Quake 4

Quake 4 is a 2005 first-person shooter developed by Raven Software with id Software supervising, and published by Activision, released for Windows on October 18, 2005, for Linux two days later, and for Xbox 360 on November 22, 2005 (Mac followed from Aspyr in 2006). It is a direct sequel to Quake II, not to the first Quake, and it runs on the same id Tech 4 engine as Doom 3. It holds Metacritic scores of 81 on PC and 75 on Xbox 360, earned an ELSPA Silver award for 100,000 UK sales, and carries a reputation that has always been worse than its reviews: the Quake that is “all campaign, little Quake.” That reputation is the subject of the Reddit thread at the top of the search results, and of PC Gamer’s 2021 piece arguing the game is “a better Quake than you remember.”

The rest of the series has its own pages: Quake, Quake II, and Quake III Arena.

Technical Specifications

Rhino Squad Lands on Stroggos

The events follow directly from Quake II: humanity has launched a counter-invasion of the Strogg homeworld, Stroggos, and Marine Corporal Matthew Kane drops in as a member of the elite Rhino Squad. The mission goes wrong, and Kane is captured and “stroggified” — converted into a cyborg part of the enemy machine — before he escapes and, with the surviving squad, pushes on to destroy the Strogg’s Nexus Core. Unlike earlier Quake games, the campaign is the focus: the single-player story gets more emphasis here than in any earlier Quake. Peter Stormare voices Strauss and Dimitri Diatchenko voices Sledge, and reviewers singled out the voice acting.

The Good, the Bad, the Questionable

The patientgamers thread in the results is titled “the good, the bad, the questionable,” and PC Gamer’s Rick Lane breaks it down the same way. The bad: the first hour is “Call of Duty in space” — slow movement, flat corridors, little verticality, and combat in which the player often stands still — and a tedious mech section drags. The good: the Stroggification sequence is a bold, harrowing moment for a mid-2000s shooter; after the transformation Kane’s faster legs and more vertical level design make the game much more fun; the shotgun, nailgun, railgun, and lightning gun are well regarded, and the black-hole gun is singled out; and the “Data-Storage Terminal” mission is one of the best in the series. Lane concludes it is probably a better shooter than Quake II and clearly better than Doom 3. The questionable: whether the game has an identity of its own — a campaign-first sequel in a series built on multiplayer.

Multiplayer and the Console Port

Multiplayer supports 16 players in Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, and the DeadZone mode, and was criticised for resembling Quake III Arena too closely and shipping with no built-in bots (a third-party mod added them). The Xbox 360 version drew complaints about frame rate, slow loading times, and Xbox Live glitches, which show in its lower Metacritic score (75 against the PC’s 81).

Where to Play It Today

Quake 4 is on GOG ($14.99, regularly $4.95 on sale; 3.7/5 from 108 users; DRM-free) and Steam; multiplayer on the GOG version needs a serial key from the account’s Serial Keys section. The GOG page lists walkers and hover-tank sections within a roughly seven-and-a-half-hour campaign. It is often ranked among the weaker Quake games, and PC Gamer’s case for it stands: a competent, atmospheric shooter with one of the genre’s strongest midpoints.