I’ve now played three and a half first-person shooters (King Kong is not 100 percent a FPS) on the Xbox 360, and I have to say that Quake 4 is the weakest of the bunch. While it has a fairly strong multiplayer component over Xbox Live, the rest of the game is less than fun and it just does not feel "next generation" enough.

The story in Quake 4 picks up where Quake 2 left off with the war against the bio-mechanical Strogg. (Quake 3 was mainly multiplayer so just put it out of your mind for story purposes.) The Strogg are so close to the Borg in the Star Trek franchise that it is a little suspicious. They are a race that uses the life forms of conquered planets to make more of themselves – fusing flesh to machine in a nightmare configuration. As Quake 4 opens, the human race is on the offensive against the Strogg home world. The player is Matthew Kane. Kane is one serious badass whose reputation has proceeded him into Rhino Squad. The game plays for a while as you would expect most first-person shooters to, but then Kane is captured by the Strogg. He is taken deep into the planet for “Stroggification” – the process by which humans are turned into only part-human Strogg. I’ll spare you the details. It is not pretty. But just before the final process, where his mind is wiped and Strogg programming is implanted, Kane’s squadmates rescue him. Now he is not mentally Strogg but has all their physical abilities.

The single-player mode plays out in well varied mission that will have Kane running all over Strogg complexes killing Strogg, activating panels, and protecting technicians. And while the game structure is okay, it just never seems to take off. Too often it is a long plod through dingy corridors that we have seen all too frequently. Somewhere along the line the fun just did not seem to make it into this game.

Quake 4 was built on Id’s Doom 3 game engine, and it looks an awful lot like the PC version of that game. Sadly, I think when the folks at Raven ported Quake 4 from the PC to the Xbox 360, they may have aimed just a little too high in their ambitions for making the Xbox 360 version as close as possible to its top-end PC counterpart. On the Xbox 360 Quake 4 runs in a slightly less than satisfactory fashion. The textures are not as sharp as some other launch titles and the framerate can’t hold a satisfactory level, especially when things get busy on screen.

The audio is a bit of a mess too. While much of it is at least workman-like, other portions are useless. Specifically I’m speaking of the voice-over work. What I could hear of it was performed okay, but very often the sound was so badly mixed that I completely lost what was being said in the din.

I also have to question how the game loaded and saved. While it was nice that the player could save anywhere within a level, the way it was handled was way too convoluted. The process was to press the "Start" button, choose "Save", choose a new save, choose a save device location, and then back out of the whole thing. And this was not just the first time. Each time I had to pick my hard drive as the save location – even though there was no other storage device present. Why could it not learn to just save to the freakin’ hard drive? The loading becomes a pain since you’re going to be killed a bit as you make your way through the game. It felt inordinately long to me. And pity the fool that gets killed at the beginning of a checkpoint with a cinematic. There is no way to skip the cinematic. You just have to watch it over again after already enduring the long load to get back in the game. The whole save/load management struck me as sloppy.

One of the bright spots of the game is the weapon system – not really innovative or anything, but at least interesting. You’ll start with standard human weapons like a blaster pistol, machinegun and shotguns and as the game progresses pick up more and more Strogg weapon technology like railguns and dark-matter guns. The human techs in your squad will periodically come up with weapon improvements that will make you use them in different situations than you normally might. It at least keeps things varied. And for those wondering, I am happy to report that the technology for attaching a flashlight to a weapon has been rediscovered in the Earth culture of the mid-21st century and you won’t have to be fumbling between the two just to see your way around and protect yourself.

This game’s multiplayer function seems primarily built with Xbox Live in mind. It allows for up to eight players to compete in a respectable assortment of game types. System Link is also supported for the same number. The weakness is that there is not even a two-player mode for same-system play. It was as if the PC version’s multiplayer mode was ported over with no thought at all for the game’s new console home. A pity since the online multiplayer runs so smoothly.

In addition to the Quake 4 game, the package includes a bonus disc with making-of stuff and an Xbox 360 version of Quake 2. It is really kind of cool. But in a bitter irony, Quake 2 actually supports more players via Link (16) as well single-console multiplayer for four. No live support though.

I guess I’ve been a little hard on Quake 4. I suppose one reason is that I’ve played so much on the 360 in the last couple weeks that I have come to expect a lot. Call of Duty 2 and Perfect Dark Zero are far better games in almost every way. Even King Kong supplies a better FPS single-player experience. If you really have to check out the latest Quake game, I’d suggest a rental. See if it can make you happy and then decide if you want to own it for the $60 it will cost you. Questions? Comments? Contact the author at willhill2600@charter.net .