Rough edges

Despite what some recent game reviews might argue, there’s no such thing as a perfect game. The following is a list of flaws I perceive in the game. None of these are major but they bother me nonetheless.

1) Red triangles. You will see a red triangle above the head of enemy players when they approach you even if they try to conceal themselves in the bushes which means sooner or later you won’t be aiming at their silhouette but rather just below their red triangle. The game loses some immersion and prevents clever ambushing. Having played a few matches in a custom server with this option disabled I can honestly say it made the game more interesting since you’d have to be more careful. In the normal game you can pretty much blaze through because you’ll know a red triangle will catch your attention as soon as an enemy comes into shooting range.

2) Water. Firstly, unlike its predecessor, ETQW doesn’t allow you to use weapons while in water (not even grenades!) which means you’re a sitting duck. Secondly, your swimming speed is painfully low. Finally, there’s no diving or underwater swimming. There won’t be any secret underwater passageways that lead you right into the enemy base because players float like corks and can never dive to avoid fire. All these factors mean one thing: if you happen to find yourself in water and you see an enemy coming just respawn, no ifs and no buts; at least you’ll deny him the satisfaction of killing you with impunity.

3) No VoIP. When the game was announced, and in subsequent interviews, the developers always stressed VoIP as an integral component to promote team work. It was then with great surprise and disappointment to me when it was later revealed the game would ship without it. Thanks to many beta testers that argued for it, the developers have now committed to adding VoIP in an upcoming patch; this still means many won’t be able to communicate effectively until this patch arrives though, which is a shame.

Specifications

Technically, the game runs reasonably well and looks good all things considered; i.e. because of the focused objectives, potentially seeing up to 32 players on screen in the same place with a couple of vehicles and deployables and artillery raining down whilst seeing the terrain to the horizon will sometimes make you wonder how the developers pulled this off with the DOOM 3... sorry, the id Tech 4 engine. We’ll be publishing an article focusing on the technical aspects of ETQW soon where we’ll discuss the major new thing: MegaTexture.

The game supports all widescreen resolutions, 4:3, 5:4, 16:9 and 16:10 aspect ratios (and you’re able to setup your own custom resolution and aspect ratio by editing the configuration files), surround sound  with 5.1 channel software mixing, as well as antialiasing and anisotropic filtering controls natively. The Xbox 360 controller is automatically detected but it will require some configuration file editing to get it running exactly like you desire as there is no specific gamepad control options screen to change the default gamepad settings. In multiplayer, the game is capped at 60fps though you can unlock it with a couple of console commands.