Games reviewers are a disparate lot, so we completely understand the cynical view taken by some readers that we all must bathe in tubs of money donated by cigar-smoking publishers with an evil glint in their eye. But I'll let you in on my personal approach to reviewing. You see, in order to actually have some clear sense of credibility I actually like to pass each game that I review – or, if the game is primarily an online one or is particularly long, I like to spend at least ten to fifteen hours with the thing.

I've had my fair share of shit games, let me tell you. And I can confidently say that I've given each one their due time before writing a review. Thus we come to Quake Wars, a game that is not inherently awful yet which I honestly found very difficult to actually play.

Sure, my 360 console decided to crap itself and display the dreaded Red Rings of Death during the process, but even before that mishap I'd well and truly had enough of Quake Wars. And then the game kind of sat there, mocking me. All the while I'm thinking ‘do I review it or do I force myself to play it some more? What will the people say if they discover that I didn't play it to pass the single player?'

Well, to hell with it – I'm going to explain why it's so hard to like this game. First of all, I have Quake Wars on PC, so it's not because I don't like the Quake franchise, I do. The main issues I have with the 360 version boil down to three points: a lack of anyone playing it online, the unnecessary speeding up of gameplay, and the removal of XP and stat tracking (which were in the original PC release).

The first problem – lack of anyone playing online – is apparent as soon as you boot the game up. The first thing you'll do is sneer derisively at the option to include bots and sit there waiting to join an online game... and sit there... and sit there some more. You'll probably have time to read a few chapters of a book before you actually find a match. And when you do, half of the players are bloody bots anyway (yes, you have options for no bots but good luck finding a game this century).

The game is not content with just making you wait for an eternity to connect; it seems that getting a stable online frame rate (or even a stable single player frame rate, for that matter) is too much to ask. Combine this with incredibly frustrating lag because the other four Aussies who own the game have obviously got better things to do, and the whole premise of the game – online action – has the rug violently pulled out from under its feet, leaving you (metaphorically) crumpled on the ground in the kind of contortioned position only seen during Adult Twister nights.

The second problem – the speeding up of gameplay – is also immediately noticeable, especially if you've played the PC version. Whereas the PC game had a clinical, Battlefield-like pacing to it, this console iteration feels like it's been beefed up on steroids and forced to swallow Counterstrike pills until it vomits up a fast-forward version of the game that removes any skill whatsoever. Instead, it relies too much on an insanely heavy auto-aim system.

This is immediately at odds with the game's presentation of evolving, class specific objectives. Where the PC version encourages you to think about tactics and employ the individual skills of your class (such as healing for medics, or repairing broken vehicles for engineers) the console version far too easily rewards a gung-ho, don't-think-about-it approach, and quite frankly this makes the game feel extremely shallow and underutilised. During most of the single player campaign, you have to do every bloody objective yourself anyway because the bots are thicker than two short planks – I seriously saw one of the bots snag the objective suitcase and then run blindly into a sentry gun – yeah, good programming there!

This brings us to the third major problem, the removal of the game's XP and stat tracking system. I'm sure there is some esoteric system in place for the console version but I can't, for the life of me, work it out. I know that you gain stars through performing class-specific tasks in each level, but in a thoroughly confusing manner these gained stars seem to disappear at the end of each match. This pales in comparison to the fairly deep stat tracking system available on the PC, which includes levelling, ranking and even class-specific perks. In fact, given the fairly large time gap between the PC and console release, such a butchering of the game's innards is enough to leave you mouthing ‘what the hell?”

It's a shame too, because the game's levels are uniformly interesting, employing a mix of objectives that span multiple choke points (a bit like the recent Battlefield: Bad Company). Given the right circumstances (or the planets aligning in the 360's case), online play can be a real blast, particularly when classes are used correctly.

As mentioned above, the single player is yet another sore point, as it serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever. Not only is there no actual storyline, but you're forced to play out the single player campaign as a series of online-structured matches – complete with stupidly long loading times and bots with brains made of jelly. The only reason I can even imagine anyone would play through these is for the achievements, and even they weren't incentive enough to keep me interested beyond the first few levels. Playing as the Strogg is fun for a bit, though, especially when using their jetpacks but that's about it. The single player serves purely as a training mode for online play, but if you can't find any online games surely that makes the whole game completely redundant.