RAGE

Wargames. Wargames never change.

Welcome to the new post-apocalyptia. Our hero emerges into the world after been cocooned into the underground shelter known as the Vault - no, strike that: the Ark, the Ark! The year is 2029 and, following a near-extinction event (namely, the asteroid Apophis spiraling down Earth's gravity well) humanity has pealed back the last vestiges of our civilized facade. Small surviving communities fight to the death for the small pockets of land, shelter and water. They fight off brutal bandits, persistent mutants and each other.

SHOOT. LOOT. BARTER. UPGRADE. REPEAT UNTIL SATISFIED.
RAGE is a RolePlaying Shooter (RPS), although it plays much more like an FPS than an RPG. There is no leveling up and you have no real inventory. On the other hand, you get missions (apparently no one strained any creativity muscle to think those up), you keep what you kill, you sell the junk you do not need and upgrade whenever you can. There are schematics (buy them whenever you find them) that allow you to MacGyver gadgets and customized weapons out of found components.
The characters you meet are quirky and interesting whereas your enemies will react to your killing shot (strangely though, not to all the previous ones!).
All in all, the game is fun to play and although its replayability is not that high, it is a game well worth of your attention.

AS NEO HAS REPEATEDLY EXPLAINED, WE WILL NEED GUNS
And by "guns" I doubt he meant...WingSticks. These are what you'd get if you were to cross a boomerang with a Ninja-star: they may look good in action but I found them to be far less satisfying than a good shotgun. Do not be disheartened though. Every weapon is extremely beautifully designed and they come with up to four different type of ammo.
In Bioshock one could complete the entire game by first zapping the enemies and then finishing them off with the wrench. In RAGE you can do the same with electric ammo followed by some WingSticks. And, unlike BioShock, ammo is plentiful in RAGE.

IT'S A BEAUTIFUL WASTELAND OUT THERE (IF YOU CAN SEE IT)
I was one of the lucky ones because my gaming PC has a single nVidia video card and I am running in a 32bit WinXP environment. ATI cards, SLi stacks and 64bit systems are out of luck: the developer did not care enough to optimize the game for them! Hence the number of gamers complaining about this.
So, when they work, the graphics are gorgeous. More artistic than realistic and with great light/shadow transitions. Ever since the original Unreal I always notice the skies of a game and RAGE has beautiful cumulus and stratus clouds, through which the Sun scorches the Wastelands.
Crack open a cold bottle of Kola-Kong, sit back and enjoy. (No, you do not need to keep the cap. Do I need to keep reminding you that this is not Fallout 3!).

HAVE BUGGY WILL TRAVEL. THE SLOW SHALL DIE.
After so many hours raking Pandora for that perfect Chimera pistol, it was inevitable that once I slipped into yet another sand buggy and start roaming desert vistas I would think of Borderlands. Buggies here are not only a means to travel but they can also be raced around tracks.
They are a good addition, the are fun to handle and they offer a nicely done racing component to a shooter game.

CAN YOU STOMACH THIS NEW WORLD?
The game comes with surprisingly modest hardware requirements for the eye candy it is. The biggest problem is the HDD space - it will hog ...25GB! For a game that is far from being...100-hours long that is on the excessive side. I had to uninstall no less than 4 games in order to fit this on my primary HDD.
Now, the rig I am running RAGE is a two years old Intel Core i7, with 3GB of RAM, nVidia 480GTX (updated to driver 280.26) on a MSI Eclipse running WinXP (SP3) - and it plays at a decent framerate but not free of frequent rendering and the occasional tearing. And this is where the game looses its first star: it is not finished.
Consoles are sold at cost and the companies make a profit by pricing console games higher. PC games are different. No one...subsidies our PC systems. So, if you are going to ask for [] quid !) for a PC game, it better be PC-optimized and polished to a shine. And when you think you are done, polish it some more.
Otherwise what exactly are you selling, the...promise of someday been able to play the game I pay at such a price?

FAST! SHOOT THE VALVE THAT CONTROLS THE STEAM.
Yes, RAGE comes with mandatory STEAM tie-in. This means two things. First, for the love of God, if you bought the game retail, activate, then kill the STEAM download, delete the local content that managed to slip through and finally reinstall from your disks. Do you really want to wait for 21.6GB to download?
Secondly, this means the []-quid-game is not yours to keep. You can play with it but you have to leave it in STEAM's playroom when done. You cannot resell it if you so decide and you cannot gift it if you get bored with it. I take a full star off for such DRM schemes; however, if this is not important to you, feel free to adjust my rating accordingly.

A FINAL BULLET.
Although not that original, RAGE incorporates a number of RPS ideas with gusto and style. Unfortunately, the game has not been polished yet, a number of graphical glitches persist even for nVidia systems. Game publishers should learn the value of respecting both their product and their paying customers.

My advice is to wait until the price matches the product.

It would be a good game if after the third time you try to play it, it would launch onto your desktop and not stay firmly stuck in the toolbar and no matter what you do it will not launch properly.
My advice is buy Farcry 2, its more or less the same type of gaming.

When Rage first came out most of the anger it evoked was for the graphical bugs that plagued the PC version (my own included).

I am pleased to say subsequent patches seem to have sorted that and you should get a bug free experience if you play it now.

The game itself is simple and fun. It is a very good shooter from the makers of Doom.

It may look like Fallout 3 in style, but it is closer to it's 'Doom' roots. Missions are all pretty much 'go there and kill everything you meet' affairs, through a series of corridors and rooms.

It lost 1 star from me for it's very abrupt ending that leaves the plot just hanging in the air. I'm guessing that they are planning a Rage 2.

If so I will happily consider picking it up