Rage Review
It used to be that when you thought of the great developers, your Bungie’s, Bioware’s and Naughty Dog’s, one name you couldn’t miss out was Id Software. This was the studio that redefined the first-person-shooter. But it’s been a long 7 years since Id’s last big release (the somewhat disappointing Doom 3). We were expecting something big. Perhaps not something that would redefine the FPS genre, but at least something that would let us rediscover the simple pleasure of firing a gun in a world filled with modern combat, predator drones and AC130 gunships. Then Id goes ahead and drops Rage into our eager, expecting hands. We wanted something great; instead we got a mish-mash of gameplay elements set in yet another post-apocalyptic wasteland. A nonsensical story, repetitive gameplay and an irrelevant multiplayer mode… I’m not sure if I’m angry or just disappointed. Well, upon reflection, I’m leaning towards angry.
The game is set after the impact of an unfortunately sized asteroid in 2029. Humanity’s best and brightest have been stuck in a freezer and buried underground awaiting the earth’s return to some state of semi-habitability. At a specified point an alarm clock was meant to go off and propel the Ark survivors into the brave new world waiting for them up above. It was presumably a clerical error on the part of the Ark personnel department to add a disturbed silent killing machine to the expensive underground vault filled with scientists and doctors. Embodying this mute killing machine, you emerge to discover that it’s all gone a bit Mad Max in your absence. It’s not too long before John Goodman (Walter from The Big Lebowski) gives you a gun and tells you to go murder a bunch of people to whom he’s none too partial (including a clan of inexplicably British petrolheads).
In fact, the first mission serves as a bizarre microcosm of the entire Rage experience. There are survivors and bandits. Everything is run by an evil dystopian government unimaginatively called The Authority. Unsurprisingly, everyone wants to kill you. About halfway through the game a significant plot detail regarding the origins of The Authority is revealed in a surprisingly blasé aside. Not that this really matters, because the story in Rage is pretty much sold to you at face value: “go over there, flick switch/grab item, kill everyone on the way and then come back to me.” I know a lot of games that try to shoe-horn in RPG elements often just end up relying on fetch quests, but Id is owned by Bethesda now, perhaps the premiere western RPG makers – couldn’t they have given some advice on how to make a storyline that isn’t just a giant chain of fetch-quests?
During those fetch quests you get to fight a lot of mutants, all of whom have impressive animated entrances into the battlefield, often featuring somersaults or the splits, but then just run straight at you trying to shank you. Unsurprisingly, the solution to this particular gameplay dilemma is just to run backwards and put a shotgun blast into them. It’s not until a third of the way through the game that you first get to fight the Authority’s enforcers, power-armour wearing goons, who sport sufficient firepower to actually make you think on your feet during combat. There was hardly any occasion that made me feel the need to resort to any weapon other than the shotgun.
Ah, that shotgun. If Rage has one shining point it’s the shotgun you get early on. Now there’s a weapon whose look, sound, retort and firepower all seem perfectly crafted to make you feel like the baddest baddass in the wasteland. Every time you pull the trigger, for just a moment, you feel like you’re projecting the explosive will of John Carmack (Doom, Quake and Rage’s lead designer) out into the world, to wreak havoc upon the poor, soon-to-be-tenderised flesh of your enemies. Considering that it can basically be turned into a rocket launcher to deal with the tougher enemies, I really found no better weapon in the game, not even the rubbish version of a BFG they give you in the last 10 seconds.
But despite the awesomeness of the shotgun, its lustre certainly begins to go a little dim after you’ve had to use it to blow away what feels like the 4000th identical mutant. Considering how little scope the game’s tight linear shooting galleries have, the lack of interesting foes to vanquish really dampens your enthusiasm. You end up carrying out the same formula again and again. Drive though the dull and utterly superfluous open-world to a door somewhere in the wasteland and then have a half-an-hour shootout. Rinse and repeat.
If you get bored of shooting, there’s a surprisingly large amount of races in which you can participate that provide a brief diversion. These provide race certificates to upgrade your vehicle, which means that once you go back into the open world your new engine will get you from point A to B a bit faster, or your boost will last slightly longer. Whilst there are some well designed races that have you soaring across towering canyons or attempting to boost across a crevasse, the majority of them make you take part in boring car-combat or repeat rally-races. There’s no real difference in the driver AI as the races progress unless you choose to increase the overall difficulty of the game. If you want to try your hand at the multiplayer (pretty much the only multiplayer mode other than a set of short and boring co-op scenarios) you’ll have much the same experience with bizarrely-devised objectives that leave the game overly-reliant on its insipid car-combat. In short, despite how much time and effort you put into the vehicles, it’s not going to provide a racing experience in any way on a par with a proper racing game, and ultimately it’s nowhere near unique enough to stand up on its own.
During the process of writing this review I came to the realisation that I had completely forgotten to mention one of Rage’s most trumpeted features: its visuals. Using the new id Tech 5 engine, Id has managed to craft a series of extremely attractive landscapes. The first few times you race across the wasteland it’s easy to let your mind wander from the monotony of the driving to the beauty of the great craggy peaks and their destroyed elegance that lie far beyond the horizon (or the boundaries of the map as the case may be).
However, the fact that I almost forgot to mention them proves that whilst beguiling, the graphics certainly weren’t astonishing enough to distract me from the game’s numerous flaws. Not everything looks as pretty as the backdrops. The majority of the ruined buildings that you are forced to explore are predominantly boring shades of brown and grey, and with the majority of the npc’s looking and acting like lifeless manikins. It’s also incredibly easily to break the game’s rendering engine on consoles and most pc’s; just spinning on the spot will cause the game to frantically try to keep up with you, revealing dodgy-looking texture pop-in left and right. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but none of the visuals in Rage ever conjured up the feelings of jaw-dropping awe in the way achieved by games such as Uncharted or Crysis. At a time when developers are constantly managing to eke every last scrap of performance out of the now familiar consoles, Rage didn’t make that much of an impression.
Rage is a game that has been in development for a fair bit of time, and it seems to have suffered as a result. The story and world-building have clearly been put on the back-burner, and gameplay elements feel like they’ve been designed in a void, and then shoved together like an ill-crafted jigsaw. Bad enough that these disparate bits of gameplay are dull and unambitious on their own, but put together they create an incohesive mess that succeeds only in causing boredom and frustration. Id seem to have become victims of their own previous successes. Rage is neither good enough as a shooter nor is the world it creates sufficiently appealing to want to spend time in it.
