So I got Rage and a bunch of other games for cheap during a cyber monday deal from toysrus.com. I paid 9 bucks for rage. Some of my friends were b*tching and moaning at me for getting it because they really disliked it. I knew it had problems, but I was too curious to try it since ID made it.

After playing it about 3 or 4 hours, it feels like Rage could have been a great game, but was rushed out and the games length was padded out with boring pointless things.

The game tries to do many things imo. It has typical linear first person shooting level which are a lot of fun. The weapons are fun to use, the enemies ai is pretty smart as they will jump around, use cover well, and will often rush at you. The problem with the game is that these shooting levels are so infrequent in the game. Rage consists of lots of pointless driving in a vehicle from town to town. You leave one town, drive for a few minutes to another, talk to a guy, drive back to the other town, drive to a quick fetch mission, drive back to a town, drive to the other town..... After about 30 minutes of doing that boring crap you finally might get lucky and get to do a linear style first person shooter level for about 15 minutes. The vehicle sections are so pointless. You drive straight back and forth between towns and there is no real open world. You pretty much drive in a straight line. There are random enemies you encounter, but there is no point to fight them, as your vehicle's ammo is depletable and you will have rebuy it. It makes more sense just to drive fast and avoid the enemies. So you just drive pointlessly between every mission in a straight line for no good reason.

The pointless driving back and forth between towns might be more bearable if the game wasnt riddled with frequent very long loading screens. Every time you leave a town there is a loading screen, once you reach another town there is a loading screen. If you enter any other area in the game there is another loading screen. It really gets annoying after awhile. The game feels as if you spend about half the time driving pointelssly between areas or waiting on loading screens.

Another problem is that the textures in this game never ever fully load. It's the weirdest thing I've ever seen in a game. The textures take 10 seconds to load in front of you, but they never stay loaded forever. The textures only load in your direct field of view, but have to reload every time you turn away and turn back. Its like you have tunnel vision and textures only load where you can see, but it's only temporary. You can even see the textures loading every time when you look down the sights of your gun. It's really really distracting. I guess though it better that they did this than making the frame rate really crappy. The game does run pretty smoothly, and enemy animations looks really good.

I was haing fun with Rage at first since it started off with typical first person shooting action, but then the majority of the time in the game turned into fetch quests, and pointless traveling back and forth every few minutes. I think the game would have been a lot better if they simly made it linear first person shooter. They should have just scrapped the driving sections and the little towns where you can talk to people. ID is know for making linear shooters and I think they should have just stuck with that formula.

I guess one good thing about the game is that John Goodman does some voiceacting in it. After about a hour or so of gameplay though you don't hear from him anymore. Also, there is a doom style space marine bobblehead on the dashboard of John Goodman's characters car in the opening cut scene which was cool heh. Another stupid cool thing about the game is when you crash on an atv into a wall or something. Your body launches into the air while you hear a hilarious scream and watch the ragdoll physics as your body bounces around the environment.