eveloper Splash Damage got its foot in the door with Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, a free spinoff of Return To Castle Wolfenstein’s multiplayer that featured diverse classes and attack/defend gameplay similar to Unreal Tournament’s Assault mode. Quake Wars is more or less a direct sequel to that title, with players choosing classes and duking it out over sets of linear objectives. The formula has evolved quite a bit here, with deployable devices and a whole mess of vehicles at the player’s disposal. And, like Wolf: ET before it, Quake Wars punishes newbies with a steep learning curve as much as it rewards veterans with deep and nuanced gameplay.

Much more so than its competitors in the online FPS space, Quake Wars emphasizes teamwork. The gameplay is asymmetric; humans and Strogg have slightly different abilities and vehicles, and each round has one team trying to achieve its objectives while the other tries to stop them. Standard FPS skills will serve you well, but working together effectively with the other classes results in a synergistic death machine that utterly dominates unorganized squads. Each of the classes is very powerful in its own right when used well, but achieving their full potential requires the support of teammates and their varied skills. While it’s tough to learn the many relationships between the skill sets, using them to your advantage in a well-oiled team is one of the most rewarding and enjoyable online experiences available.

The biggest curveball that Quake Wars throws at the genre is the introduction of deployables. Each class can summon one or more emplacements that can redefine the battlefield, from antipersonnel turrets to artillery pieces. Understanding how these relate to each objective, each other, and the different classes and vehicles is key. This additional layer of strategy works well and helps define Quake Wars within the crowded genre.

As in any competitive multiplayer game, balance is of prime importance here. Happily, Quake Wars never feels unfair for long. Like a good fighting game, layers of strategy are revealed as you learn to counter what seem like “cheap” tactics at the time. In a strategic game such as this, this means life or death for the entertainment value – and Splash Damage has definitively nailed this aspect of the game. Weapons, classes, vehicles, and deployables all feel relatively equal in power, and the circle of counters (machine guns beat infantry, handheld rocket launchers beat vehicles, etc) is well defined and intuitive.

The missteps that Quake Wars makes are mostly minor, but worth mentioning. Lack of integrated voicechat is asinine with the emphasis on teamwork. No matchmaking means finding a good server to play on can be a bear, and the run-and-gun gameplay sometimes feels too fast and “spammy” for the strategic metagame. Still, the game executes its ideas well and has no glaring flaws. Whether you prefer this, Battlefield, or some other title will come down more to personal preference regarding gameplay style rather than an issue of quality one way or the other.