Rage review

The irony of Bethesda’s acquisition of id is that it has made Rage and Fallout cousins when, in all honesty, it’s hard to imagine them getting along. There’s a resemblance, certainly – you can see it in the junkyard aesthetic of the rickety shanty towns that the inhabitants of both wastelands have thrown together, you can hear it in the snarls of the mutated monsters lurking in the hideouts beneath both game’s surfaces, and you can feel it in the similarly black-humoured approach to the end of civilisation. But the likeness only goes skin deep. Where Fallout is freeform, Rage is focused; where Fallout’s execution is shonky, Rage is technically flawless; and where Fallout is abstract and statistical, Rage is upfront and personal.

And, visually, id’s game blows Bethesda’s in-house title out of the water – and not just because it’s running at an unbroken 60fps or packing id’s much-vaunted MegaTexture tech. Beneath the brown, rugged surface there’s real character here – in the lined and weathered faces of NPCs, for instance, or in the way a shaft of sunlight has been angled to hit a pile of artfully aligned rubble just so. It’s an artistry that comes at the cost of environments that react to your bullets in only the most superficial of ways, but nonetheless, the world of Rage shows that id’s artists are capable of much more than gruesome cyber-horror.



Less of a departure from Doom and Quake is what you actually do. Rage is about shooting things, mostly, and it does shooting things well. Enemies have a hint of bullet sponge about them even on the lower difficulties, which, coupled with their tendency to move quickly and unpredictably about the environment, develops a sense of urgency about putting them down before you get overwhelmed. Even the unarmoured, unsubtle mutants, who will charge the moment they clap their glowing green eyes upon you, have a habit of swerving sideways or leaping to the ceiling as you settle your crosshair upon them. Your health recharges (making health-restoring bandages seem superfluous), but die and you’ll get a chance to respawn on the spot by successfully completing a minigame that sparks off the defibrillator in your technically-not-a-space-marine’s chest. It needs to recharge between uses, but it provides a safety net that minimises the danger of experimental – or just plain foolhardy – assaults.

Your armoury is disappointingly unflashy, offering the usual selection of short-to-long-range shooters, though special mention must go to a crossbow capable of firing barbs that turn enemies into walking bombs controlled directly by the player. Mostly, however, the game relies on its engineering system to deliver tactical nuance. Components can be bought from vendors in the game’s city hubs, or found scattered around, and the products of this system include the bladed wingsticks (capable of stealth kills as well as slicing through necks), turrets, mobile spider bots and explosive RC cars. We rarely found ourselves in a situation we couldn’t shoot our way out of, but sending in a sentry bot to soak up bullets before wiping out the distracted bandits was more entertaining.


But before you can blow a bandit hideout to smithereens, you have to drive there. Rage’s vehicular combat is more than a little reminiscent of Twisted Metal, along with, in the races, a dash of Mario Kart. Vehicles circle each other, throwing up shields and exchanging rocket and cannon fire, until one turns into a gorgeous-looking ball of flame. Unfortunately, despite the option to hop out of your vehicle at any time, Rage’s vehicle sections and its on-foot gunplay rarely intersect, missions instead being built around driving to FPS sections separated by a loading screen.

In a leftfield move, it’s the driving around which id has chosen to build its multiplayer experience. In a market crowded by shooters, it was the right choice – it takes human players for the joy of its vehicular carnage to fully emerge. One match type sees players racing to pick up crystals scattered around a map, before returning to a constantly moving base to bank the points – cue angry collisions over crystals and furious chases to stop fully stocked players getting back to base. Triad Rally, meanwhile, requires players to zip through three checkpoints in a row before they can collect any points, something that proves tricky enough against one other player, let alone three. And while the courses in question have been mostly snipped from Rage’s open world, in this context they make more sense.


That’s because Rage’s open world is essentially a prop, a way of joining up disparate levels as well as an excuse for occasionally reusing them. Visit some parts of the map between missions and you’ll see empty film sets, waiting for the next scripted tussle to take place. More effective are the two town hubs to which you return between missions to sell junk, receive quests and play the odd minigame. These atmospheric townships work hard to depict the communities the story has you fighting to save, which is critical, because the plot throws you up against power-armoured Combine wannabes The Authority without making any effort to convince you of their nastiness first.

In its later stages, Rage becomes a slog. Enemies get tougher, and the repeated pattern of rooms filling with monsters – which must be killed before, say, a door falls off its hinges – begins to drag. Objectives, meanwhile, rarely move beyond simple fetch quests. There’s a fine line between sticking to what you’re best at and being stuck in your ways, and id occasionally crosses it. Rage is a stunningly rendered FPS, but one that seems caught between a desire to innovate and the desire to be true to the template its creators defined.

Im trying out Rage on my pc at the moment, and im loving it! The only problem i can find with it at present is my computer isnt quite beasty enough for it.
This is a game im going to have to play on the xbox, to be able to play without rendering lag and stutter, what i have seen so far has got me hooked

I bought Rage for my xbox and it has completely and utterly blown me away! I love this game!!
The graphics, motion, playability, storyline and locations all make this my game of the year so far!