And now to the review:
Quake 4 is a game that I had to force myself to finish. Technically the game has a lot going for it: Quake IV is build off idTech 4 and showcases the fantastic lighting work that engine is capable of, it has good modeling and texture work, the movement and weapon mechanics are solid, and it even has a few outdoor zones with DOOM 3 did not. However it is marred by technical issues as well; the biggest is the severe frame rate drops that happen every time there are multiple enemies or too much geometry on screen, or if you're just moving too fast. To save on rendering resources, the dynamic lighting is lessened in this game from DOOM 3, and some lights and shadows are 'baked' into the environment, but its not something you'll easily notice. Though the game has high quality textures on the player, weapons, and foreground objects, this is offset by low quality, blurry textures on distant land and the skybox, which is really noticeable in the later levels. Also on the 360 some enemiess just look nondescript gray, but I assume this is a console specific problem since I've seen PC screenshots where this is not the case.
But let's talk about the gunplay. Quake IV has ten weapons that are all carried at the same time and can be switched to on the fly. They are all unique and serve a specific combat niche. This is a major improvement from modern shooters which limit you to only two weapons at a time and as a necessity most of their weapons are fully automatic and very similar to each other with minor differences. Like most games in this genre, I found myself hoarding ammo for the most powerful weapons and defaulting to the shotgun, machine gun or the pistol for most of my encounters. I could take out even the strongest enemy in the game with just the pistol by dodging correctly, timing and aiming my shots, and using the charged up pistol shot, which is significantly more powerful than the standard fire. For me, this is a hallmark of good game design, as opposed to other games which arbitrarily make your starter pistol totally useless in any real fight.
I have nothing bad to say about the gunplay, but the enemy AI is a different matter. It's so bad it completely drags down the whole game. The AI is not advanced at all, and will either shoot at you while standing out in the open, or run in a straight line toward you to engage you in melee. This has led to many, many encounters where I simply backpedaled while firing and managed to kill my opponent without getting hurt myself. There are three enemy types focused around this attack and all three are "damage sponges" with high hit points but unsophisticated attacks, which make them very dull to play against.
The standard grunt comes in two types - machine gun wielding Strogg and shotgun wielding Strogg. Now, in video games, its much simpler to simply program the AI to "see" the player at all times, even through walls. It's simple to have them aim and rotate onto the player's position with perfect accuracy in instant time, and its far less costly to implement bullets as hit scan calculations, where there is no real bullet but the game simply calculates if the target was in the line of sight of the shooter's aim at the time of firing and then scores the hit instantly. This makes the enemy AI kind of cheap to fight against so the developers of Quake IV offset this by making them attack in patterns. The shotgun wielding Strogg will try to close the distance and somersault to the player before firing. This makes him laughably easy to predict and kill. The machine gun Strogg will fire in patterns from right to left or in short bursts directly at the player. The direct bursts are unavoidable, but the right-left spray will never hit. They are not complicated and easy to defeat.
Acknowledging how cheap and uninteresting the hit scan and melee enemies are, none of the bosses use hit scan weapons but fire large, slow moving projectiles in patterns you may recognize from a 2D game like Mega Man or Ikaruga. Again, not hard to avoid and the boss battles just turn into a "shoot it until it dies" affair.
Level design is the second totem of First Person Shooter gameplay, and here it is also a mixed bag. The early levels are bland corridor shooters, the later levels open up, are less linear and have wider spaces for you to use your toys of destruction in. It's why most reviewers say that Quake IV "gets better later".
Overall Quake IV is not a bad game, but its a good game that's being severely held back. Also, when it came out in 2005 its competition was Half - Life 2, which didn't have as good shooting mechanics but had large levels and implemented an amazing physics system that was utilized to provide lots of unique fun, F.E.A.R. which implemented bullet time mechanics and had amazing enemy AI, and Halo 3, which was popular for no real reason. Quake IV sort of got buried under its competition and it can be seen as sort of the last gasp of the old school, corridor shooter from the 90's. Fittingly it was made by Raven Software, whose other collaborations with id like HeXen and Return to Castle Wolfenstein are some of my favorite games ever, and which somehow avoid the pitfalls that Quake IV fell into.
The 360 version of the game also came bundled with a port of Quake 2, which for me was why I even bought it to begin with.
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