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Ben Smith
United States
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
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 The Good:
- Cleverly streamlined design for quick-paced play while offering more depth than your average shooter.
- Graphics, overall, are great. Nice lighting, great character models and plenty of unique-looking characters. Still runs very smoothly on my slightly dated PC.
- Vehicles! They handle great, look great, and have enough depth to customization options to keep it interesting.
 The Bad:
- Graphics programming means that some textures fill in as you’re watching them, or shift in and out of high-detail. It can be distracting. (Could just be my PC’s limitations?)
- Minor interface annoyances in porting from a controller-based console--you are limited to 4 quick-select guns in graphic interface which is unnecessary with mouse/keyboard setup.
- Mouse sensitivity is a bit whacky in the menus and does not match my mouse movement in Windows.
 The Meh:
- Tired post-apocalyptic theme, very much "been there, done that" feel coming after Fallout 3 and Borderlands
- No maps/minimaps for internal areas.
- In-game collectible card game is nice idea, but has almost no depth
The Story
The setting is all too familiar: It was the end of the world... almost. Earth played chicken with a giant asteroid and lost. So life was obliterated and the blue planet turned beige.
Some humans survived, and some mutated into mindless beasts. People took another stab at civilization, starting shabby settlements in the post-apocalyptic wasteland.
This is where Rage takes place. You take the role of a human specially chosen to be put into hibernation before the asteroid hit. When you awake, it turns out very few of the hibernators survived, and you are a wanted commodity by a mysterious group known only as "The Authority." Initially, your only role is simple survival, and the story develops from there.
The game is part first-person shooter and part destruction derby racing, held together in a semi-open-world framework. There’s enough chit-chatting with townsfolk and item-crafting that at times you’re fooled into thinking you’re playing an RPG, but you certainly are not. No, there are few if any meaningful character decisions, no moral bifurcations with paths towards either good or evil. Instead everything is expertly designed to let you do lots of cool stuff with zero-hassle, with plenty of action always as near by as you want it to be. It’s a bit like if Borderlands and Bioshock had a love child.
Ah, the familiar wasteland. The weapon shown is a crossbow--the real silent killer (after high blood pressure, that is).
The Look
What you notice first when you start playing the game is the graphics: they’re nice. The lighting in particular is pretty great. Best of all, it all runs smoothly even on my semi-dated rig (I run at 1920x1080, no AA, and I’m packing two 8800GTs in SLI). There are some quirks; the textures sometimes load as you’re watching them, and then sharpen more as you get closer. Not sure if this is just my PC’s limitations, but it’s noticeable and a bit annoying though not a deal-breaker. Also,the dynamic lighting shifts that occur when you move from inside to outside are a bit too pronounced at times. But overall, the graphics are pretty slick.
The second thing you’ll notice: this looks familiar!! All too familiar. It’s too bad that the whole "post-apocalyptic wasteland" setting feels so overdone these days, and that Rage was one of the later, rather than earlier, games to have hopped on that bandwagon. And while I can’t say that Rage adds any real originality to the whole scene (for post-apocalyptic originality, see Enslaved: Odyssey to the West), I can say that it at least depicts things very well. If you’ve played Fallout 3, or Borderlands, you know exactly what to expect: Sand. Tan rocks. Ramshackle villages built out of cobbled-together scraps and bits. Dune buggies driven by angry, goggle-wearing banditos with a mix of high-tech weaponry and primitive clubs. Yes, you’ve seen it all before.
This is an RC car bomb that you can build and drive at your enemies.
The Gameplay
It saddens me to no end just how many games these days are a re-hashing of genres a decade old yet FAIL to live up to the simple standards set years ago by the very games they copy! It would be like a new gas-electric car coming to market offering fabulous mileage but not including seat-belts or a windshield, or perhaps no steering wheel. Far too often an anticipated game comes out, boasting of “innovation” and “new features”--which it may or may not have--but then flops in the basic departments of fun and playability because they took a recipe that was not broken and broke it by focusing on embellishments rather than the foundation.
/rant
That said, I am jubilant to announce that Rage does NOT suffer from this syndrome! No indeed, quite the contrary is true: Rage is an impressive refinement of the adventure-shooter genre, succeeding in capturing the core ingredients of an FPS while offering subtle but impactful improvements. This thoughtful design leads to excellent game pacing and just all around FUN, while still offering more depth and adventure than in past id games like Doom and Quake. It’s nothing wildly new, but everything it does it does well. Perhaps most notably: it doesn’t try to be what it is not.
A brief example: the inventory. If you have ever played an RPG--action or otherwise--you’ll likely have spent countless hours sifting through the loot of fallen foes until your inventory fills up, then dutifully returning to town to sell off your myriad of useless crap items, one at a time. When your inventory space is limited, it becomes a frustration and disrupts the pacing as you constantly fill up or grow encumbered, and have to stop the action to micromanage and sell. When inventories are unlimited, on the other hand, they can grow overwhelming, especially when you are collecting tons of tiny random items from the forts and hideouts you pillage. Rage is not an RPG; it is an action game. Thus, it offers an elegant solution. There is one-click looting of bodies. There is no limit (that I have run into at least) on your inventory: so just grab, grab, grab, and you can deal with selling it off later. Bioshock had almost as good a system, but there you still had to be very careful what you snatched up since some items and drinks would have unwanted effects. In Rage, it’s aaaall good so just take it. One particularly brilliant feature is the grouping of nearby items strewn about into a one-click, grabbable unit. Say you find a shelf or workbench strewn with goodies: two grenades, some buckshot, some bandages, etc. Yay! In most games (like Fallout 3) you would then CLICK CLICK CLICK on each individual item, hoping you didn’t fumble or miss anything. In Rage, just one CLICK and you sweep everything in the batch into your inventory. In, out, done. The names of the items you grabbed will display one at a time for a few seconds at the bottom of the screen in case you didn’t look before you grabbed. At any time you can enter your inventory to see what you have, and perhaps craft items together into gadgets and goodies (no workbench is required; just craft anywhere, anytime).
