Review - RAGE

RAGE

At a glance

Pros:  Excellent graphics, smart AI and an intriguing setting.

Cons: Weak story line and repetitive levels.

Final Judgement:  Worthy of a recommendation.  The fun combination of racing, FPS killer AI and graphics make the game a great addition to the ID line up.

www.rage.com

Available for: PS3, XBOX, PC


Once upon a time, there was a being known only as “The Carmack” who on May 5^th, of the year 1992 turned his gaze upon the world.  Seeing a deep longing and emptiness in mankind, The Carmack descended from his golden throne, reached out to the unwashed masses and gave us the promethean fire known as Wolfenstein 3D.  In a big bang-esqe explosion of robo-hitler killing glory, the First Person Shooter genre was born.  Ever since then we’ve been shooting, stabbing and blowing up NPC’s and each other with wild abandon.

Nineteen years or so later; (God has it been 19 years? Damnit I feel old now) The Carmack, being the crazy rocket man that he is, has blasted off into the sky to rain down on us from on high unbridled violence against your fellow man… and things that used to be men.  Because, when the world is trying to recover from getting hit by an asteroid, it needs a mute hero who shoots first and asks questions… never.

Wow, I should pitch that line to Segal.

RAGE is the newest offering from The Carmack and ID Software and touted as the next evolution in FPS gaming. A game that I, for what ever reason, knew almost nothing about prior to purchasing.  Rage combines a post-apocalyptic Fallout like world with Wolfenstein style RPG mission selections and racing, can you ask for more? I submit that you cannot. 

Let’s have a look at the plot:

First check out this youtube video of the intro sequence, don’t worry I’ll wait…

Epic, no? Well it gets better.  Did you get a good look at the asteroid in the video? The one that drops in and fucks over everyone’s day, like an uninvited in-law? That is Apophis.  Well actually it’s 99942 Apophis, a very real Asteroid which was discovered in December of 2004. After our scientists discovered it and gave it the most sinister name possible, they took a moment to have a good look at it and then realized that it was getting bigger and then pooped themselves as objects appear to get bigger when they are coming towards you… and Apophis was coming towards us… directly towards us. Thus Bruce Willis was put on standby and people in the know began to count down to Friday, April 13th, 2029 (yup Friday the 13^th) when Apophis would stop by for dinner.  As it got a bit closer however the eggheads decided to check their math and noticed that they forgot to carry a 2 and thus Apophis would not be buying us a hat, just passing by close enough to give the menacing glare of a lifetime.  So, good news, we aren’t all forked well that is until April 13^th 2036,  when Apophis comes back around, and then  it carries a 1 in 250,000 chance of booting the planet in the nuts.

"AHH! DUDE! FUCK! WHAT THE HE-"

Which would be awkward.

Now before you all start panicking and realize that you should be out living your lives and not wasting time with my blather about games, that could potentially be atomized in twenty five or so years, take a deep Zen breath and listen to the Redcoat… The impact will only kill some of us, ten million or so, and we won’t end up with an impact winter as the strike will only equal 510 megatons. That’s only like, ten or so times greater than the biggest hydrogen bomb ever exploded. See? Nothing to worry about, don’t you feel better now?

Soon.

So anyway, in RAGE the date is April 13^th, 2135; one hundred and six years after Apophis apparently shit all over us in 2029. You awake in your pod,  since you and your friends didn’t get the extended warranty or something, you are the only bro in the Pod still breathing. You emerge from your ark into the hot and dusty wasteland that used to be, what I can only imagine, prime real estate next to a big city.  For a few moments you stumble around before being promptly and unexpectedly attacked by Raiders. (The sudden and unexpected attack of these hombres damn near made me wet myself.) Just as it looks like RAGE is about to be the shortest campaign ever, a good Samaritan by the name of Dan Hagar, rescues you. Dan then takes you back to his pad, where I assumed he would be filling you in on what everyone had been up to while you were chill-ax’in beneath the planet surface, teamsters style.

"Yous goes ons aheads and starts rebuid'in... I'lls catch up."

I was wrong.

While Dan is driving through the wastes he talks about stuff, mentions Bandits and a sinister group known as The Authority.  He tells you that there is no time to answer your questions at that moment but he never elaborates further, and you don’t ask. In fact you never say anything. Dan basically says “listen bucko, go kill everyone in that bandit camp with this hear pistol. No survivors, no prisoners.” You just nod stoically and go about murdering everything that moves. No questions asked.  No “Why should I?” No “how do I know that they aren’t the good guys and you’re the bandits?” You just give a silent ’10-4, good buddy’ and then start a rolling wave of death and blood.

And that more or less is the extent of the setup for why you do what you do.

Now I pieced together, from the way people talk to you, that you likely have amnesia. You don’t appear to remember your life before Apophis, what your role was supposed to be in the Atlas Project, or why your blood has been replaced by what appears to be Tang.  There are two separate occasions in the game where people say “you have questions, I have no time for answers right now” even when things are totally stable and it appears as though there is all the time in the world to explain shit. They just point, you kill, and everyone is all right with that.

