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.

In short ... not quite.

Here follows a fairly personal and slightly rambling experience of RAGE, warts, spoilers and all.

I must admit to being a bit of a Cormack / iD fan. I remember sitting in front of my mate's 286, sporting a couple of megs of extended (or was it expanded?) RAM, taking it in turns to blast our way through Wolfenstein 3d. We'd jump at every door clunk, digitised sound had only just made its way to the PC and my mate had only recently spend a couple of hundred quid on the original Sound Blaster. I remember also the midi-synthesised soundtrack to Space Quest 4, feeding 5.25" floppy after 5.25" floppy into a drive then waiting patiently for an hour while 5Mb of game files decompressed to be able to shoot through space at 5fps in Wing Commander. My mate actually paying for an add-on pack for a couple of minutes of hissy lisping speech: "Without him, the Terrans cannot stand against us". I digress.

A few years later we'd gone through massive summer night cake and ice-cream DOOM bonanzas, the all-night Quake-and-all-mission-packs in co-op mode (after spending most of the day fiddling with BNC cables, IPX protocols, and shelling out for that Diamond Monster 3D card), and the path was paved for Unreal Tournament, Blood, Quake III Arena, all the usual suspects.

But all that was, what, ten years ago now? And what have we had in the mean-time? Well the advent of cheap, fast broadband for all has pretty much kicked the classic idea of FPS aside in favour of deathmatch, team-play, massively multiplayer online RPGs, mass-participation console games (I'd like to see your average XBox user trying to figure out 10Base2 termination before playing Call of Duty 58). Every game became focussed on the multiplayer experience, the idea of tacking a deathmatch mode onto the single-player maps just no longer cut it. Games got serious. Things got slick. And it seems to me that in most cases something intangible got lost along the way.

Where are we now with games? The steamroller of games-pushing-hardware has brought us graphics cards capable of creating the most immensely realistic and believable worlds. Far Cry and Crysis have pushed that envelope. They're intense, involving games. But I guess the difference now is that whereas in the day of Wolfenstein, 3d was a revolution, games like Crysis feels more like evolution, and it's almost as though the more effort hardware and software developers make to create the ultimate rendered reality, the less and less games feel like, well, games!

Cormack has, I think, done the right thing with RAGE. It's a step backwards in many ways, a step away from the technology of the game, from rendering more and more polygons, to looking at what makes a game involving and fun. There are so many elements to RAGE that work so well. The traditional FPS experience is extremely well crafted, really involving firefights at times and some of the level design is top banana. The driving experience is bonkers, arcade stuff.

The in-game mini-games for instance are almost an in-joke and remind me of such inspired genius as the "Monolith Burger" shift in Space Quest 4. Only knifey knifey drove me briefly mad and the top-trump like card game, well I didn't get that at all.

So why isn't it, in my mind, the hit it could have been?

Well... the trouble is it doesn't all quite hang together. I'm all for an open gameplay experience, but this isn't quite it. It feels as though a lot of different teams have worked on different elements of the game, and made each one really quite good, but no-one's really taken the time to figure how the player actually gets through it.

This is a problem.

I've just finished the game, and I'm left with the feeling that there are huge chunks I've missed out on. For example I got the "sewers" mission add-on as part of the anarchy pack, and early on in the game discovered the entrance to the sewer, but with dire warnings not to go in unless fully tooled up. So I decided to wait a bit then go back later on with more weapons. Only trouble is I never did, for two reasons - firstly the whole "mission" system really encourages you to get on with the missions rather than explore. Hanging around in the wasteland is difficult until later in the game when you have a good enough vehicle and ammo to survive, so you tend to run from mission to mission. Secondly without any real map of the wasteland I don't actually know how to get there, the map system is like a tiny gps screen that guides you to objectives but doesn't really give you an overview. And the sewer mission is never an objective.

