Quake III: Team Arena

"A good expansion, but not good enough"

Overview

Quake 3: Team Arena (or as I will refer to it for short Q3TA)was released in the year 2000 and was made to be the expansion to Quake 3. Hence, you must have the game Quake 3: Arena before you can play Q3TA. It adds extra modes of play to the game and the graphics are well done but is it more fun?

Modes Of Play and Game Types

Single Player: You can play against bots and have bots on your team. Single Player is fun in all but multiplayer is great!

Multiplayer: The heart of the game and the most enjoyable part of it. You are missing out if you don't try the multiplayer mode.

Game types:

-Overload: You must storm into your enemy's base and shoot the skull in their statue until it dies. The skull has 2500hp and on top of that it regenerates it's hp!

-Harvester: You must frag the opposing tema members, then for every person fragged a skull of their teams color appears. You must pick up the opposing temas skulls and bring them back to your base for points. If you touch a skull of your own team, it will dissappear leaving the other team no skulls to get points with.

-Capture The Flag: Storm your opponent's base, steal their flag, bring it to your base, and touch your own flag to get a point. One catch is your flag MUST be there for you to make a capture and gain a point. If you frag an opponent with the flag, touch the flag and it will return to your base.

-One-Flag Capture The Flag: One flag is put in the middle of the level and must be taken and brought back to your base. Bring the flag to your flag stand yo gain a point. If the enemy has the flag you must attempt to frag them and return the flag to the middle.

Graphics: 10/10

WOW! This game looks amazing. The environments and the characters are deeply detailed and well designed. When you die, your corpse will remain on the ground and it can be blown up to make a bloody mess, the bullets leave holes in the ground and the rockets leave black marks, so you know there was a fight. The only thing that looks this good is GT 3!

Play Control: 10/10

Can be customized to your comfort. Once you learn the controls well you find that your hand moves naturally without you really even thinking. Play Control is very important in this game as it affects your aim, usually the main reason why some players are better than others.

Sound: 6/10

The title screen has pretty good music but the rest is not even worth noticing. The only reason why this gets a 6/10 is because of the voice communication (yes like Unreal). Although good sound is nice, it is not really that important to a game like this. The only time I care about music is if it gets annoying.

Difficulty: 10/10

The difficulty is of course up to you. As you learn you play harder bots and as you beat those bots it gives you confidence for playing online. At that time the difficulty varies but thats no fault of the game's. :)

Game Play: 7/10

It's not that this expansion is bad, it's that there is so much better available. Even with this game I still played regular Capture The Flag for Quake 3: Arena because it is more fun. On Quake 3 Arena I liked the maps better and I liked the fact that it's not all about hoging the power-ups. If you don't get any power-ups you don't stand a chance against a player with the guard power-up. The Weapons Factory Mod is so much better and you can download it for free! This is where this game lacks most.

Replay Value: 10/10

You can play this game over and over with new people, with different styles and skills, on different maps and on different servers (assuming you have multiplayer). If you don't have internet (which most people should if they are reading this now) it's a different story. You can do all of the same above except with bots. It's almost the same experience but bots become predictable and boring eventually. Replay value doesn't get much better than this.

Buy or Rent? Neither

Although this is a good expansion it is over-shadowed by what is already out there. My way of doing things is buying Quake 3: Arena, playing Capture the Flag and Death Match with it, then downloading Weapons Factory. Weapons Factory beats out Q3TA by far and it's free.

Final Evaluation: 7/10

A good expansion, but not good enough.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 07/29/01, Updated 07/29/01