Rage

Rage is a game that has been in production for a few years now. It's been eagerly anticipated by Id fans and now it has finally been released. However, the game falls well short of greatness from a myriad of problems. There are some great aspects to the game that could have made it enthralling, but the game is bogged down by poor decisions.

From the very beginning of the game, the cliches are prevalent. Your character (no name given) awakens in a stasis chamber called an Ark. You see, there was this big asteroid that came down from the sky and destroyed all of civilization, with the exception of a few towns, raider groups that seem to have an infinite amount of members and hordes of mutants. For an asteroid that destroyed everything, it left a lot of people alive. Anyway, the Ark program was set in place to make sure that some people, such as the player character, survived. All of this is very similar to the vaults in Fallout, but much less compelling because everyone was just asleep. You don't have the interesting things that went on while everyone was cooped up in a little vault. The style of the game is also very similar to Borderlands from the faux-Western aesthetic to basic missions to the driving even.

The rest of the story isn't much better. In fact, for the first disc or so (there are three for the Xbox360) there doesn't seem to be a story at all. The player character is simply set out by forgettable characters to do...things. Usually it involves killing something. Eventually a conflict is set up between the Authority, which represents authority, and The Resistance, which is the...resistance to that authority. The battle is so archetypal that the two sides of the battle actually sound like terms someone would use to define those archetypes. I would go into more detail, but there really isn't any. Through some weird providence, Rage shares the same core complaint I had with The Saboteur in that they cannot make me care. There is just nothing to the story or the world that invested me in this game.

That's not to say that Rage was necessarily as boring as last week's game. Rage actually has moderately fun game play. The shooting feels very old-school-shooter, which is appropriate since this was made by Id (developers of Doom, Wolfenstein and Quake.) The guns feel powerful and can hold a seemingly endless amount of bullets. However, the foes are also quite powerful. In fact, the enemy AI in this game is some of the best I've seen. They actively seek cover, and even while bum-rushing you like a PCP freak they have the presence of mind to dodge the player's gunfire. This is what kept me playing the game; the sheer unpredictability of the enemies. It's really hard to get a bead on them and, since they can take more bullets than your average Call of Duty enemy, shootouts become frantic trigger-mashing parties as you scream obscenities at the screen. Also, the killing itself is very satisfying, as morbid and disturbing as that sounds. The animations for the enemy deaths are amazingly varied; its very rare that you see the same animation twice. There are also juggernaut-type enemies that take so many bullets that you feel a real sense of accomplishment when you take one down. However, the power and interest of these features becomes diluted after playing the fifteenth mission in which the player has to go into a strangely circular base, kill everyone and fetch item x. There is also a lot of driving, which is adequate but not particularly interesting, and races which were so easy that a racing-hater such as myself finished with ease. There's also a crafting system, but again, it's lackluster and usually amounts to creating some kind of ammo that you'll never use. Add in a save system that forces you to save every five seconds lest you be tossed back across the wasteland to three missions before you died and you've got a game that just barely avoids being a total mess.

Despite my cynicism, I cannot overstate how good this game looks. Id is, if nothing else, a company that knows its tech. Since they've been working on it for four or five years, it makes sense that the game would be gorgeous. As a tech demo, the game is flawless and I expect great things from the Tech 5 engine.

It seems like, more than anything, this game is confused. It doesn't know if it wants to be an RPG, with it's somewhat open world and crafting system, or a standard FPS. It also straddles the line between what shooters were and what they are doing now. Yes, you have big guns with lots of ammo, but you also have regenerating health thanks to nanobots in the player character's bloodstream (kudos to Id for actually explaining the regenerating health device for once) and cover is occasionally necessary. At the same time, cover can be hard to find without a prone position. It's a lot of broken ideas with not enough interesting missions or anything resembling a story to cover it up. The reason World of Warcraft players perform menial tasks over and over is because they are invested in the story to some extent and, much more importantly, the development of their character. When your character doesn't have a name and doesn't change more than a little, there had better be some ridiculously exciting things to do.

In the first twenty minutes or so of Rage, I thought it was a great game. After that, fatigue started to set in. There are some cool ideas here, and I applaud the old-school game play and graphics, but the poor save system, lack of missions and overall lack of interesting content kills this game. Id has a style that has some merit, but they definitely need to refine it if they want to stay relevant.

Edit: I forgot to mention that the female characters in this game are surprisingly attractive for not being real. Do with that what you will.