The races I found very variable - the straight-up races are fairly easy, the rally races seemed pretty much impossible by comparison (gave up after 5 attempts coming last every time and no clue how to do better), the trouble is you can't really progress unless you complete all of them and there's no real motivation to do it since you only need to do a couple to win cars to complete the missions.

The "job board" missions seemed quite good at first and I guess were involving because you need the cash, but the latter ones seemed to get easier and easier and as you get more tooled up the prizes less exciting.

The main missions also seemed to me to get easier and easier, I was playing on hard but toward the end the formula was too simple - wingstick, shotgun or rifle for mutants, sniper / dynamite bolt for big stuff. Job done.

The control system is a bit cumbersome, particularly if you're one of those weirdoes like me who never got the hang of wsad. I play numeric pad and customise around those keys which normally works fine .. but in RAGE the secondary item selection is a nightmare as you need 4 keys to customise (normally F1-4). I discovered that caps-lock cycles through items, but you can't customise that key through the menus! The saving grace is that the build screen (Tab) pauses the game so you can stop, sort out your items, build, set up weapon assignments then carry on, but it disturbs the flow of the game. I guess it's tricky when you have SO many items you can use.

Which brings me to my next gripe ... even on hard most of the items are unnecessary. The biggest armoured baddies take 3 or 4 dynamite bolts to take down, and it's much quicker to just do that than to mess around setting up turrets or bomb cars etc. I never found a use for the RC cars outside of the single mission you need them for - they're no good against enemies as they get shot too quickly, and I didn't once find another secret-looking area I thought "I know, an RC car will get me in there". Well actually I did spot one but it turned out it wasn't - the car wouldn't fit under.

I didn't really use the sentry bots either after about half-way - they're friendly little things but they get shot too quickly and they also get in the way when you're trying to move about. Plus you can't deploy them when you're tight against a wall (which is normally when you really need one), so again it's easier to just shoot the bad guys than faff around.

I never used the magic healing potion, or the magic authority enhancer.

I never used the mind-control bolts after the first time I tried one and got shot up while I walked my zombie authority guard a couple of steps before he got shot to pieces too.

I never used the pulse cannon. Not even a test fire.

I never, sin of sins, used the BFG. I had 5 rounds ready for that final monster.

In fact I finished the game with all of these things in my inventory, waiting for the ultimate end-of-level baddie, the one really really tough guy that had been hinted at, the ultimate oh-my-god-this-is-going-to-take-100-goes-to-complete level. But the end credits rolled and still nothing that a couple of shotgun blasts or dynamite bolts couldn't take out.

Oh, and you can't skip the end credits either. You. Must. Sit. Through. Three. Minutes. Of. Mandatory. Music. We. Paid. For.

Maybe it's my fault. Maybe I should have made the effort to explore more. I don't know. I even found toward the end that you could return to Wellspring on the floaty plane thing, but I'm not sure why you would since you just get given more and more missions in the subway bit.

Some level design poor, level re-use a bit hit and miss resulting in some frustrating running around an empty building having finished the mission and killed everything trying to find the way out scenarios. But in a way perhaps that's a tribute to the way things used to be in DOOM and Quake, no hand-holding mission radar to light the way, figure it out for yourself.

I think, overall, a lot of opportunities have been missed which could have tied the game together in simple but subtle ways. All those optional frustrating bits (like the mail delivery race thing) could have been tied into the mission structure somehow, I'm sure of it. It just seems for me that there's almost two games in here fighting to be played - a straight-through FPS experience and a wonderful eclectic out-of-the box collection of oddities, but perhaps the straight-through game draws you on too fast to really get the most out of the rest of it.

Ultimately though, it's still a great game, and it's fantastic to see single-player gaming perhaps back to its roots a little.

excellent game , very very atmospheric , good gameplay , varied things to do , cool weapons and upgrades , buggy racing , man the list goes on , only disappointment really is that is wasnt long enough , but replay it on a harder level and it does just great :)