Although I didn`t review the PC version of Quake Wars (check out Sean`s review here) I spent a huge amount of time with the beta and followed the PC version of the game since it was announced. When I heard that Activision was bringing the game to the consoles I was a bit cynical as the game`s asymmetrical class based game play may not go over well with the console crowd. These kinds of games require a lot of team work and coordination to really work well and I`m not entirely sure that console crowd meets those demands.

The back story of the game is a bit odd as it`s actually a prequel to the second and fourth Quake games. In the previous games you attacked Stroggos, home planet of the half human/half robotic Strogg to beat back the Strogg. Enemy Territories:Quake Wars actually covers the Strogg invasion of Earth that precipitated the events of the other two games, allowing you to play both the defending humans and the attacking Strogg. If you`re looking for more of a plot than that you`re going to have to try and stitch together the events of the missions in the game because there`s no real narrative to the game the background is just a setup to have two different forces beating up on each other.

The game is class based and you have your standard classes of soldier, engineer, medic, sniper, and support for both sides (although the Strogg do get somewhat cooler names for the same classes). There are some nice tweaks to the classes as your medic class and engineer classes aren`t gimped and are actually useful in combat outside of their typical roles. You can customize your class a bit by choosing different weapons based on how you want to play that class and you can earn more weapons and utilities by earning promotions during the game. Promotions are earned by completing objectives and doing the specialized things that you class can do. This is where the game differentiates itself from the rest of the pack as it assigns dynamic mission objectives during the game. For example, in some missions my engineer is responsible for building a shield penetrating laser but since he`s Mr. Fix-it and Mr. Turrent deploy-er he can get extra experience points for fixing damaged vehicles and deploying turrets. Likewise soldiers are assigned things like taking out enemy turrets and clearing out obstacles for the rest of their team.

The game contains twelve different missions which are broken into four, three mission campaigns. Each mission has three or more goals to accomplish and a set amount of time to get them done in. My personal favorite has you attacking a Strogg stronghold in Africa where you have to infiltrate their base, hack a slipgate to Stroggos, then drive the large MCPslipgate and use that foothold to take out a Strogg generator. Each part of the mission requires you to use a different set of classes to complete the objectives as you`ll need a soldier to blow open the gates for the vehicles, a sniper class to hack the slipgate, an engineer to repair the MCV as it makes it`s way to the setup point, and finally the soldier class to blow up the Strogg generator. There are some other mission types such as holding back a Strogg attack on an area or trying to deliver secret plans somewhere and there`s enough variety here to keep you interested. I just wish there as a little more of an introduction to provide some backstory on the missions.

There is a nice variety of vehicles and weapons at your disposal to help you complete your missions though. The weapons are you standard variety FPS fare with a mix of machine guns, shotguns, rocket launchers, and pistols at your disposal. The Strogg get slightly different versions of the same weapons with a few extra toys tossed in for fun. My personal favorite is the remote drone for the strogg sniper class which allows you to send o...