That's about enough for the gameplay, since it's more about you picking up the game and playing it than it is me twittering on. Next up is the techy-side of things, well, not really. The graphics of ETQW use mega-texturing and it provides a pretty slick looking game right from the get-go even on just auto-detected options, play around with the settings and depending on your rig, you can have a nice looking game that plays as sweet as a nut.

The level designs are great and there are numerous interior and exterior locations, all waiting for some serious mayhem. The maps provide a lot of tactical options as well as having big enough areas for some serious confrontations to occur. The effects are top-notch as you'd expect for such a game and the weapon graphics are just as good. We're talking a nicely rounded package in terms of those areas.

The animations can look a little flat and once again the Quake engine developers don't quite seem to have mastered the art of getting models to climb ladders, this always does my head in and breaks the immersion for me when I see someone run up a ladder holding the gun and basically using the same god damn run animation that they've used for the past million times. Come on, if CDProjekt can turn the Bioware Aurora Engine into something that looks better than KotoR (with the Witcher) you guys can make a dude climb up a ladder!

That minor rant out of the way, the AI! As I mentioned previously, it's good. It's got a grasp of objectives and it'll usually complete them with the minimum of fuss. At times you won't know the difference between the Bots and the human players and the game's just as fun offline as it is on, good training too. You can toggle the Bots complete objectives setting on and off as well, so if you want to be the ultimate hero and take all the glory you can.

Hoo-RAH Marines!

Sound: Yeah, it's got sound? Anything else! Ok, seriously. The sound in the game's good, the weapons are chunky and they don't sound like Halo 3's pop-gun-tart weapons with their pif-pif weak noises and whisper-quiet gun reports. These have BOOM-SHAKKA-LAKKA to them and that's what counts.

Voice: Don't get me started, weakest part of the game; they picked the most generic sounding worst voice actors on the face of the planet. I know it's not meant to win any kind of vocal awards but would it have killed them not to use people who sound like they're gargling a half-block of cheese and the grater to go with it? The repeated voice work gets right on my nerves and makes me want to kill people, so mission accomplished. No Jack Thompson, this is not a Terrorist Training Simulator, if you want one of those go bother someone else's video game.

In short then, Quake Wars is a great game let down a bit by some online networking issues that I didn't really mention so I'm telling you now, since you scrolled down all the way to the end hoping for a summary. It does suffer from some disconnects, but these will vanish in a patch or two since Quake's code has always been solid. You can play it over a Lan as well or on your own. It has a good mix of classes for both sides and the maps are large enough to remain interesting but not boring.

If you like the B-Field games and want something new, grab this. It's good.