Reviews November 10, 2011
Rage
Reviewed by: Bryant Crawley
System: Xbox 360 (Also on PS3, and PC)
Genre: FPS
Rated: M
Players: 1 (2-4 Online)
Cost: $59.99
Release Date: 10/10/2011
Developer: id Software
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
When John Carmack’s name is attached to a title, as a gamer and journalist, I have a tendency to listen. The man has only established one of the most important video game companies in the world and has worked on games that shaped the industry we have now. Had it not been for 1992’s Wolfenstien 3D and 1993′s Doom, the First Person Shooter genre might have been shaped very differently. And who knows, maybe we wouldn’t even have the FPS genre till much later. When Rage was officially announced in 2007, I could not wait to get my hands on the title. It seems that every piece of news covering the game would only make me anticipate the title more and more. id Software’s newest engine, id Tech 5 would be powering the game and you could tell from the trailers that the game looked simply beautiful; truly a milestone over id Tech 4 (the Doom 3 engine) which powers Brink and the upcoming Prey 2. The question is, does Rage stand on its own merit, or does it stand simply because of the famous names behind it?
id Software’s hodgepodge of ideas is never more evident than in the game’s opening, with Earth is devastated by asteroid Apophis in 2029. More than a century later, your voiceless, opinion-free cipher awakens inside his Ark, only to find the world outside inhospitable thanks to an abundance of mutants and whisperings about the shadowy “Authority”. Guess what? They’re the real bad guys, if you couldn’t already tell from their not-at-all-ominous name.
Rescued by John Goodman’s character, Dan Hagar, you’re introduced to the three things you need to survive: guns, cars, and an eye for scavenging. Comparisons to Fallout don’t really do either game any favors: Rage plays more like a Borderlands light. You travel between hub locations to take on quests, selling crap and buying bits, indulging in a handful of mini-games to boost your cash, before driving around the surprisingly compact roadways to go from combat dungeon to combat dungeon.
Only a few minutes into the game, fresh from your rescue, you get your first taste of id’s astounding gunplay. Sent to slaughter a clan hideout by Hagar, you enter the deep, richly detailed lair to the game’s signature 60 frames-per-second silky smooth performance. The gorgeous design isn’t just in the artwork and crafting of the environment, it’s in the hideous enemies too. Their gnarled, abused forms don’t just hide behind cover or charge at you: they roll around, stagger humanly under fire and keep themselves moving acrobatically to make things so much tougher for you.
Mutants and melee-focused enemies are the best example of just how smartly the AI works. They veer around your aim, never blindly rushing you but rolling and jumping away, forcing you to backpedal and strafe your way towards clear shots. With the game’s performance utterly flawless on consoles, enemy onslaughts are breathtakingly fierce and never simple run-and-gun affairs. They’re mad scrambles, enlivened by the astounding reactive animations and your homebrew utilities.
Like any good RPG, you spend as much time scavenging the environment as you do peppering it with bullets. When you’re not picking up ammo, collectable art cards for the Magic-like card game or vendor trash, you’re picking up craft able scrap. Over time you gain access to a small library of items to help you, from sentry bots, turrets and RC car bombs, to explosive crossbow bolts, EMP grenades and bandages (for those times ducking behind cover doesn’t heal you quickly enough). Deploying your tools in battle becomes an integral part of the action, giving you more firepower, while utilizing alternative ammos becomes a must when dealing with heavily-armed units.
In its finest moments, the action reminds you why id was once the master of the FPS. They still may not be up to much when it comes to storytelling and characterization, but they can make you dance across a battlefield. Nothing is as beautiful a sight as spreading clan blood across a trashed hospital, seeing a wing stick lop off a mutant head in an abandoned underground station, or desperately fighting off hordes in a spike-trap room for the entertainment of the masses on Mutant Bash TV. It reminds you why everyone who moaned about the flashlight switching in Doom 3 was a spineless coward, and how much better Rage plays without monster closets.
