"Another fine entry into the Castle Wolfenstein series"

Overall, I found that the predecessor to this game, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, was enough reason by itself to buy a cable modem. Playing single player, I read the instruction manual and dreamed of how awesome multiplayer would be, and when I finally got a faster internet connection, I was not disappointed. As you'd expect out of any first-rate online video game, there were free servers out the wazoo, tight down-to-the-wire gameplay to be had, and it required a lot of personal talent to be able to compete beyond getting a few kills and feeling good about it. What set RTCW apart from other games, however, was the amount of teamwork required to play against players that each individually had any merit to be there, and it brought the game up enormously in the eyes of any gamer who doesn't just want to be #1 on a counterstrike server somewhere off in the internet.

Enemy Territory, however, takes that all to the next level. The division of what each class you may choose from and the abilities therein is of paramount importance to the dynamic of your team and your success. The best player in the world may not be able to win the game if no one else helps in the objectives, and that sort of thing makes every person playing have importance. No longer can having the perfect shot make sure that your clan can win every match, for often that perfect shot will run into a situation where he requires, say, an engineer to blow apart a way for him to enter or a destroyed tank that needs to be made operational again.

What really makes Enemy Territory better that regular, awesome Return to Castle Wolfenstein is the newly implemented "reward" system of experience points. If you so choose to be any class, they all have two bars common to all classes and one unique bar that goes up as they complete tasks specific to their class and that all classes must do. Medics, for instance, have a "first aid" skill bar that goes up as they heal their teammates and revive them when they're wounded that eventually allows the medic to preform his tasks with much greater efficiency. Soldiers have a "Heavy Weapons" skill bar, covert ops have a "covert ops" skill bar, and so on and so forth for all classes. The skill bars common to all classes, Battle Sense and Light Weapons allows for any class to become more impactual on the battlefield. This creates a desire not to just throw off your class at the drop of a hat, allowing for some level of mastery in what you do and creating another interesting intricacy of Wolfenstein.

My only complaints are two; one being that the connection speed tends to be slightly worse than regular RTCW. I don't know why this is, exactly, but perhaps the larger size of the maps or the higher graphical requirements affect the "lag" factor and drag down the play speed. This isn't as bad as I know you happen to be reading it, but it's noticeable in comparison to RTCW regular. The second complaint I have is that Splash Damage may have actually made the maps *too* big for comfortable play outside of professional aims (clans) or just to screw around in. I find that players who only seek to have a casual match may be turned off and not enjoy the game because of the maps taking 2 minutes to simply walk from point A to B. Those two minor (for me) flaws keep me from saying this game's absolutely deserving of a ten.

In all, I summarize what I've said as so; if you have a computer capable of playing relatively newer games without dying on you and a fast internet connection, download Enemy Territory. At the absolute worst case scenario, you won't like it and it'll have been a waste of your bandwidth to try, but at best, it could be the game you want to marry.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 08/08/04