After the wait, after the grueling time i spent waiting for the keys to be released, stopping the film i was watching with my girlfriend to sign up for this key, i am seriously left sat here thinking is it worth it.
The game is basicly the classic battle between man and invadeing aliens. the strogg have come to earth you fight them off, that is essentialy it.
For anyone who played Wolfenstein Enemy Territory (now freeware) the gameplay style will immediatly be very very recognisable. the gameplay has not changed at all except for the introduction of vehicles which are just weird and slightly overpowered and over-armoured from my experiance. it took a good 5 rockets on direct hit on side armour to take down a strogg tank, plus i had some assistance from a friendly tank. Many of the origional elements of the game remain, such as when you die you have the option to go to limbo and respawn or wait for a medic to revive you, this was in the origional and although it encourages teamplay amongst your team its just basicly been copied right out of the origional.
as the game largely focuses on teamplay, your objectives encourage you to play as a team. with certain classes being able to complete certain objectives, such as the basic soldier carries an explosive charge that is used in the beta map to destroy some grates, the engineer cass can build objectives and place gun turrets. although this is a nice thing to have in a game, set objectives to complete and for it not to be a straigh forward Deathmatch it basicly turns into a deathmatch with one person running for the objective. With the engineers building objective structures it ruins the atmosphere of the game, as you suddenyl get this huge white outline of the structure appear(as you can see below)
for me, that outline appearing ruins any realism the game may hold. in the above picture i was palying as Strogg forces and what is shown is a GDF (human) objective, so its a bit of a nappy game, as you do not realy need to be paying much attention to whats going on or being said as is appear slap bang infront of your face.
the graphics of the game are very dated, i have it on full settings getting an average of 30fps... the graphics in Battlefield 2 look better and i get around 80fps everything maxed in Battlefield 2. i know this is a beta version so performance will be increased hopefully with the final release but graphics will not improve to bring it up to date which is a shame.
so basicly the graphics of ET:QW are around 2 years back dated with just some bump mapping on objects to try and make them look more real... but it doesnt realy do anything to the overal graphics.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is just the same old looking slightly better but the graphics still look dated, its a shame that it has not lived up to its expectation as i was genuinly looking forward to this, but you may as well play the origiona wolfenstein enemy territory as its the same but you will save yourself
or atleast my old 4400 ran Hl2 fine on med settings