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In Quake 4 youre granted a nameMatthew Kaneand you are a member of the elite Rhino Squad. Along with other Marines, you are tasked with defeating the Strogg race and their new, more powerful Makron. You'll crash land in the middle of trench warfare, and it's immediate action as one superior officer after another sends you off to retrieve people, destroy key locations, and infiltrate deep behind enemy lines. Sometimes you'll be accompanied by game-controlled team members -- typically a technical officer who can repair your armor, and/or a corpsman who can heal you up to full health. I was pleasantly surprised with the AI of your teammates as they hold their own pretty well, doing more damage than we're used to seeing from game-controlled teammates, and taking even more punishment than you can, on some occasions.

Here is one of those times when you actually crash land into allied controlled territory (yeah right !!) Notice how you see the mountains appear through the clouds.

The single-player mode emerges as a very linear game, which contains 31 levels. In it you can experience the vehicles of Quake IV. You can use hover tanks, a tram, and mechs (remote-controlled giant robots) The addition of the vehicles was a nice touch and went a long way to divert from the fairly linear progression through the game. Their inclusion though was not really needed and at times they seemed 'stuck in' almost in an attempt to demonstrate that we can do this and that. They were quite fun though. One can also notice the variation in the skyline.

Raven has done a great job by modifying Doom 3's physics engine for vehicles. The mechs have a different feel from normal ground combat, as you are strapped into the cockpit of a missile-launching, machine gun-toting piece of beauty. While cool, the mechs are odd, as the tank and shields recharge, so long as you pull back and stay out of trouble for a few seconds. The same goes for the hovertanks. But they feel totally different. As you slide along the planet's surface, you're getting a turret's eye view of all the action. Just for the heck of it, I jumped out of the mech and tried fighting the enemy with my hand guns. I quickly had a change of mind.