class. The Medic can heal, resupply, and revive his teammates and also heal himself. The Medic has great offensive potential because of the ability to heal himself, and can still be very useful even if he doesn’t tend to healing teammates. The Engineer is required for constructing and repairing objectives and defusing explosives planted by the opposing team. The Engineer can also deploy different defensive turrets and plant mines, being crucial in playing defense. The Field Ops is a support class which can deploy artillery or airstrikes, which are crucial at controlling choke points or decimating enemy defenses. Covert Ops can either play as spies or snipers, and are required for hacking objectives and can disable deployables and vehicles through a variety of means. Covert Ops can also deploy radar, which marks all enemies on the minimap, making it easy to coordinate attacks or defense.

As players complete objectives and make kills, they get score in the form of XP. When one gets enough XP in a certain skill category, they unlock rewards pertaining to that skill. These rewards range from new weapons to improved class abilities. The rewards are server specific and do not transfer towards other servers. Unlike the last ET, in which there was an XP save option which most servers ended up using, which allowed people to keep their rewards even after disconnecting, XP rewards only last for the duration of the three map campaign. This decision was made by the developers because in the previous ET, too many people were distracted by ‘XP whoring’ and not trying to contribute to the team. Despite this, there is a very large amount of players who don’t want to help their teams win. It’s not uncommon to see half a team on offense unsuccessfully attempting to snipe, when there’s a hack objective waiting to be completed.

As said above, there is no real incentive for trying farm XP. There is however, a persistent stat feature, which records all of your stats on ranked servers. As you accumulate enough XP, you can get medals for a particular range of skills. As far as I know, these stats can only be seen by you and the medals have no actual in-game value whatsoever. The only use I have found for the stat screen was to record weapons accuracy, play time, and KDR.

There are 12 maps in ETQW, divided into four 3-map campaigns around the globe. All of the missions are composed of one team on offense and one on defense. Most of the missions follow the same formula, objective-wise. The GDF for example, usually have to build or destroy something, move a Mobile Command Center to a designated point, then hack some kind of defense grid, then destroy some Strogg device. Despite this, most of the maps are fun to play and progress at a good pace. The objective marking system built into the interface makes it easy to know where to go and gives you something to do. This is especially useful if you barely started playing. Despite that, one still has to figure out chokepoints and key areas that need to be controlled. The maps are generally large and offer for interesting combat at all ranges and environments.

The gunplay can be described as a hybrid of Quake-style deathmatch with long range shooting somewhat similar to that of Battlefield 2 or Stalker’s single player. Circle strafing and bunnyhopping are key skills for close quarters combat. Recoil is pretty much negligible, but still requires some minor control for long range shooting. Overall, the shooting feels very comfortable, with none of the weapons being too powerful. The only problem I had with small arms were with sniper rifles. Due to the large size of the maps, snipers now can go to really high up and far off distances ranging several hundred meters away and still be able to fire shots at full damage, whereas the assault rifles lose damage after around a hundred meters. The case usually isn’t even that of not knowing where the sniper is, as most just stand out in the open, but dealing with one takes more time than what it’s worth. But overall, snipers just turn out to be a minor nuisance.

The vehicles are pretty much like any other game with vehicles. In order to maintain balance, all weapons can harm vehicles. Missile weapons can lock onto vehicles, but they can be defeated by countermeasures which can be launched by any vehicle. This proves to become a problem for the attack aircraft, which can become very dangerous in the hands of a skilled player. Essentially, in order to destroy an aircraft, there must be more than one missile source targeting the aircraft, otherwise a single missile will never hit it. Fortunately, aircraft can be easily hit by small arms fire, so as long as you have a decent team, aircraft are not much of a problem at all.

The learning curve of the game is pretty typical to that of any other multiplayer shooter. The developers have tried to make it as small as possible by using the objective system and explicit announcements made throughout the game. In addition to ingame messages, there is a small pamphlet that you could run through in about a minute, included with the game. The pamphlet pretty much tells you how to complete all the objectives, most of which is just simply done by holding down a key with a certain class. Besides that, all you need in order to be successful in the game are basic aiming/movement and teamwork skills. Of course, there are advanced techniques and strategies, but they really aren’t that necessary. The game also has a BF2 style context menu allowing one to quickly report information or give orders which can be easily accessed with minimal effort and while moving.

Like other games of course, both teams have to be good in order to truly enjoy the game. Some maps may seem too biased or the game too imbalanced at first, causing some frustration. But after a few hours of gameplay, and playing with decent teams on both sides you’ll come to realize that your team or the other was simply composed of idiots. The fact that you’ll have to play with many of these people may be undesirable, but then again, such is the case with pretty much every other multiplayer shooter, whether it be free or not.

The game itself is nothing unique or revolutionary. There’s nothing here that you haven’t seen in BF2. But one must realize it’s pretty hard to improve upon the shooter genre. With that aside, Splash Damage managed to create a robust game with solid features and mechanics with the right balance between all out action and professional complexity and technique. What I liked most about the game was that it always felt as if I were in some kind of action packed battle, rather than playing like an efficient robot against other robotic players, which some other shooters sometimes feel like. With that said, ETQW could pretty much be the best multiplayer game of the year.

If you just want to kill people, do NOT buy this game. I can not put anymore emphasis on that. Even though some players do simply focus on killing people, such as Field Ops, Rambo Medics, and Soldiers, I often see many people end up running around aimlessly making sporadic and negligible kills and end up wasting a player slot. If you just want to kill people, go play Quake 3 or Unreal.

83% for anyone who cares about scores.

RustedSpork