Review: RAGE

10 Oct, 2011

Title: RAGE
Platforms: Xbox 360, PC, PS3 (reviewed on PC)
Developer: id Software
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Tagline: An FPS title that is a Jack of all Trades but a Master of none.
Family Friendly: This is an id shooter, and it does reward players with headshots that remove the head, complete with chunky brain matter. Blood spouts from wounds, characters yelp out in pain or whine as they draw their last breath. RAGE earns its M rating and should definitely be played by those over the age of 17.

When id software announced RAGE several years ago, people were excited at the prospect of a new IP from the house that built the FPS genre. Early videos showed off beautiful visual fidelity that had not been seen on the console in quite some time. Now that RAGE is out on the marketplace, it does look amazing, and I am having fun playing it, but it is forgettable at the same time. It is a game that offers up so many concepts but never lives up to the full potential with any of them.

RAGE starts off with an amazing cinematic presence, with the idea that an asteroid is plummeting to Earth, and will take out the human race. In a last ditch scramble to save some semblance of the human race, huge arks are constructed inside mountains where the smartest or most important humans could be stored to rebuild society years later. Of course, things never work out as planned, and your character awakes from 100+ year slumber only to find the rest of your pod in the ark dead and the world looks nothing like you expected. Mutants run wild, small outposts have sprung up as storefronts and most importantly, a new sheriff is in town by the name of The Authority and they want to find any Ark survivors, putting your character at the top of the most wanted list.

The story in Rage is passable, but it never rises to anything more than the means to move you from one location to another to kill things. Rage is a first person shooter, and it does live up to the id Software brand of creating quality first person shooting experiences. There is something about the engine that feels just right when you are pulling the trigger. And it is not just the weapons, which do not stray far from the traditional FPS experience. The enemies move from all angles, using flanking maneuvers, tossing grenades to cover movement and more. The enemies are cunning and smart. They will retreat when taking too many losses and they will call in reinforcements when they are overrun.

While the shooting and enemies are good, they never strive to the greatness that you expect from id Software. While enemies do all of those cool things, they all start to act in a similar manner. While different gangs have some differences in their movement and strategy, through the course of a mission, you will see the same behaviors continuously. And it is not just the idea of shooting that seems to average.

So many things are attempted in Rage but never fleshed out into greatness. The game pulls ideas from so many locations, but implements them very in lackluster ways. Rage has loot to pick up, but you never do much with it. It has you collecting weapons, but there are only a handful of weapons to find. You meet people, but the conversations are limited, and there are no dialogue options to speak of from any of them. Even the idea of an open world is broken, as you have the painstakingly beautiful world, but you get to see so little of it. Areas in Rage are confined into such a small area that you sometimes feel a sense of claustrophobia overwhelming you. And the areas themselves are again, rendered with tons of detail, but never excelling to anything original, instead coming down to straightforward corridors that you go from one end to another and then exit the area.

And yet, with all this talk of being generic and never pulling the trigger on something exceptionally great, id Software has made a game that is fun to play. Even with its repetitive nature, I continued to marvel at the world and all of its little details. The art work and the new idTech5 engine is a thing of beauty and it runs smooth and makes the journey through the generic wasteland interesting. Rage finds itself at its best when you are pulling the trigger, throwing out grenades and destroying the enemy.

Rage does offer up both multiplayer and co-op play, but only one adds much to the experience. Strangely, id Software is known for their excellent FPS multiplayer experiences, and yet they stray away from standard multiplayer with this title. Instead, Rage uses the buggy combat from the main game as the multiplayer component, and it is not very good. Connections were tenuous at best and after a few matches, I found myself tiring of the driving around huge environments that were limited to four players. It was like playing hide and seek with a grain of sand in the Sahara Desert at that point. Co-op plays out in similar areas as the single player game, but at least takes the approach of expanding on story points in new ways. Co-op is fun, but only when you find a game that is stable.

I did run into some visual issues and some weird crashes from time to time with the PC version of Rage. Most of these issues seemed to be cleared up with a patch that was released shortly before the writing of this review. One of the major revisions in the patch was the ability to change more functions in the graphics which were locked out before the patch. Now you can control texture memory, Antroscopic Filtering and other items. I did play with both a controller and a mouse, but if you do want to mix and match controller usage (driving with a controller, on foot with mouse/keyboard), note that the icons will stay on for the controller until you disable controller support.

So, is Rage the next evolution of first person shooters, or does it sign the end of the dominance of id Software in the FPS arena? Rage is a good shooter, and you find yourself having a lot of fun when you are playing it. But when the experience is over and you put down the mouse and keyboard or put the controller away, you find the experience forgettable, and never pulling you back for more after you are done.

The Good:

• The Game World is vibrant and gorgeous
• The shooting feels perfect
• Enemies act with instinct and purpose

The Bad:

• A very by-the-numbers shooter
• Multiplayer is not fun (and is sometimes broken)
• “Open” world is actually the size of a closet