RAGE is a newly released first person shooter, developed by the infamous id Software, the creators behind the Doom franchise. For months pending it’s release, there was promise of a revolution to first person shooters, however a decent game, this is certainly not the case.
The Story
RAGE starts with a catchy intro, one that really manages to pull you in and raise serious questions about what is going on in the story line. From what is gathered, you play as one of a select few humans that were stored away in underground chambers to be released after a catastrophic world-ending event of a massive asteroid impacting the earth. Sadly, one the game itself begins and going on a couple hours into the game, the story telling is thrown aside and I can no longer care, considering even the character who rescues you mentions aloud that telling you what happened is of little importance, just go out and start killing stuff.
The Gameplay
Definitely nothing revolutionary here. Ironically enough, if the story sounds familiar to Fallout (not to mention the publisher Bethesda is the same one behind Fallout 3) it’s because it really is. Not to mention, the game itself plays like a watered down mix of Fallout and Doom, ironically again. There are some minor RPG elements like item collecting and crafting that are thrown in but manage to add very little to the game of significance. The collection of various items strewn across the game world for the purposes of raising a cash supply and ingredients to craft items simply poses a means to break you away for the action, as you’ll often stop in the middle of a firefight to scour the room for pick ups before heading back to the fight.
Purchasing upgrades for your weapons is cool, but it’s been done before, while also some of the upgrades are actually irritating. I found myself getting rid of one in particular, the binocular scope for the settler pistol, as it ended up making shooting more difficult while adding insult to injury, couldn’t be deactivated or even dropped without returning to town and selling it to a vendor…
Headshots don’t seem to have a massive effect, and I often found myself shooting a bandit three times in the skull, with a blood splat over his face, before the bastard finally dropped which was a total *raises eyebrow* moment. There is also a racing sub-game which is thrown into RAGE with no real reason (which you have to take part in), that lacks significant value or worth, time that could of been better spent on developing the storyline or actually adding something revolutionary.
All in all, the gameplay is the biggest disappointment, falling far short of any promises made about the game. Granted, it still is decent enough, but there’s nothing really enticing me to return to the series of; pick up quest, drive to quest location, kill everything, press a button here or there and dip. Also the lack of proper auto-saves is really irritating and can end up sending you back 30+ minutes or more unless you stop the game, go to the menu and save after every significant event. There is a strong aroma of “We couldn’t be bothered” with this one.
The Graphics
This is the one truly nice part of the game, with some pretty overwhelming visuals. While it probably is dependent on your rig setup, my personal PC is pretty high performance yet the way textures are loaded as low res first, then high res overlaid as the game gets around to loading them, after you look in said direction. This means more lost gameplay pace as you have to wait around for a bit for the graphics to build up if you actually want to take in the gorgeous outdoor surroundings. If you keep a high speed of pace, you will likely end up playing a game with much lower quality graphics. Another point of irritancy that hampers what could of been mind blowing, is the textures seem to reduce back to low res when you look away, meaning turning back around brings you back to a dull visual.