Fails with narrative, variety, replay value and ambition. Technical problems at launch didn't help.

User Rating: 6.5 | RAGE PC
Rage is an arcade shooter / racer from id software, the developers who helped define the FPS genre. It is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland 106 years after an asteroid crashed to Earth. Before the asteroid struck, you were placed in an Ark and buried underground along with many others. You awake as the only survivor from your Ark and are rescued from certain death to begin your journey. Rage gives you discrete linear shooting segments split between driving across the empty wasteland. It is a departure from id's previous linear efforts.

Rage struggles with a narrative and occasionally doesn't even bother to try. You meet caricatures, who you don't care about, that give you meaningless tasks. It is really only the last hour of this 14 hour game that you get something resembling a story. Unfortunately this is more than offset by a terrible end level that feels slapped together. If your idea of a good motive is going to a distillery to bring back moonshine (twice) then Rage will suffice. Of course the arcade design is a great way to defer responsibility. It's just a shooter after all, who needs a cohesive reason for your actions? If you expected an atmospheric wasteland then you will be disappointed.

The open wasteland in Rage is dissimilar to the ones seen in Fallout 3 or Stalker. It takes up a static role and serves as the playground for brief vehicle combat. It doesn't have a living world of mutants and bandits vying for control. Instead the wasteland respawns vehicles, sometimes in identical places, for you to kill repeatedly as you move back and forth. Occasionally you'll be prompted to destroy groups of death cars or collect "Feltrite" meteors to gain funds.

Aside from some floating robots, which can be smashed by performing crazy jumps, the wasteland is very static. There is no weather system, nor is there a day-night cycle. The static lighting ensures it's always 3pm in the world of Rage. Even car wrecks do not remain on the barren surface. The two main wasteland areas are located around Wellsprings and Subway Town. These outposts are your go to zones for ammunition and quests. The wastelands are just open hubs that connect small, linear shooting segments.

The core of Rage is the shooting, and it takes place in carefully designed linear levels. Each level has a different flavour including a hospital, power station, prison, sewer and metro tunnel. The good thing is that the shooting and weaponry feels similar to Doom 3. These levels typically last around 30 minutes and there are around a dozen throughout the game. The game only saves at the start and end of each level, so the F5 key will get a good workout. Once you get to the end of the level the game blocks off your previous route and opens a shortcut to the entrance.

Some quests send you back into these linear levels, only this time you may move through them in reverse. It's a shame they didn't decide to mirror the levels too, in order to squeeze every last drop from them. After all these years the majority of time has gone into creating large empty wastelands rather than more unique and enjoyable shooting levels. In an effort to spice things up, various gangs provide subtle gameplay differences.

Rage populates the linear shooting sections with human gangs and mutants. Mutants move quickly, leap on walls and like to get in your face. Their animation sequences direct them naturally over objects as though they weren't even there. The Gearhead gang use robots and sentry guns to make your life rough. The Authority, the main foes in Rage, use electric shields to cover each other. The enemies don't provide the variety from id's previous games so there are rarely surprises. You slowly gain access to more tools but the combat remains simple.

Combat is frantic shooting, backpedalling when required and standard ammo management. The biggest departure from the formula is the wing stick, deployable robots and the different ammo types. The Wing stick is a bladed boomerang that lops off heads with the press of a button. Robots can be crafted and provide enough damage to make them worth using. Each gun has multiple ammo types, from electric arrows to meteor bullets. Although these don't alter the gameplay much, it never hurts to have options. If you tire of the shooting you can always get behind the wheel.

Rage isn't just a shooter, the game gives you the opportunity to race your wasteland heap of junk and buy upgrades for it. You are free to participate in events and only a few are required for the story. The events start easy with time trials and follow with combat races and rallies. As you are using your vehicle to drive to each quest, the prospect of more racing becomes unappealing after a handful of non-essential races. At least the vehicle controls are adequate and the AI does a fine job of driving over highlighted zones for points.

Many race events take place in the same wasteland you've been moving across already. The murderous bandits have taken a break and let the local residences set up tracks with floating items to collect. The racing doesn't help sell the game world. Its arcade nature contrasts too heavily with a world that frequently strives for atmosphere and texture. The transition was done so you can hop into the multiplayer and know what to do. Thankfully the competitive aspects of the multiplayer work rather well.

Multiplayer in Rage comprises of the vehicle combat and co-operative shooting. The competitive racing immediately feels like Quake 3 on wheels. The twitch aiming has been replaced by good driving. Even health, ammo and quad damage are scattered on the surface like Q3A powerups. Weapons lock onto cars in front of you, so being the first isn't always the best. There are no linear races, opting for a better use of open areas and capturing randomly spawning zones. You score additional points for destroying other cars. Aside from some lag the multiplayer racing is quite enjoyable for a few hours.

Not surprisingly the co-op has you and a buddy running through levels you've already seen in the campaign. "Legends of the Wasteland" relives the events that occurred before the mute protagonist moseyed his way into Wellsprings. Some of the co-op levels use foes in the exact same locations as in the campaign. When the action gets intense enemies can freeze briefly then warp right in front of you. The closest competitor this year is F3AR which is a more polished, enjoyable co-operative experience. The co-op isn't fun to play, can be finished quickly and has too many sloppy lag problems.

The visuals in Rage are somewhat unique, with a game engine that does things a little differently. The world is detailed in the distance with no repetition. Artistically it's well designed with a textures laid all over each other. It's as though somebody has come along and painted over the world, then dozens more have added extra texture detail. Subway Town looks incredible and many of the locations viewed from medium to long range are breathtaking

The engine has some downsides though, not including the myriad of problems with the PC launch. The megatextures in Rage are not kind to small items and objects in close view. You don't have to go out of your way to see these low resolution textures, they are everywhere. There is almost no interaction with the environment as boxes, computers, and barrels are super glued to the world. The engine itself, if you get it working, runs smoothly at 60FPS.

The launch of the PC version was a combination of errors from several parties. Gamers using AMD graphics cards were dealt the biggest blow with the wrong drivers released. Unfortunately Rage also had no graphics settings and while patches added settings many problems remain. The flawed auto-detect system resulted in poor performance and bad texture streaming for some. Configuration files improved things but are hardly an ideal solution. Considering the visual power of Doom 3, with its own graphics settings, this departure was foolish. Technical problems aside, Rage just isn't a good game.

Rage doesn't really know what game it wants to be. It tries to be a racing game but forgets that you spend lots of time driving through the vapid wasteland. It feels like a shooter but reuses linear levels, has almost no environment interaction and doesn't have enough enemy variety. It has a bad narrative, a terrible finale and the replay value of a yo-yo without a string. Aside from some satisfactory shooting, which could have been compressed into 5 hours, the game is a waste of development time. The strengths of id software are distant echoes bouncing off the attractive canyon walls.