It's difficult to approach a review on Enemy Territory: Quake Wars without first acknowledging one very obvious aspect - it's quite a lot like Battlefield. From the types of vehicles you get to use and mow people down with to the numerous playable classes and the important roles they play in the game, it's all undoubtedly been inspired by the current leader in squad-based online vehicular shooters. It is not however, as some gamers have accused it of being, a carbon copy. Yes, it is undeniably similar in certain respects, but it's also a game with a few neat ideas of its own.

It's also something of a departure from the deathmatch-led Quake games of the Quake 3: Arena era, though this is first and foremost an Enemy Territory game despite what the more recognisable Quake name may suggest. Just in case you missed it, Enemy Territory was a multiplayer modification for Return to Castle Wolfenstein created by British developer Splash Damage who released it on the net for free, to much critical praise from gamers everywhere. It makes sense then that they were given responsibility to develop this full-blown commercial sequel that builds on the success of its predecessor with scope for something far grander.

Quake Wars acts as a prequel to Quake II and Quake 4, charting the invasion of a near future Earth by series baddie The Strogg, an alien race of half mechanical, half flesh monstrosities who consume and recycle the body parts of their defeated enemies. Storytelling creeps up from time to time, giving you titbits of information on the numerous battles fought out between the Strogg and the human Global Defence Force, but for the most part it's laid on rather thinly and never gives you much cause to really care about what's going on. This isn't a huge loss though, as this is an online action shooter after all and once the bullets start flying you immediately lose interest in the back-story as you focus on the more important job of surviving.

A nice introduction to the game, possibly thanks to its wafer thin plot, is the Campaign mode. Although there are three game modes to play, Campaign has proven to the most popular. It's similar to the way most single player games pan out, as campaign mode links a series of three maps that take place all over the world. What's of note here is that all of your stats and any items you might have unlocked stay with you from the beginning of the first map right on through to the end of the last, which, thanks to a dedicated stats system that tracks your progress, gives you reason enough to stick around to the end.

And you do have to stick at it, because the immediate problem with Quake Wars is that your first impressions are obviously going to lean more towards its similarities with Battlefield, rather than picking up on its more unique aspects. Take, for instance, the way in which you must win a map. Here the game is heavily objective-based; in its simplest form it casts one side as the attacker and the other as the defender, as both work towards achieving a series of objectives that lead to one main mission-critical goal. As these objectives are gradually completed, they unlock a portion of the map to the team that has completed them, which provides them with a new spawn point closer to where they need to be.

The objectives themselves vary constantly from map to map, so the sense of repetition never becomes a problem. From hacking a shield generator to bring down a forcefield, or planting explosives on some salvage that mustn't fall into enemy hands to guarding a mobile MCP as it drives through a slalom of enemy fire, it's a darn sight more interesting than the toing and froing of Battlefield's flag-capturing antics. It doesn't end there either, as the game constantly spits out smaller side missions that you can choose to complete if you wish, and these always generate depending on which class you are playing as, so even if you do end up failing to secure the main objectives, you never feel left out of the action.

This is an indication of how Quake Wars likes to make everyone feel like they are a part of the game, rather than having the outcome always resting on the shoulders of those hardcore few. It also effects how the game handles unlockable content. As expected, abilities and weapons that can be acquired from gradually building up experience points (gathered from completing missions and destroying the enemy) but they don't stay unlocked after the game ends. This is a problem perhaps for those who like something to work towards and who enjoy being rewarded for their efforts, but this does mean that everyone tends to be on a level footing, with the newbie player who's just starting out having an equal chance to climb to the top of the scoreboard as someone who might have been playing since the beginning.

Contradictory to how the game occasionally lends itself well to new players, it's still got a bit of a steep learning curve, thanks to those pesky Strogg. While it's nice to play a game where for once the two sides fighting it out are as different as their appearance suggests, going at it as the Strogg takes some getting used to. Their weaponry not only manages to be confusing to grasp, thanks to some confounding wording and poor weapon design never giving any indication to their function, but they're also fairly underpowered when compared to the meaty and instantly more recognisable firearms used by the GDF.

