Quake 4’s single-player campaign holds up better than its multiplayer ever did

Quake 4 arrived in 2005 as the fourth main entry in id Software’s shooter series, built by Raven Software on the id Tech 4 engine that powered Doom 3. It is a sequel to Quake II, not to the multiplayer-only Quake III Arena, and it pushes hard in the opposite direction from that game: Raven put the weight on a single-player campaign and let multiplayer ride along behind it. It earns a 7.5 of 10.

Trailer, via Chase McIntyre.

Matthew Kane and Rhino Squad

Quake 4 continues the war against the Strogg, the cyborg alien race that Quake II’s unnamed marine failed to finish off. You play Corporal Matthew Kane, newly assigned to the elite Rhino Squad, which is tasked with spearheading the invasion of the Strogg home planet, Stroggos.

The setup is clean and the stakes are legible. The previous hero killed the Strogg leader, the Makron, and humanity assumed that was the end of it.

It was not.

The squad’s ship is shot down early, crashing in the middle of a battle zone and separating Kane from his companions. He regathers the scattered team and works through the assault — destroying and capturing Strogg aircraft hangars and defense systems — before the survivors reach the USS Hannibal. That ship is where the game’s second act gets its shape.

The Tetranode and the EMP

The Hannibal mission is an infiltration of the Tetranode, one of the Strogg’s central communication hubs. The plan is an electromagnetic pulse bomb, meant to throw the main Strogg Nexus into disarray. Kane is assigned to defend the convoy, which takes heavy casualties.

The setbacks pile up. A Strogg ambush destroys the EMP device outright, leaving Kane to finish the job with only Private Johann Strauss, played by Peter Stormare, and Lance Corporal Nikolai “Sledge” Slidjonovitch, played by Dimitri Diatchenko.

Strauss works out that the core can be destroyed by shutting down its coolant systems. It is the best stretch of the campaign, because it turns a corridor shooter into a small crew of three people solving a problem under fire. Then Kane reaches the Tetranode entrance and meets two rocket-equipped network guardians and a newly constructed Makron, which beats him without much trouble and knocks him unconscious.

Becoming One of Them

What follows is the reason Quake 4 is remembered at all. Kane wakes strapped to a conveyor belt in the Strogg “Medical Facilities,” a structure used for converting captured humans into Strogg.

The game’s own pitch puts it plainly: in a desperate war for Earth’s survival, against an unrelenting enemy, the only way to defeat them is to become one of them. Kane comes out of that facility no longer entirely human, and the campaign’s back half runs on the question of how much of him is left.

Armed with advanced weaponry and vehicles and aided by an elite squad of marines, you take the battle to the heart of the Strogg home planet and become earth’s only hope for victory.

That turn is the game’s real idea, and it is a better one than most 2005 shooters had. The horror theme in the game’s own tagging is not decoration — the Medical Facilities sequence is the only place Quake 4 lets the Strogg be genuinely frightening rather than just numerous.

Deathmatch, Tourney, and 16 Players

Multiplayer is where Quake 4 thins out. Modes are Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Tourney, Capture the Flag, Arena CTF and DeadZone. The client-server architecture returns, and the network code was altered from Doom 3 to allow larger servers: Doom 3 capped at four players, while Quake 4 carries a standard 16-player limit.

Players at QuakeCon reported strafe-jumping and rocket jumping carried over from earlier Quake games, plus the ability to send shots through teleporters and to bounce grenades and napalm fire off jump-pads. Movement borrows from Quake III Arena and Quake Live, with two additions. Crouch slides let players hold speed through corners. Ramp jumps give extra height when you jump as you reach the top of an inclined object — a technique present in the original Quake and Quake II but absent from Quake III Arena.

The problem sits right next to the feature list. Quake 4 lacks the bot matchmaking offered in Quake III without third-party mods. For a game whose predecessor was built to be played forever, shipping a multiplayer suite that cannot fill a server with bots is a real loss, and it is the clearest sign of where Raven’s priorities were.

What Quake 4 Gets Right

The single-player emphasis is the correct call, and it is why the game holds up better than its reputation suggests. Quake III Arena had no campaign to speak of. Quake 4 has one that continues Quake II’s story, gives its protagonist a name and a face, and then takes both away from him in a conversion chamber. The id Tech 4 engine gives the Strogg industrial interiors a weight the series had not had before.

The multiplayer is competent and underfed. Six modes and a 16-player ceiling are fine numbers on paper, but a Quake game lives or dies on whether people can play it a year later, and no bots means a shrinking pool of humans is the only way in. That is the part of Quake 4 that aged worst, and it aged worst immediately.

What matters most is the campaign’s willingness to make its hero complicit. Kane is not saved from the Medical Facilities; he is processed by them, and the game asks you to keep playing as whatever walks out. That is a sharper piece of design than the genre was offering in 2005, and it is the reason to revisit Quake 4 now rather than the deathmatch suite.

The 7.5 of 10 reflects that split. A committed single-player campaign with one genuinely unsettling idea, attached to a multiplayer mode that cannot stand on its own without mods. Play it for the Tetranode and the conveyor belt. The rest is a server waiting for players who mostly did not come.

game review · id Tech 4 · Quake 4 · Raven Software · retro FPS · Strogg