Quake Live Review
What is it like? Most simply put playing Quake Live is the equivalent of shooting bouncing flees off a dogs back with a sniper rifle from 6000 feet away, only if the fleas where Ritalin induced 12 years olds with Jedi reflexes. Now Im not saying its a good thing or a bad thing…its just Quake at its purest. Honestly, as much as I would love to tell every reason in the world why I hate this game, I just cant. I feel so dirty.
Quake live is the latest addition to the long running quake series of video games, this time being offered as a free browser based game. Not a bad move at all considering its long following and probably a considerably low development cost. I would guess that the older engine technology is being used. Even though the tech is slightly old, the graphics are actually rather nice to see. Quake games are historically blocky, ugly and generally most easily compared to eating 3 bags of fire hot Cheetos only to puke them up and snap a pic with a low rez camera phone. Quake Live is less of that sort, with a fairly decent color palette and lighting. Im almost sure there are advanced lighting techniques and detailed textures, shaders and bump maps used throughout the maps. The polygons are super low, but hey its a free browser based Quake game. Honestly, while running Firefox, listening to music, using video capture software and running Google’s resource heavy Gmail I only experienced one crash. Not bad at all. It would be nice to fullscreen the youtube-sized game but I doubt the low rez textures would survive it. See my Cheetos analogy.
When i comes to gameplay, Its Quake plain and simple. I am by no means a Quake fan, but the true fanboys have got to be crapping themselves on this one. Quake Live is a twitchy frag fest in the purest form of the concept, new aged stop-n-pop gamers and Gears of War fans beware. To be successful in Quake Live, you must be the type of person that enjoys bunny hopping head shots and characters that run almost as fast as the bullets they are avoiding. Seriously, the plasma rifle(if that is its name) completely misses because the player can move before the bullets arrive.
Speaking of weapons, the weapons of Quake Live are complete garbage. The starting weapon is so bad that you can empty and entire round into a afk player(away from keyboard) and there is a strong chance that they survive it. How embarrasing. I, and even the game itself recommends through its tutorials that you arm yourself before heading into combat. This is horrible game design, and the illfated uzi from Halo 2 comes to mind. A spawned player should be able to defend himself and the sad thing about that is those who disagree mostly seem to be the type of person that loves Quake. So again, Kudos to he developers. But as far as Quakes weapons go, just grab yourself a rocket launcher or shotgun to bring in those kills. The Quake shotgun is so overpowered and unbalanced that a smart player would simply camp the spawn point, seeing as how it spawns every few seconds. But its hard to point the finger at one unbalanced weapon when most weapons kill you in a milisecond. Usually, by the time you realize that you are under fire, you are already dead. And if anyone points out realism, I would be entitled to paint the Quake logo on a large piece of concrete and hit you with it. No, you die fast as to stay within the frag fest gameplay. Hopefully the ramp up the starter gun and ramp down the shotgun and other weapons in future releases, which they probably wont since core fans will likely disagree.
Overall, Quake Live is a very good game, with great technology, great community features and a good tribute to its benefactor.