A further requirement is how Rage deals with all the random wasteland items you grab that are only good for selling: miscellaneous rusted tools, canned food, slippers, books, clipboards, etc. Rather then keep each of these items separate in inventory so that you have to scroll through pages and pages when viewing or selling, these sell-only items are swept into just a few categories: tools, small items, and junk. So instead of a hammer, a monkey wrench, and 5 screwdrivers (the items you saw and collected), you will end up with simply "7 Tools" in your inventory, which you can sell at your leisure. Mind you, if items are useful to you and can be crafted, when you view them it will say as much, and will even show a picture of each potential item you know of that you could craft a given ingredient into.
In short: looting, selling, and inventory management is a real breeze and doesn’t slow the game down at all.
Realism vs. Fun
In Rage, a few hard choices were made in the name of fun. One seems, at first, a crime: all the weapons that enemies use and drop simply dissolve into nothing once you kill them. You still get bullets and loot, but no actual new guns can be looted from enemies. At first this bothered me. In the Modern Warfare series, you can always snatch up the guns of your enemies to refill on ammo. You might also recall Borderlands, where there is a virtual infinitude of guns: every gun that every bad guy has can be yours if you shoot them and take it, and every single one is different. In theory, all those weapons sound amazing! And in practice, it was pretty cool... at first, but after a while it plateaued and you spent all your time sadly sifting through mediocre piles of guns and junk, with worthwhile weapons fewer and further between with each level you advanced. In Rage, while it’s at first sad to not be able to grab the weapon off a downed bandit, it soon becomes the blessing it was intended to be since you’re now free to one-click-loot the guy and rush onward to things that are just more FUN.
Vehicle physics is another area where just enough realism was thrown out the window to keep things fast and really fun. The cars handle just like an arcade racer should. This is quite a feat considering that Rage is an FPS, yet does better with the car physics than a number of dedicated (albeit low budget) racing games. Kudos to them! The cars will magically flip back on their tires should you ever end up upside-down, sacrificing sense for playability.
And speaking of the cars...
The Vehicles
The fully-upgraded Cuprino packing minigun and rocket launchers.
I was skeptical about the driving in Rage when I first hopped onto the little four-wheeler ATV that is your first vehicle in the game. That vehicle felt pretty lame. And it was. But once I upgraded to the dune buggy, it all changed and I was a rather blown away by how much went into the vehicle portions of the game. It’s what Borderland wished it’s vehicles were like.
Once you earn your first car, things really open up. Soon you have the option to enter race after race, and if you want you can get sidetracked and spend a good long time just racing and upgrading your vehicle. Vehicle customization is a tad basic, but deep enough to be fun while not taking too long. There are upgrades to suspension, engines, tires, boost (nitro), bumpers, weapons, and some cosmetic-only upgrades to the paint job. You’ll need to win races or kill tons of bandits to upgrade your vehicles, though if you’re not interested in that you can avoid much of it; only a few car missions are mandatory. I happen to be a sucker for cars+guns racing, so I very much enjoyed the various destructive race modes involving rocket launchers, mines, and explosions aplenty, and I applaud id for making this part of the game so polished.
Other Stuff
When you’re not busy shooting bandits or racing buggies, you will likely find yourself wandering in town. This is where the pace downshifts. In town, your guns disappear, the pace of life slows. You can wander about and elicit one-line remarks from random townsfolk. You can gamble, you can shop, you can check the job board for new missions. And, you can play cards! There is a mini-game in Rage: a built-in collectible card game. You start with a puny starter deck, and find new cards hidden throughout the levels and landscape of the game. Each card has different abilities and a different "cost" to it, and when you’re ready you can challenge the local dealer to a game, with the difficulty and payout depending on the total "cost" of the deck you’re allowed to build. This is a very cool idea (I think something similar was done in Knights of the Old Republic) and I find it ten-times better than the pointless system most games have of "Collect all the randomly hidden flags/crystals/briefcases in this area, and we’ll pat you on the head!" The cards you get are fun to try out, and can be a small source of income. That said, the downside is that the card game you play with your deck is incredibly shallow. I’m talking really, really shallow. Although you do get to customize your own 12-card deck, gameplay is pretty much akin to War: both sides flip out cards in a random order, and the cards attack back and forth. You don’t get to make any really useful choices, so there are no tactics to the game. Ah well, you can’t have everything.
The card dealer in Wellspring where you can try out your deck.
Summary: It’s Good!
That sums it up! Rage is a fun, very well designed shooter with a surprisingly well-polished vehicle element. It’s not very original in genre or setting, but what it does accomplish is an impressive amalgamation of gameplay elements that are all very well executed, unlike most games that get more sloppy the more features they try to tack-on. There’s a decent bit of depth but this doesn’t hinder the pacing. It’s not for everyone, but if you like shooters, or have a soft spot for destructive racing, you may want to give it a try.
My rating: 8/10
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Gnomish Mustard
United States
Texas
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Great review! I loved this game at first but then other games came out that stole me away. I havent completed it yet but some day!
Note - If any console readers come along, you HAVE to install this to the hard drive if you want to remove the textures popping up as you move that was mentioned above. Be warned, its over 20 GB to install.
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Posted Thu Jan 19, 2012 8:48 pm
