Quarantine 2: Road Warrior - Review

Author: Res Date: Jun 17 2005 - 00:08

Short Introduction:
Quarantine II: Road Warrior is the sequel of Quarantine which was released two years before this game came on the market. I will start talking in this review about the first Quarantine game to give you an impression what the real difference is between both games.

Quarantine was one of the first games with a huge open environment, what I exactly mean to say is that you´re able to drive through every street you may notice during your ride. This was really a special thing back in 1994. Quarantine allowed players to drive through a dangerous futuristic city called `Kemo City´. What you had to do is pick up passengers (you will meet them during your ride), complete missions that your passengers give you; like blow up a building, kill a group of people, blow up a car, etc. and in the end get the secret password from one of your passengers that allowed you to drive into a secret tunnel which will bring you to the next city. For the rest you could also upgrade your car with guns, panzers, turbo boosts and a few other things. You also had to repair your vehicle because during your ride a lot of people and cars all over the entire city shoot at you or just bunch into your cab which causes in damage. All this freedom in the first Quarantine game disappeared in Quarantine II: Road Warrior which is really a shame.

In Quarantine II you play the role of `Drake Edgewater´ which was also the case in the first game. You still have to control a cab and you still have to complete missions. The main difference between both games is that Q2 doesn´t allow you to cruise through the city, pick up some passengers to make money, upgrade your car, and several other pretty cool things are missing. Q2 works like this: you will just get a mission which you always have to complete otherwise you won´t succeed to the next mission; it´s as simple as that. So when you´re unable to complete a mission you can better remove the game before you start eating your mobile phone or kicking your electronic devices. Q2 still features guns and turbo boosts but this time you will just get them when you need them for a certain mission so you can´t buy the weapons you prefer and use them during a mission. For some people this game will feel like one big `mission add-on´ for Quarantine. But there are also some improvements. First of all the graphics are really improved, Q2 features nice SVGA graphics instead of good old VGA graphics but you´re still able to use VGA when your machine isn´t powerful enough to take care of the SVGA graphics which is a good thing, next to this Q2 features a cool story which will be explained during the game by the usage of a cartoon, next to this you can also get some training lessons before you start your journey. Sadly enough I can´t name any other improvements.

Features:
Quarantine II: Road Warrior offers over a hundred missions spread over ten cities, a few rides from one location to another and two factories. The cities aren´t as huge as in the first game but there are more cities available so that´s not something to worry about. All cities have a certain theme which you will notice in a lot of things all around the city, for example there is a city that has some kind of `childish toy´ look, unless this happy look the people and missions are mean though; like you probably already expected. Q2 features a lot of bloody and terrorism-related missions but there are also some childish missions (with a bad background of course); one of them is blowing up balloons or shooting at people at Skippy balls which is really funny. You also have to defeat bosses, mostly to go to the next mission; they aren´t very easy though, this is one of the reasons why I always save my game after every little success I book in this game, when you don´t do this you have to start all over again when your cab has been destroyed by the evil. During the, as I call it, mission-switch a cartoon will be shown; I really have to confess that the cartoon is very well drawn and the story in it is clear, not some kind of story where you have no idea what´s going on.

The Graphics:
Quarantine II features both, VGA and SVGA graphics. The S in front of SVGA stands for `Super´ which is true in this case; the graphics just look twice as good in SVGA mode. A very logical thing is that a game with better graphics requires better hardware well this game is no exception to this rule, for instance on my 486DX2 66MHz this game ran far too slow in SVGA mode so for slower machines (lets say slower than a Pentium 120MHz) use VGA but also in VGA mode this game didn´t run flawless; something which wasn´t the case in the first game. Perhaps you are wondering what you may expect regarding to the graphics of this game; well the graphics aren´t impressive but very well for 1995, the developers tried to create a 3D environment with a lot of different objects and they did this very well. All over the screen are objects such as walking people, cars, houses, mines, walls that shoot rockets, etc; yes, I know this sounds pretty weird but this game should simulate some kind of `bad´ future and your goal is to destroy `evil´ to create a better world.

Music and Sounds:
The RIP of this game; a RIP means that required parts of the game are in the archive you can download but unnecessary files such as music and movies are missing; doesn´t feature music but when you own an official copy of this game you are able to listen to about fifteen futuristic tracks from hard rock to punk. The music is pretty good I can´t say anything else about it, except the enjoying track that you´ll hear when you are in the main menu or the third city (a bad `farmer style´ track). The sounds are basic, just like in the first Quarantine game but all sounds together create an acceptable environment. The sounds aren´t really special, I don´t know what cars in the future will sound like but I don´t think the engine will sound like in this game (well at least, that´s what I hope).

The Gameplay:
The gameplay is similar to the previous game´s gameplay, very simple and annoying too for example when you´re stuck between a few buildings or cars. The simplicity is a good thing because you just need a few buttons to control your car, shoot and switch weapons. The reason why the gameplay is annoying is something you have to experience by yourself; I think when you play this game for the first time you will immediately notice what I mean, it´s just a little bit too plain so I won´t rate the gameplay as `good´ more like average or acceptable.

Conclusion:
When you liked the previous Quarantine game and you´re looking for some action you really have to check out this game but when you didn´t play Quarantine before I want to suggest you to have a look at that one before you start playing this game, the graphics may be worse but the game itself is much better and a bit longer. This game will offer an average gamer a few hours of fun but like I mentioned before, Quarantine will provide you even more fun. The idea of this game is nice and the atmosphere is really cool but it´s not really an improvement regarding to the first Quarantine game. The download is about 20 megabytes which is a lot for 56k users so 56k users trust me, it isn´t worth downloading but for other users, users that own a fast connection (e.g. cable or DSL); you should give it a shot when you played Quarantine before!

	Title / Type	Submitter	Date
	Review	Res	Jun 17 2005
	Review	Grades	Jul 29 2004

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