Review | RAGE

The developers at iD Software sure know how to take their time with a game but by and large it’s usually worth the wait. We got our first glimpse of Rage back in 2007 and after a succession of ‘not this year, sorry’ the FPS-driver hybrid finally sees the light of day.

Set in the desolate ruins of civilisation some 106 years after a meteor decimated humanity in 2029, players step into the role of the survivor from a preservation scheme gone horribly awry. The Eden project involved a series of Arks designed to keep a portion of humanity alive post-impact to repopulate the planet – unfortunately it didn’t go quite as planned and our protagonist appears to be one of few survivors.

Humanity has done fairly well without the Eden project anyhow, so when our boy emerges from his stasis chamber he is greeted by a barren future frontier society where life is hard but the human spirit endures.

Stumbling blindly from the technological cocoon, the player isn’t given much of a mission other than to survive, and a quick skirmish with some feral mutants quickly establishes that task alone will likely keep us quite busy. The unnamed protagonist is promptly taken under the wing of magnanimous wasteland settler Dan Hagar, who assigns the first of many missions of exploration and destruction amongst the dusty outposts of the treacherous land.

If that general outline doesn’t sound at least a little familiar then we will have to assume you are in no way familiar with Mad Max, Fallout, Firefly or any other post-apocalyptic adventure of the last few decades. It’s one of the game’s biggest failings that it takes such well-travelled narrative territory and does absolutely nothing with it. The characters are dull and quickly forgotten, the story lacks any real drama beyond the threat of random violence and the world itself is about as sparse as they come.

Which is a shame, because many of the game’s other aspects positively ring out with polished success. As a first-person shooter the game successes unequivocally, the gunplay alone is worth the price of entry. The combination of decade’s worth of experience on the mechanics combines with a truly theatrics take on enemy AI makes each skirmish an exhilarating, often terrifying, occasion.

The whizzing bullets are backed up by some of the slickest visuals yet seen in the dynamic genre, especially on a console. The developers’ innovative take on textures in particular gives the game an engrossing feel and the overall production design is detailed, clever and immaculate.

Addressing the other half of Rage’s mixed genre equation is a little more problematic. The need to include a rather robust racing element to a shooter of this calibre is debatable but you can’t blame the makers for wanting to differentiate themselves. And there’s nothing terribly wrong with the Burnout-like argie-bargie racing elements but you never quite shake the feeling that it’s all entirely unnecessary.

Both shooting and racing portions have thoughtful RPG aspects but while upgrading your abilities with the guns seems like a prerequisite to progressing, messing about with your ride does not. The funds and baubles you can wrack up from racing are helpful but you can essentially skip a large portion behind the wheel and not miss much.

Two multiplayer modes, Road Rage and Legends of the Wasteland, round out the package. The first is an anarchistic all-on-all match that tries vainly to encourage vehicular use while the second unravels some of the folk tales heard through the campaign as co-op missions.

A game that does so well in some areas only to miss the mark entirely in others is the original recipe for frustration. To Rage’s credit, the pros far outweigh the cons but the feeling you’re playing something that could have been so much more persists.   [7]