Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Where the game fares better is the destructibility of all the vehicle units and deployable artillery, which have been lovingly rendered in a way that's at odds with their vanilla surroundings. These are not only varied in terms of utility, but blessed with a satisfying degree of destructibility, which goes a long way to adding to the game's chaotic ambience.

The biggest question mark we have though is whether there's enough variety to justify positioning this at full price. With just 12 medium-sized maps to flit through and precious little variety in them, the biggest fly in the ointment is a massive amount of repetition and a questionable lack of different modes and customisation options. Unlike so many multiplayer shooters, Quake Wars appears content to merely offer a single, objective-based gameplay mode, where you're either defending or attacking. The main problem is that you tend to find yourself performing the same old tasks, involving generators, bridges, mining lasers, and getting (or preventing) key vehicles reaching to their destination. Sure, the option to switch between the Strogg and GDI and explore the nuances of the unique abilities of the five different classes can put a different spin on the gameplay, but in no time the repetition of the tasks within the maps can't help but chip away at your enthusiasm.

It's always a risk for publishers to try and sell a game based entirely on its multiplayer mode when so many great single-player games ship with a fully fledged online component. If Quake Wars' online offering boasted a richly varied and well-realised experience, you wouldn't even comment on the absence of a convincing single-player mode - but that's plainly not the case. Calling a sequence of bot-matches over all the game's 12 levels a "Campaign" is optimistic, and smacks of "will this do?" To replicate the whole thing with limited customisation options and then call it "Instant Action" is worse. The third mode, Stopwatch, is, again, identical to the main objective-based Campaign mode, only you have to play as GDI in one round, and then play the same map from the Strogg perspective. That all three almost identical gameplay modes exist isn't so much the issue, as the baffling lack of imagination to do anything else with these maps.

It definitely helps that the game's bots are excellent, but that's no substitute for a compelling online experience. With frame-rate issues already dragging down the offline game at times, the moment the same thing happens online, it's lag central. Once in a while you can probably tolerate it, but when missions involve getting tanks from A to B, and you're being shelled to kingdom come, the whole thing nearly grinds to a halt. Not good. In simple terms, some of the objectives within each map just aren't optimised for online play, and for a game which relies almost entirely on its online prowess, that's a big no-no.