I have always been a massive fan of id Software’s games. In fact the first game that I remember playing was the original Doom on my friends PC. I ‘borrowed’ his floppy disks (search for that on Google if you don’t know what that means kids) and installed the game on my PC. Quake followed Doom and in many ways without id’s games I may not have even got into gaming at all. So it is with a heavy heart that I write this review as Rage has done nothing to help the veteran developer’s name.
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Things start off brilliantly in id’s latest FPS-RPG. The first thing that you will notice when you step outside is how stunning Rage looks. Light streams through the cracks in the clouds and through the high-rised rocks of the canyon, creating realistic shadows on the beautifully textured environment. You are quickly thrown into a post-apocalyptic world of danger as you are saved from a mentally deranged bandit by a local stranger.

The rest of the story is kind of a blur to me if I am honest. Amongst the banal fetch and kill missions the story is easily lost. I’m sure there is something there and at times the game attempts to create an engaging story but it never really works. At one point in the game (*SPOILERS*) rebellion forces turned up and wanted me to work with them. This is about at the halfway point of the game, but since I had begun Rage there were so few changes in the story I was actually surprised and confused by what was happening.

So let’s just get this sorted quickly. Rage’s story has you, a mysterious stranger, awakening in a chamber and embarking upon an FPS-RPG adventure in a post-apocalyptic world that looks like the Grand Canyon.

If Rage’s plot points were not strong it should have excelled is its atmosphere and it seems the devs focused on this. Charters show some surprisingly good animations with faces wrinkling and stretching as NPCs laugh, berate and generally talk to you. Environments look great and the cities feels alive enough. The only problem is that these areas are too small so the atmosphere of these areas is sapped by the player very quickly.

Rage has an open world, but it isn’t exactly packed.  The open world feels like it has been thrown in just for the sake of advertising or so that Rage could get the title of pseudo Mad Max. Let’s get things straight, most of the space in this open world is used for driving around as there are only three cities or proper hubs in the game that you will regularly visit. This means that half of it you’ll just be driving through on your travels. There’s not even things to do in these areas, so most of the time you are just driving from A-B taking down bandits in your car, which never seems that much of a challenge, even if you don’t have any upgrades.

The mission design is really where Rage fails. You expect the odd fetch quest in an RPG, but Rage takes this concept too far. I found half of my missions would be some guy telling me to go kill a group of bandits in order to get a part I needed or to do them a favour. Usually these quests last the entirety of a ten minutes. I had one where the whole thing literally took me under two minutes. These are not only the sidequests either, these are main campaign’s!

The side quests are not much better either. Rage has a delivery service, gambling, challenge room (Mad TV), racing, a job board and hunting bandits on the road to name a few. This is all well and good, but most of these are poor and will only entertain you for a short while. The Mad TV challenges are the only exception to this and it is one of the best parts of the game. The different art style and characters represent what Rage is missing: variation. There are some parts of Rage, especially later on in the game, that pick up the pace, but overall the missions feel underdeveloped and rushed.

As aforementioned you can use your car to take down bandits. You can upgrade your vehicle with rockets, mines and all sorts of damaging weaponary, but you’ll find you will rarely need it as usually you can outrun bandits on the road and they become more of an annoyance than a side quest or fun diversion.

Rage even has its own racing mini-game. This is a nice change from the campaign with quite a few races thrown into the different cities. The major issue I had with this was how slow the opponent seemed to be. I won three races (not the beginner ones either) with no engine upgrades and without using weapons. It almost feels like the computer wants you to win.

The shooting mechanics in the game do feel solid and there are a nice set of guns, each with their own unique types of ammo. Unfortunately none of these seem too inventive, with Rage’s biggest ‘wow’ moment for weapons being that you can use electric bolts to kill multiple enemies in water, how original.

The bosses as well fair little better with most of them being simple battles of attrition. The few of them that exist in the game (there are not enough) give big glowing points for players to shoot and felt like a huge letdown. It isn’t that the game is bad, it just feels like it is spread thin, stinking of mediocrity.

The whole world feels underdeveloped and this word nicely sums up how the game felt for me. The RPG elements have some odd decisions. There is no way to upgrade your character, other than a few generic purchases (upgrade armour, upgrade reload speed ect). There’s no perk system, no special powers, nothing. Now I’m not expecting this game to be on Fallout proportions, but there is little to show that this is an RPG other than the open world and different missions (which as discussed earlier are flat).

It just feels like that id Software attempted to tackle too much when making Rage, losing focus. I really can’t recommend this game as by the end I only felt like I had wasted my time. Do yourself a favour and don’t pick this up. There are a lot better games on the market at the moment.

 

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