But then you leave the action-oriented dungeons, get in your combat buggy and drive back to town. You don’t need to worry about getting lost, because the paths are so short and tight you won’t be taking a wrong turn any time soon. Enemy vehicles spawn at random in certain areas, introducing you to Rage’s weakest action mechanic: car combat. The vehicles themselves have robust enough handling and can be upgraded with race winnings, but the fighting is about stale lock-on rockets, bullets and eventually pulse cannon face-offs, with a side-order of shop-bought one-use defensive and offensive items. While not broken, the vehicular combat lacks any spark of invention or excitement, and quickly becomes a tiring chore as you navigate what turns out to be a very small wasteland. Thankfully very little of the core campaign revolves around actual race events, as the optional races in the two main hub locations are particularly drab affairs. Racing environments are cribbed straight from the world map, and cut up into circuits and opened up for rally events, but the sole interesting moment is finding a huge ramp as part of one circuit. The races add to the overall diversity, but Rage shows that variety is not always the spice of life.
The further into Rage you get, the narrowness of its focus begins to show. As intricately detailed and jaw-dropping as its environments look – particularly the labyrinthine neon hell of Subway City – the broken world outside looks smaller and more thoughtless. Side quests are limited to the odd static shooting events, a couple of speed delivery tasks and the ‘Sewers’ dungeon DLC included in all new copies, but all are ridiculously short-lived blasts and in the second half of the game they dry up. Even the more substantial side-quests just send you back to story dungeons, some even giving you the same objective as last time, only making you take a different path.
It’s not like the questing really does anything for you. With no leveling system or upgrading beyond the odd schematic to purchase or a few weapon add-ons, it’s hard not to realize that the only purpose of deviating from the storyline is just grinding out your time with busywork. This is nothing new for RPGs, but at least most of them have character and give you a purpose to adventure on. Rage doesn’t give you any incentive bar money and the hope of finding something bigger and better that never comes along. The only activity with any kind of depth is the collectable card game, where you battle decks of characters and items against each other in surprisingly engrossing fights.
Despite how good the combat is, id has taken the utterly bizarre choice to not create first-person competitive multiplayer. There’s two-player co-op, either locally or online, in the form of Legends of the Wasteland action dungeons. The other option features four-player action that consists of car combat arenas and modes. Although tweaked slightly to be more action- and power-up-oriented than car combat within the campaign, compared to the prospect of FPS action among the gloriously detail of repurposed dungeons, it’s a bit like finding out on Christmas Eve that tomorrow’s been replaced by a Bank Holiday, and all the presents have to go back and the decorations need to come down.
No matter how beautiful the game looks or how much fun it is blasting mutants into chunks with the shotgun’s pop rocket grenades or slicing through Authority armor, Rage’s hollow depth spoils the rest of the package. As much as it tries to bring more to the first-person shooter than just corridor turkey-shoots, it plays like the worst counter-point to Doom 3′s linearity: it’s open because it feels it has to be, but it’s not as expansive as it needs to be or as closed as it could have been to be perfectly formed. The game lives in a limbo, unable to be a sprawling masterpiece or a tightly knit tour-de-force. The paper-thin storyline belies the sheer amount of artistic detail lavished on the game world, and more than anything it begs to have been explored deeper than it has been. Weighing in between ten and 15 hours with all side-missions, mini-games and races mastered, Rage’s depth really is as skin-deep as its beauty: look around the environment quickly enough and you’ll see the mega-texture streaming falling over itself as it tries to paper over the emptiness.
So in the end you ask yourself, “How will Rage stand out in a crowded FPS genre?” My answer to you is that it really won’t and that’s just heartbreaking to me. As someone who really was looking forward to this game for years, the more I played it the more average I thought the game came across. It never did anything horrible or bad even but it never did anything superior to other games in the genre. It sort of just stayed in its box and never adventured out. Overall, Rage is a good game but as long as the game took to make and coming from id software, it felt like it could have been much, much more and that my friends, is the disappointment of Rage.
Game Play: 7
Just a standard FPS. Nothing to really set it apart from other games.
Graphics: 9
I will say its one of the prettiest Xbox 360 titles around.
Sound: 8
Voice acting is well done but the overall soundtrack will leave you sort of indifferent, except for a couple key moments.
What’s New: 3
Besides being a new id IP, it’s nothing really new to the genre.
Replay Value: 7
The single player game can last anywhere between 8-12 Hours and there is some sort of multiplayer but it probably won’t keep you coming back for more with other FPS coming out on the horizon.
Final Score:
6.8