"Welcome to town, stranger! Feel like murder'in the bejesus outta a hundred or so people for me?"

I don’t really hold the “strong silent hero” bit against RAGE, after all there are plenty of great games that have silent protagonists.  There are many reasons game developers do this.  For some it’s so that players can better imagine themselves as the main characters.  Other developers don’t want shatter peoples image of an established character by giving it a voice that some might find inappropriate.  In most situations a silent protagonist is not a big deal.  However, in RAGE the character is thrown into a world populated by mutants and scraps of humanity. It has a blasted, alien landscape full of ruins and asteroid fragments. The world is so richly detailed and fascinating that, as a player, I want to know more about it. RAGE never gives you the option of looking a bit deeper.  If they won’t let you talk to the characters in the game to learn more about the world, then include books, items or documents that can be located throughout the world that will teach you more about what’s happening.  RAGE doesn’t have these things and as the storyline continued I found myself wishing more and more that it did.

"Whats that? You want to know more about my cleft lip and awesome chest tattoo? Well, too bad."

My main complaint with RAGE, perhaps my only real complaint, is the story.  The game makes you repeat almost every level that it has, making you either navigate through the environment backwards or complete it a second time fighting a different faction for no real good reason.  Frankly speaking…it sucks. I don’t mind if in a game they make me play the same level twice but there should be a good plot driven reason to do so. In any case, level duplicates should, like exclamation marks in writing, be used sparingly and not as a way to pad play time.

What’s more, the second half of the story seems rushed and the plot is weak. The game jumps from inconsequential run around quests to end game missions with almost no lead up, warning, or rising action. RAGE also sets up a villain that you never see, introduces a conspiracy that you never do anything about and has a final mission which is laughably easy.

Id Software is either setting up for a real ass kicker of a sequel, in which they’re going to flesh out a lot of RAGE’s themes, or they spent all their time envisioning the world and creating a gucci engine to render it, and then just mailed in the plot, because they were sleepy from all the other hard work they had done.

Speaking of the Engine, the ID Tech 5 engine, which The Carmack and his crew developed in house for this game is as I said pretty damn gucci. The sky is amazingly rendered, the environments are rich and the characters look great.

Ghost clan bandits, gett'in all up in yo' grill.

The only criticism of the engines performance is a slight delay in the rendering of high definition textures. On the Xbox version of the game I found, when you spun your character around quickly, the game would lag in the rendering of high def textures momentarily.  This would result in you seeing the world half in high def and half in blurry low def textures.  This issue was mitigated by installing the game on to the Xbox’s hard drive, which the game strongly recommends, but the lag was still noticeable.

While it didn’t really detract heavily from my enjoyment of the game play or affect the performance of the game, it was distracting. I’ve looked around the net and found that this isn’t an issue specifically to Xbox either, it affects all platforms and ID is working on driver tweaks for the PC. That being said, I don’t know if that means the issue will ever be fully addressed on Xbox or PS3.

The game play of RAGE is really where it’s at. The game is basically separated into two camps: FPS and racing.  For half the game it takes your standard shooter and elaborates on what makes shooters great. The AI for the enemies is excellent.  During the game the enemies try to flush you out with grenades, fall back when you start putting on the pressure, and then react appropriately to various threats and injuries.

I can't think of a snappy caption for this screen capture, but its looks good... no?

For example, if you throw a bladed boomerang called a “Wingstick” the bandits will yell a warning to each other and then duck and cover in an attempt to avoid the spinning death.  If you try shoot a melee oriented enemy they’ll dodge, dip, dive, duck and dodge to avoid your fire.  The enemy will even use terrain such as tables and walls to jump, run up and launch off of to get up close and personal to you. It’s cool, it’s exciting and it makes you frantically waste a lot of ammo.

Thankfully not every enemy in RAGE knows the five d's.

For the other half of the time, you race around the wastelands all Mad Max style in your tricked out whip of a wasteland ride. This is also for the most part, a lot of fun and very well done. Early on in the game you get access to a Dune buggy which you can shortly thereafter start upgrading with weapons and parts to give it a longer boost, better turning, faster top speed and many other cool features. You buy said upgrades by participating in races which are accessed through towns. The races have various conditions for winning including time trials, being the first across the finish line or collecting the most flags. The driving controls are intuitive and tight. The racing is so good in fact that RAGE could have been, with a bit more work, a standalone racing game.

When in doubt... ramp that shit.

To sum it up, I enjoyed RAGE and would definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a good shooter / adventure game to play. The world is interesting and the gameplay is fun. Even with the texture issues the game looks great and I look forward to ID further developing this particular piece of IP.  I just hope they put a bit more into the story and characters next time or at least give us a tangible motivation for the next mass of soon to be corpses they turn us loose on.