Even in the more familiar shoes of the Human side you'll have to learn the various aspects of each class yourself before you can unlock their full potential though, so early on it's easy to completely miss certain abilities simply because you weren't told about them and had no idea how they worked. Help is something that the game at first appears to be more than a little generous at handing out, with a multitude of tips for getting you used to the game, but the problem with this is that even with a HUD that seems obsessed with providing you with information, none of it's really anything you haven't already have figured out yourself, while the stuff you really want to be told appears to have been left out altogether.

Once you do manage to grapple with the ins and outs of the classes, you'll realise that they've actually got more uses than the main roles they've been given. The five classes available all fall into predictable roles - the frontline attacker, the medic, the covert ops and so on - and predictably they all excel in different areas, except here there's been a more generous handing out of abilities to each class. For example, the standard soldier class, often the jack of all trades and master of none, doesn't just get to choose from a wider selection of weaponry that allow him to tackle different targets; he can also plant explosives on mission-critical equipment. The Field Op however gets only one weapon to choose from, but can deploy artillery pieces and call down air strikes (or a huge orbital strike if you're playing as the Strogg) on target areas. Some classes can call in deployable structures, anti-missile defences or radars for instance, and the more interesting of these is with the GDF engineering and Strogg constructor classes, who can call on anti-personnel or vehicle turrets to use to defend objectives. Light strategy touches like this are exactly that - light - but they do add a tactical depth to the gameplay that not even Battlefield has yet managed to provide. But as fun as it is to sit back and allow a gun turret to deal with incoming enemy forces, there's still always something much more fun about strapping yourself into a vehicle and dealing out death and destruction on the move.

The range of vehicles aren't that different from what you'll be expecting - jeeps, tanks, light aircraft - it's predictable, but that doesn't make playing around with these toys any less fun. Of course, with the two sides being as distinctive as they are, the Strogg often seem to get the more imaginative vehicles to use, with hover tanks, jetpacks and the huge and utterly devastating Cyclops, a two-legged walking death machine. Yes, it's a rip off of the huge stompy robots you get to use in Battlefield 2142, but why not? If anything these huge metallic beasts should be a pre-requisite for all futuristic war games.

One concern when Quake Wars was announced was how well the game would be at handling large outdoor environments when using the same graphics that powered Doom 3, a graphics engine that hasn't exactly proven it can handle large, open areas. Thankfully Splash Damage have pulled out all the stops in this regard by not only making this the best looking Doom 3 powered game to date, but also by providing a plentiful amount of huge maps to tear across. The maps themselves vary constantly, thanks in part to the fact that the game takes you around the globe, and while it may be lagging behind other more recent games and those on the imminent horizon, it also still manages to be a good looking, albeit slightly murky and grey, game. However, it is a bit of a system hog and there have been problems with some ATi powered graphics cards.

Being an ATi user myself, I don't care to relive the day I spent downloading and installing an assortment of graphics drivers just to get the game to play. There's also a problem with the audio that for one reason or another fails to allow you to choose a speaker set up larger than the two speaker/headphone option it forces on you. It's obviously a flaw and one that doesn't seem to have been corrected by a recent patch, but while this may not hassle those out there who use headphones for their gaming needs, for those of us with a top of the range sound card and a 7.1 speaker system it's a problem that shouldn't exist.

Beyond a couple of flaws and the fact that you'll probably be comparing it to Battlefield for the first few days, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is its own game with its own ideas that on occasions actually outshines others in its class. Although I was tempted to knock a mark off just for some of the similarities going as far as imitation, in the end I actually managed to enjoy Quake Wars more than Battlefield 2142. Blame it on its varied game-play, blame the fact that it borrowed ideas that have proven to have worked in the past or just blame the fact that it's a fun game developed by people who know how to make games like this work. Who knows - this might be the start of a whole new franchise of online action gaming and possibly one of the first games to really give Battlefield a run for its money.

Reviewed by Kieron Giacopazzi for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).