The Stroggs are coming, the Stroggs are coming!
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars concerns itself with creating objective based routines for teams to defend and attack across multiple battlefields. What sets Enemy Territory apart from other games in the genre is its ability to complicate matters with several different options that any of the five classes that players have chosen. The game's structure of classes and operations given to each, in execution, gives it a rigid undercurrent of teamwork and cooperation that other games lack. These range from creating, defending and maintaining turrets or radar, creating off-site rocket launchers that send a barrage of fire upon their enemies, or capturing additional resources and spawn points.
If this sounds complicated, you're not alone. Each of the maps plays like a completely different game, all of which gets compressed, electrified, and thrown into a frenzy that plays itself out over a thirty minute time span. Both sides of the assault are compelling adventures in their own right, requiring completely different ways of thinking and planning. While defence is certainly a waiting game, the attackers are constantly pushed forward by the initially terrifying HUD placed over the game's already crowded screen. There's a lot to learn before you are actually able to make a difference in the tide of battle, and defeats against the easiest level of the game's spectacular AI enemies are all too common.
However, the reward for learning the flow of the game is gratifying. The game is so complex that few matches ever play out in exactly the same way. And the game is so nuanced and layered that it feels more like a real time strategy game such as StarCraft rather than a simple Battlefield clone as it has been accused of being - this comes from not only the way the various units and vehicles fit together, but also the intricately designed maps and objectives that bombard the player with a constant list of things to accomplish. While overwhelming, the game manages to keep the insanity to a minimum thanks to an excellent tutorial mode (which, while not on the original retail disc, is an excellent reason to apply the game's most recent patch).
The multiplayer shooter is no stranger to in-game upgrades as players progress, but Enemy Territory seems to benefit more form it than most. Extra guns, faster tools, and cool abilities will slowly unlock themselves to players who complete objectives. The game has carefully designed the maps and the placements of objectives so that players who try to milk this system will be moving their team forward an extraordinary amount, even if they're never firing a gun. The objectives tailor themselves toward the player's class - for example, a medic will gain experience healing players in the thick of battle, while engineers can power up by littering the landscape with vehicles and turrets.
The game is so tightly paced that onlookers have mistook the subtle waves of enemies as a highly scripted single player shooter. This is the game's strength, and in part, the engine's strength. The game runs on the engine Doom 3 used, and the game inherits the same "feel" that Doom 3 had, without the antiquated Doom-style gunnery and nonsensical scare tactics. What Doom 3 managed to do was feel expensive, top of the line, and solid as solid can be, and Enemy Territory lives up to these standards by allowing the game to keep this feel. Games often reuse other engines (id games especially) and tend to feel similar to each other when they do; Quake Wars is no exception.
The game does feel like a dedicated single player shooter at times, though the balance makes sure it's more of an open-ended experimentation sort of game like Far Cry rather than a funnelled and controlled Half-Life 2. But every game feels so different and every map feels so different that I wouldn't be saying that this is an insult to the game. Quite the opposite. The perfect shooter, in concept, would be one that feels fresh after every round, yet allows the overall round to keep the same excellent tone and feel that will keep players coming back for more. Maps like the future classic Slipgate, which features an entire environment change and attack focus halfway through the map, will keep Enemy Territory in rotation for years to come.
This is what Enemy Territory manages to do. On a multiplayer scale, it throws in a hodge-podge of crazy features, tools, options and methods, and somehow the developers issued a product that is so sleek, refined and well made that there are few words I can use that express my joy. Splash Damage one-upped themselves, and considering the heritage, that's saying a hell of a lot.