Over the last six or seven years, we've witnessed the rise of the large scale battlefield shooter, lead by EA DICE's Battlefield series. Somewhere along the line, id software decided it'd like to get in on the action, and contracted Splash Damage to develop Enemy Territory: Quake Wars[i], a sequel to their successful [i]Enemy Territory expansion for Return to Castle Wolfenstein. The response was generally positive, with praise directed towards the game's graphics, balance and online code, though a lower player count and a lack of unique features were seen as holding the game back. Like many other successful PC games, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars has made its way to the consoles, and the results are interesting, to say the least.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars does its best to hold up John Carmack's perception of porn-level stories in video games, pitting the Strogg against the Humans (or GDF) in a battle for Earth in the not-too-distant future, apparently before the events of Quake II - I'm sure everybody here knows what that entails, having obviously played Quake II for its enthralling plot. Nevertheless, you get to pick a side and blast the proverbial seven shades out of the opposite team, who are ideally controlled by eight of your buddies.

Players get to choose a side out of the Strogg and GDF, each of which has five classes. The classes on each side are pretty much the same, but there are minor differences, such as the Strogg having a combined health and ammo replenishment called stroyent, and more heavily armed vehicles. Splash Damage managed to create a fairly stable balance between the two teams in the original version, and that is maintained here. The Soldier/Aggressor class are your regular foot soldiers, who have access to four different main weapons, and are capable of planting explosive charges, handy for accomplishing objectives and taking out key defences. Field Ops/Oppressors are your support guys, responsible for dishing out ammo or deploying shields, calling in artillery deployables, as well as painting targets for strikes by said deployables in addition to laying smoke down for air-strikes. Medics/Technicians supply players with health and revive fallen soldiers; while the Medic only hands out health, the Technician hands out stroyent, which fills both health and ammo. The Medic can call in a supply crate, but the Technician can implant a dead Human with a spawn host, allowing a Strogg to spawn at the location of the corpse when claimed. The Engineers/Constructors are defensive support units, building turrets and placing mines, as well as repairing damaged vehicles and structures. Finally, the Covert Ops/Infiltrator class is your sneaky sniper class, designed to take out enemies from long range and disable key defences. They can deploy radar with a 120m radius, making it easier to detect incoming enemies.

Each side also has access to five main vehicle classes, while the GDF have an additional naval/amphibious vehicle set. The light vehicle class provides the Humans with a rather nifty little ATV that's as fast as it is poorly armoured, while the Strogg get the Icarus jetpack, which gives players limited flight ability in addition to some rather neat bombs. The Strogg Hog and Human Armadillo are the medium class vehicles, with the former providing space for two in addition to a nifty bull-bar for splattering GDF soldiers, and the latter is more of an APC, with space for five soldiers with one driving and another on a top mounted machine gun. Heavy class vehicles include the Strogg Desecrator, a hover-tank and the GDF Titan tank, the former of which can go into siege mode, while the latter is more powerful and has a higher top speed. The superheavy vehicles, which aren't available in every map, include the GDF mobile command post (or MCP), a unit which can be unpacked into a small base as the name suggests, and the Strogg Cyclops, a bipedal walking tank not unlike the mechs of Mechwarrior fame. The GDF Anasi serves as the Humans' main aerial strike vehicle, a helicopter with some serious firepower, while the Strogg have the Tormentor, a hover-capable vehicle with rather annoying homing missiles and plasma cannons. Finally, the Humans have access to the amphibious Trojan APC and the Platypus speed boat, enabling the GDF forces easy passage over water.

The game packs in 12 rather large maps, each of which has a number of objectives. One team will be on offence, having to accomplish their list of objectives, will the other must defend. Objectives seem like they're rather varied stuff – drive the MPC to this point and deploy it, blow this up, defend that, hack this, build that – but it mostly ends up being a course of running up to something and holding X for 20 seconds without dying. Certain objectives can only be accomplished by specific player classes. Playing well and filling the intended role of your class will earn battle XP, which will upgrade your character class with better damage resistance and such after you've earned enough, though they reset at the end of each campaign. It's still rather fun, especially when you get a good team together that can communicate and co-operate to get the job done.

One of Quake Wars' major follies is that it does a really poor job of explaining its mechanics; the Xbox 360 version does add the training mode added in the 1.4 patch, but even that is not enough to explain the abilities of each class, advanced deployables and such. Instead, players pretty much have to learn the game through a trial by fire, which can be more annoying for serious players. The console version by default has an overbearing auto aim system activated, which removes the need for basic aiming skills.

Quake Wars is a good game at heart, but all the praise is made on the basis of an assumption that you can actually find a match. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is a game that demands to be played with humans and the Xbox 360 version does a very poor job of delivering this. Publisher Activision has done nothing to promote the existence of the Xbox 360 port, and as such, there is virtually nobody playing the game. You can't really blame them – Activision makes a heck of a lot more money on Call of Duty 4, a similar style of game which is currently the most-played title on Xbox Live. Not only is it more difficult to find a match to play, but the game has no dedicated server support, and the number of players has been cut to 16. The net code is still pretty good, but considering the fact that you can get the better looking, mod- and dedicated server-supported PC version for less than half the cost, it's really difficult to see any reason in playing the game on a console.

There is a feeble attempt to make up for the lack of multiplayer action you'll experience with the console-exclusive inclusion of a single player campaign mode. Of course, the campaign just forces you to play against bots through the existing 12 maps in four sets of three missions, grouped into North America, Africa, Northern Europe and Pacific fronts. Any half decent FPS player will tear through these missions in less than three hours. The game includes the mandated set of Xbox 360 Achievements, though the developer has done little in the way of offering anything remotely imaginative, with rewards mainly centring around earning X number of stars in each class, and completing campaigns on specific difficulties (which don't stack). The fact that most of these achievements require you to play on Xbox Live against other people only exacerbates one's frustration.

Id Software's Doom 3 engine has historically struggled on the Xbox 360, but it manages to hold it together for most of your time with Quake Wars. Of course, the game looks nowhere near as good as its PC equivalent, which wasn't a particularly pretty game to begin with, and it runs at a fixed 30 frames per second. This is mainly due to the removal or downgrading of the lighting and shadowing effects. Many of the specific effects, particularly things like the Strogg's Orbital Laser strike, have been completely neutered (it now looks more like someone pouring orange juice on the map). On the positive side, the draw distance is still pretty good, so snipers won't be too disadvantaged.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars on the Xbox 360 is still a good game at heart, but let's consider the facts; for half the price of this version, you can get the PC version, which will run rather well on most modern computers, and not only looks better, but runs at a higher frame rate in a higher resolution, has mod support, an active player base and dedicated server support. With little marketing or support from the publisher, the console version of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars was doomed from before it hit the market.