(Long review) OutRAGEously dissapointing.
The more I think about ID's RAGE, the shooter we've been all waiting for so long, the more questions and flaws I find with it. It's pretty dissapointing to say the least.
When I think ID, I think of fantastic first-person shooters. DOOM, Wolfenstein and Quake along with its great sequels, aside from DOOM 3 and now RAGE. That's not to say RAGE is a bad game. It's actually far from it. It's just that I feel forced to give it this score because it just isn't a great game. It's a horribly rushed product, but it's very core, just the ideas behind it, are absolutely great if they were just given enough time. It's such a shame too, because you can tell this is a product of love and care. There are so many good things about it but also so many BAD things about it that it kind of cancels each other out.
If Bethesda did actually gave ID enough time, then, my god, how the mighty have fallen. My best guess is that we were waiting so long for the game either the guys at ID or Bethesda wanted this game released in its most playable state. By a playable state I do not mean bugs, and while it had huge technical problems at release, I don't mean that either. My biggest problems with this game are right here:
*The story is non-existent and the 'lore' is bullsh*t;
*The open world is an illusion, it is vapid, has no real purpose and is merely filler;
*The racing gets very repetitive, very quickly;
*The minigames are, again, pointless filler.
Before I bash on the stuff which makes RAGE so dissapointing, I'll talk about the good things first.
Graphically, RAGE is perfect. The levels, especially indoors, are simply breathtaking. It surpasses almost every recent game that had great graphics and runs very well on older machines, like my own. Even on a HD4890 I got a steady sixty frames per second on my machine, except for the last two levels, which were very demanding. The levels are really big, both in length and data size, as the textures constantly pop in from the corner every time you move in this game. While it is annoying at first, you do get used to it later on.
The animation of the both the enemies and the chatting NPC's is something everybody has got to see. It's such a long time ago I've been so impressed with character models and the animation clockwork behind them. The animation is so good, I found myself rushing to the next quest just to see the new character skins and models because they looked so good. Speaking of which, the script behind them is really solid and the voice acting is excellent. Off the top of my head, I could probably name twenty wildly different characters of the game and describe them what they were like. My favorite characters were the first salesman you ever meet in the game and a sort of post-apocalyptic World War I German guy... thing. You'll understand when you see him. They're both wonderful characters, so I was really shocked to see that from the developers of games where you do nothing but shoot the same characters.
What else is good about RAGE? Well... the level design is impressive. The levels are inventive and, as stated before, f*cking gorgeous, but many levels are pretty memorable because the developers make use of the fact that most locations you visit haven't been touched upon for over a hundred years.
What else? The shooting feels really solid, as any ID game should. The weapons feel great, are satisfying to shoot and come with different ammo types, items like a sentry bot, an RC-XD straight out of Black Ops (no, I'm not kidding) and much, much more. So the shooting is secured as well. The game also took me about 20-25 hours to complete, but this depends if you're the guy who wants to see all of the content.
I mean it when I say that the first ten hours of the game the one thought I had was: "Borderlands, but... well, playable."
Now to the bad stuff. As I said, the story is so incredibly bad and screws itself later on. You could say this is an ID game and it shouldn't matter, and you'd be right. But, there is a difference between a complete lack of a story or just a hint at a story (Portal, Amnesia) and telling a COMPLETELY generic tale of good versus EVIL (insert evil laughter here) and telling it in a bad way. I have nothing (much) against generic tales, on a basic level we all like those. But there is a difference between telling it in a compelling way and just telling it badly.
In RAGE, the Earth has been devastated by a large meteor which has turned the landscape in large deserts and almost drove Man to extermination, like in Fallout 3. You are an Ark survivor, a soldier who awakes after 106 years of cryo-sleep. But of course, not everything went as planned. You see, in RAGE, there is no central bad guy. You go through the entire game fighting bandits, mutants and then there is this vague group of foes called 'The Authority' and they want to RULE THE WORLD for no reason other than to RULE THE WORLD (insert evil laughter here). They do this by taking people, mutating them (why?), and putting technology in them so they can be controlled to help them RULE THE WORLD. And if you tell me their motivation is so they can all make money in the end, I'll come to your house and beat you to death with a sledgehammer.
Oh, and the mutant-altering plan, by the way, is the big twist at the end. I mean, seriously? That is something I would expect to see in a Serious Sam game, or a Duke Nukem game, and I would be totally okay with it. It'd be silly, but silly fits those games. RAGE presents itself as a tragic, serious action game with Fallout-y elements. Doesn't really connect, does it? There is this constant talk about the Authority in the game, but they never seem to do anything other than being slightly annoying and getting killed by me. One of the big scenes in the game is one where two Authority soldiers break into a house looking for you, while you're watching from afar. I kind of scratched my head at that. Couldn't you do something big and shocking? With this awesome, really powerful engine that supports these revolutionary animations, you couldn't have the Authority do something really terrible to the people of the towns you visit? Because they are so desperate to find you? I'm not going to write down suggestions here but come the f*ck on.
Instead we get F*CKING MINIGAMES AND RACING!
You don't even get to see the Authority until halfway into the game! In Final Fantasy VII people constantly talked about Sephiroth because he was so powerful and legendary. Guess what? He was. The building up paid off in the end. In RAGE, the Authority is a weak, underwhelming group of people who are powerless to stop me, even with their numbers and advanced technology. It makes no sense! All the build-up was pointless! Yes, Sephiroth got defeated at the end of FFVII but not before he almost wrecked the world.
The game contradicts its own lore. There is even a scene in the game where you're being transported to a new town, and you can't get back to your former town because the game says so. Turns out in one of the missions in the game you temporarily get transported to the first area, so why was it necessary to lock me out of the first area?! Was it so hard to put an NPC or an object there to let me transport back? The game makes so little sense and seems to do whatever it wants. It does not seem to understand that anything needs consistency. There are many more tiny little plot holes that just add up over time.
There is much more I could **** and moan about, but this review has been going on for quite some time now, so I'll keep it short. The open world is pointless. It really is. I'm sorry for the people who worked on that, but it really wasn't necessary. The world feels tiny and unreal. You can get from one town to another by slightly stepping on the turbo. Watch it! You'll crash into the invisible walls of the other side of the world if you hold the turbo for more than ten seconds! The open world feels like a pointless extra distance between me and my destination. Unlike Fallout 3, there is nothing to interact with in the open world unless you count stupid trick jumps you can do in the open world, which I don't. It feels wasted and pointless. Why couldn't we get a 3D-ish map like in Skyrim where I can pick my destination for the next level? Wouldn't that save a huge amount of development time and money? With that time and money, couldn't the game be more fleshed out in other departments?
Then there is the racing and the minigames. Spoiler alert: they both suck. The racing plays a third of the main game and is incredibly repetitive and boring as a direct result. The minigames are a collection of unfair, chance-based games that you can use to grind money. They are not fair or engaging, and simply put not fun.
I could go on and on about RAGE but I think I mapped out the things I really wanted to say. Otherwise this would also get too long. So in short: what's good? The characters, the levels, the graphics, the shooting, and the animation.
What's bad? The story, the plot holes, the open world, the racing and the pointless minigames.