Strapped to a gurney on an assembly-line from hell, Kane gets stabbed in the chest with a needle like a drainpipe, has his legs sawn-off and replaced with cybernetic prosthetics, and generally gets a shrapnel-based makeover, all in an effort to convert him into one of the cyborg grunts he's spent the last few hours fighting. Yet all this changes after the infamous Stroggification scene, which fifteen years on is still harrowing.
Bizarrely, the game is closest in spirit to the original when you board a hover-tank, the armoured vehicle boasting the nimble, slippery movement Matthew Kane lacks. But the encounter design still feels uninspired. Quake 4's shotgun is excellent, as is the nail-gun, complete with rotating bore and twin clips. And the shooting improves as both the weaponry and enemy roster expands. There are a couple of nice moments, such as when the massive USS Hannibal descends from orbit onto a nearby plain, a sequence that impresses in its scale even today. The shooting is flatter than a stingray that's been through a pasta roller, and many combat sequences take place with your avatar standing still. Level design is deeply uninspired: simple corridors and trenches that contain no verticality and no surprise. Movement feels painfully slow compared to the breakneck pace of the first game. And there's no question that Quake 4 is at its weakest when it is most like Call of Duty. If anything separates Quake 4 from the other three games, it is following trends rather than setting them. The action stops every few minutes for dialogue between characters, or for a charming scripted sequence like a Strogg dragging away a screaming marine. The opening hour is not one of circle-strafing your foes while blasting them with a double-barrelled shotgun, but skulking slowly through flat gunmetal corridors, peppering Strogg with assault rifle fire while your squadmates back you up. The game begins not by plonking you unceremoniously at the start of a map, shotgun already in-hand, but with an elaborate cutscene that sees Kane scrambling to his feet after his dropship crashes, surveying the horror of the wreckage. This is why Quake 4 initially plays like Call of Duty in space. But Quake 4 emerged in the wake of games like Half-Life, Halo, and Call of Duty, which placed greater emphasis on scripted spectacle and telling coherent stories, drawing influence more from Hollywood than pen-and-paper RPGs.
Id's early shooters had been primarily inspired by the team's own Dungeons and Dragons games, which explains their mazey maps and ad-hoc storytelling. Quake 4 was developed at a time when the FPS was changing.
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