Quake 4, or Q4 as fans affectionately know it, is the fourth in the series, and it does pick up where Quake 2 left off. However, in Quake 4, the graphics are much better, the guns are bigger, and you can drive vehicles.
| Overview | Rating  |
In Quake 2, when the solo marine killed the brain of the Strogg stronghold, the Marines assume that is it dead - but it is not. The epic battle continues in this game, where the player becomes Matt Kane, the rough and tough marine who survived the battle in Quake 2.
The graphics are much better than before. As a player, you drive vehicles to help within the missions, and you are not fighting solo. The area in which you play seems to be bigger and has detail more than in previous versions. There is an abundance of interactive things in the game to watch, hear, touch, and otherwise experience.
You have an army of marines to help you, fight the battles and they will even rescue you when the Strogg capture you and try to make you become one of them. When the Strogg capture you, you go through an assembly line process of becoming one of them, so you see at times what the player ahead of you is going through.
| Features | Rating |
Gone is the BFG, but you get other weapons which will help you kick Strogg butt. You will also get a wide array of vehicles to play, and the sound effects in the game are neat. As you shoot outside the buildings, you will be dodging flaming debris that flies off the rooftops of nearby buildings. Some of the voices are hard to understand, but seems trifle in the big scheme of game play.
| Graphics | Rating  |
Graphics in this game are similar to the other Quake games. You'll have dark passages, and then lighted areas. In Quake 4, you will also see flaming debris balls, and more gore then you have seen in any other Quake game. The guns even seem to fire more brightly if possible, so that if you shoot in a dark area of a building it lights up the area pretty well.
| Multiplayer | Rating |
Yes, you can do this version in multiplayer, and the play is exceptional. You get all the guns and excitement of shooting up other players, but the vehicles won't help you here. The vehicles are absent from the multilayer portion of Quake 4 to assure you get the best hand-to-hand combat that you have come to love in the previous versions of the game.
| System requirements | Rating |
For Quake 4 you will need a computer with at least a Pentium 4 processor and a NVIDIA GeForce 3 video card. You will also need at least 3 GB of free space to install the game on your hard drive, and at least 512 MB of RAM to run it. You can play the game on any Win 2000 system or a higher OS.
| Overall | Rating |
This is a great game, but it would be better if I had a more powerful system so I could move faster in the game. My older system seems to really slow down during multiplayer sessions, so I just do regular play. Even in regular play, you get help from other marines, which adds to the excitement. Overall, I give this game a great score. It is very fun to play.