id knows how to make a shooter. That's the thing everyone has known for years. Since the olden days of Wolfenstein 3-D, the name id has been synonymous with first person shooters. Even though the company's been through a lot of changes since then, they have managed to come up with a great shooter in RAGE.
RAGE has been talked about for years as the next huge thing to come out of id, a benchmark to today's games in a similar way Doom was back in the mid 1990s. Now that it's out, does it deliver? As a first person shooter, definitely. As it seems at first glance, as an open world experience, not so much.
The story opens up with the apocalypse of Earth. An asteroid wipes most of the life on the planet and everything turns into a desert. Luckily for humankind, the planet's government had a plan, to save the last bits of humanity in the form of arks, which held the best specimens our race had to offer: grunts. Fast forward a few hundred years, your ark opens and you're pushed out to the real world. You're the last of these survivors left intact and you're about to find out you are not the only person alive on the planet. Gangs and mutants have taken over and it's up to you to help out the last pockets of humanity if they ever hope to survive for long.Frankly, that's not the most original of stories but it serves as a nice excuse to shoot the crap out of things. In that regard, RAGE excels. id's engineering for first person shooter is at its finest, from the quantity and variety of weapons, that range from the trusty shotgun to a point-to-point precision crossbow, to how enemies behave and attack. Weapons can be upgraded and there's also a crafting system that makes use of some of the junk you find lying around the desert. If you don't feel like tinkering, though, you can buy everything in the convenient general store out in the desert. On top of a pretty fun on foot shooting system, you also get to drive and equip your own set of wheels for races and destruction.
Sadly, it's the bit with the driving that might bog down your experience with RAGE. The open world feeling that is passed through cutscenes and visuals when you start the game doesn't really carry through to the end. Missions are very straightforward and there really isn't a whole lot to do in between the pockets of quest givers you drive to and back. Sidequests make repeat use of the same areas you 'instance' into for the main story and don't vary a whole lot from the same "shoot all that moves and pick up this bottle for me" mold you've come to expect. Even though the driving itself is a lot of fun, it doesn't really amount into much at the end.
Speaking of the end, the ending section to RAGE is also extremely disappointing. Without going into spoilers, you're given an incredible weapon and basically rats to shoot at with it. It's a frustrating conclusion to an otherwise exciting set of missions that could have been probably arranged at an alternate order and have resulted in a more satisfying experience.
Once you're done with the single played campaign, there's an entire separate section of the game devoted to multiplayer. If you can find people to play it with, the multiplayer portion of RAGE is varied and rewarding, even if it's somewhat under-populated at the moment. Instead of taking the easy way and throwing out a simple deathmatch mode, id decided to take the co-op approach and designed a set of cooperative missions set in the main game's levels. They're presented in the form of legends of the wasteland, side stories that involve the cast of RAGE and how they happened to have two very willing individuals who took down a lot of enemies.Your other online option is a handful of racing tracks where you put your pedal to the medal, racing and fighting with other players. You can count on a similar leveling system you've seen in other online shooters, which rewards you with better weapons as you gain experience. While not the most original set of options around, RAGE tries to set itself apart, with relative success.
Whether you're tearing through the desert or just playing cards at the local bar, there's no denying RAGE is one of the best looking games in this generation. id's new graphics tech is easily one of the prettiest so far. That's especially true in outside environments, where the sky is visible and it just blows you away with how everything is so well lit and drawn. id's touting a new 'mega-texture' technology in RAGE, which is basically a fancy way of saying that all the textures are painted in a single, huge file that's supposed to help loading textures be much faster. In RAGE's case, that works most of the time, even though there are still some instances of draw in, even more when you're turning around all the time. That's when the illusion pops out and you can see behind the curtain of how it all works. That only happens once or twice, though, mostly when you're on foot outside.
Characters also look really charismatic and act cartoony. We're treated to John Goodman as a voice actor early on in the game too, which only ups the presentation. He's not on for too long but the rest of the cast manages to keep the bar high once he's gone. The cities you visit each have a distinct feel and definitely looked lived in and put together differently. Levels are relatively large too and aren't exactly a set of tunnels duct-taped together, although they don't escape the curse of being fairly straightforward.
As a shooter, RAGE is an excellent game. In comparison to other game's that claim to be open world experiences, like Borderlands, it doesn't really deliver. While not the most unique FPS around, it does what id's been known for years and looks stunning in doing so. The multiplayer component also helps, keeping you busy for a while longer. If you don't mind the cookie cutter story and lack of mission variety, you'll dig living through yet another post-apocalyptic journey RAGE's serving. |8
