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Quake 4 is a good looking, hard hitting FPS. It has a solid, evolving storyline that keeps the missions moving along at a quick clip, but after a while it just loses its luster.
Like its predecessors, Quake 4 sticks to the straightforward run-and-gun FPS model. It makes some nice adjustments to the mission goals, providing more diversity and effects to the environment during the game. For instance, in one mission, one of your ships actually comes in for a landing. This doesn't sound like much, but the ship is absolutely massive and you really stand awestruck as the landing gear is deployed and that behemoth touches down. In perhaps the most striking sequence, you are captured and sent along a track to be converted into a Strogg. Here you get to see the procedure up close and personal as your body is mutilated and mechanized.
The weapons offer the standard range of pistols, shotguns and the like, with some nice extras like the nail gun for variety. Ammo is not unlimited in quantity, so care must be taken to manage your resources. You also have teammates that occassionally accompany you, including technicians and medics, who can heal you or repair damaged armor, so the incentive to keep those people alive is definitely there. A wide assortment of enemy types and locations, both indoor and outdoor, keep the scenery varied and the action moving along.
While the game definitely has a lot of things working right and everything comes together nicely, you can't help but get that same-old same-old feeling as you progress. The enemies become increasingly more difficult, the health packs fewer and ammo increasingly rare. The missions start to kind of just run together, as this is a very linear game. The game doesn't fall apart, but the feeling that you've seen it all before sets in and boredom follows shortly thereafter.
Obviously, Quake 4 offers multiplayer components for those interested, which I was not.
Overall, Quake 4 turns out to be a solid title, but nothing you haven't already seen and played if you are a veteran of the FPS genre at all.
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