Platform: PS3
Price: 10 Eur
Play time: 16 hours
Difficulty: Nightmare
Where do I even begin ? Rage is a game, that is complicated to review. Not because of the game itself, but the overall feeling it gave me while playing it, is difficult to describe.
To me, it felt uncomplete, the story feels like a straight up action movie, but without the character development and strong backstory. Characters are just there to give you a simple one-note quests, nothing more. After set of quests done for them, they just go away, never mentioned again. At least that’s how I felt after going through the storyline. I felt lot of potential for a great story, but the game just won’t go that length. Explain Bandit gangs more, in later half of in the story, you meet a Bandit gang called the Gearheads, you don’t know anything about them, just that they scream “Sookah” at you and swear all the time in Russian. They were rather empty pointless stereotypes just for you to kill.
Why is it hard to review ?
I was thinking about that all the time, what Rage tried to be. A FPS mixing Bioshock and Borderlands or a modern Doom sequel and for sure the latter it is not. The deeper I think about it, Rage feels like Borderlands, a tech demo, where everything was
being tested. Maybe a new graphics engine, where RAM is used more than vRAM.
Story
Earth suffers massive blows from asteroids and governments collect hundreds of people into Arks and send them into outer space. You, the lone Ark survivor, wake up in one on Earth and you are saved from a Bandit attacker. You are caught between 2 sides in conflict, on one side there is The Authority, who wants to use the Ark people to build a dictatorial society. There is The Resistance who want to use them for greater good. Story itself is pretty basic and this is the point, where I might start rambling again.
All of the characters have only one-note:
“I helped you, go kill some bandits for me.” “Ow, you want that medicine, go kill those for me.” You start to notice a pattern here.
Oh my god, the ending, about that later.
Gameplay
Where the story suffers, gameplay wins. Rage is a typical FPS shooter, I don’t typically play a lot FPS games , but Rage did it for me. Gunplay was fast and there were times I felt on the edge of my seat. But not for long.
"Big Mutant build up was pretty good, slowly showing him in the background"
Enemy types are your standard flock of FPS enemies including Mutants and Super Mutants, who offered some good moments. Mutants are agile and use parkour to move towards you. Bandits are tough guys when in a group, they want to flank you as well. I had moments, when only one Bandit was left, he decided to charge in my direction, guns blazing.
Rage offers also standard set of weapons , but the Wingstick I started using more often later in the game, and they are useful for knocking out large Mutants. You can also craft ammunation, wingsticks, medicine. grenades, EMP grenades, Sentry Bot. Sentry Bot became a personal favorite of mine, you can send 2 of them into the battlefield.
Buggy is your main vechicle for exploring the Wasteland, taking out some Bandit cars for bounty and discover sewer hatches, where you can kill mutants. You can take part in Racing events to collect Certificates to improve your ride with Engine, Boost, Weapons etc.
What killed Rage for me?
Overall location repetition and tiresome in the long run. You travel to the same location 2-3 times for quests, even fetch quests equal killing lots of people, what started killing the experience for me. At first, I had difficult time getting in to the game, but once you get to the first city, things started looking better and it had it’s fun moments.
When I got to the second part of the Wasteland, I felt tired and you don’t even spend that much time in the second part. I completed the main game in 16 hours and I spent only 4 hours in the second act.
I was playing the game for nearly 12 hours at that time and shooting simply became tiresome because the story itself didn’t offer strong motivation to cover up repetitive shooting.
The ending part of it is another story, you travel to the capital of the Authority and the mission is just a shooting gallery with flipping switches and than you press the final console, game just STOPS !!! all of the Arks start emerging, game over. There should have been at least 2 more missions because all of the opponents weren’t dead. Maybe these people joined the bad guys instead of the good. I thought all the time, who is the Authority’s boss, they mentioned a Colonel, who timed some Arks to open earlier to take control, but nothing more.
Pros and Cons
Pros
Simple shooting with good first impressions, but later in 2nd half it killed me !
Selection of weapons (Pistol, Assault Rifle, Big Fucking Gun etc.)
Engineering menu was easy to understand
Quick access weapon/inventory takes some time getting used, but works overall
Good Visuals
Cons
Poor story and character build up
Mission structure overall is pretty weak, you don’t have much side stuff here
Side Quests should be different from main ones, I even met a quest that was 100%
duplicate of one main quest
Really, really poor ending
Conclusion
In conclusion, I would recommend Rage for a playthrough (I even met some players still playing the co-op) but purely for the joy of shooting and messing about. Overall, it’s not a BAD Game, it had a lot of potential, but fell into the trap of a high budget shooter, that outweighs the storyline itself. Story was just a shadow of the tiresome shooting action. I bought the game for my PS3 for 10 Eur and for that price it has plenty on the gameplay side, but not on the story.
I also tried Wasteland Tales with a another player and it’s just Horde Mode with some minimalist objectives. It had a difficulty spike, but overall won’t add to the overall experience.
After writing this review I didn’t have any intentions on returning to a 2nd play through, but I’m a Trophy collector too and have to return to someday, but not right now.
"Potential to be something more, but didn’t take enough risks"