RAGE Review

There seems to be somewhat of an upsurge of games developers from years gone by releasing new and exciting titles for us lucky gamers. RAGE is one such title from long time FPS developers id Software. If you play RAGE without reading the rest of this review - take this one piece of information with you. Play the game for what it is. Not who it’s made by. I assure you this will make it wholly more fun if you’re not thinking about the developers previous games.

Dropped into the world of a survivor as the result of an asteroid impact you’re sent out into the world completing errands for various people somewhat incapable of doing said tasks themselves for whatever reason. For most of the game, it’s a standard FPS affair, with elements of racing and vehicular based combat. If anything, you could say it’s fairly reminiscent of Borderlandsalbeit with a toned down art style.

Shooting mechanics are spot on - as you’d expect from a developer that is au-fait with FPS games. There’s good amounts of recoil for guns that need it although you can upgrade and stabilize some of your weapons slightly to level this out. The driving aspects in the game can sometimes be finicky and a feeling of the vehicle not being grounded in its environment leading to sometimes unbelievable driving sequences. On the whole, the driving doesn’t take up as much of the game as it would initially seem, with only a few missions required to progress in the story if you don’t like it that much, but this would hinder getting around the sizable area of land the world of RAGE takes up. Watch out if you fall off your quad bike though, the death animations are frankly, hilarious.

The graphics are the big thing in this game with id rolling out their new engine, id Tech 5, to make the world look as beautiful as possible. And boy do the environments look absolutely stunning. As long as you give them a short moment to load in that is. There’s noticeable texture load within the game especially when you spin round at speed. However, I found that after a good chunk of playtime, I had become less ‘aware’ of the load in and continued enjoying the game regardless of this minor issue.

When playing on the harder difficulties, the game is indeed hard. This would have been a much less infuriating point, if saving had been better managed. Having to manually save constantly as auto-save points seem to be so far apart as to be non-existent, means there’s additional time spent looking at menus for the sole purpose of saving the game. Maybe this is id’s way of informing newer gamers of ‘how-it-used-to-be’ and that we all should be a bit less dependent on auto-saves.

Overall, RAGE is a good fun blast of FPS goodness, and should be enjoyed without the thought of what id Software had done previously. This can be hard - if you stumble upon some of their hidden rooms within the game (no spoilers here, if you want to explore for them yourself). It’s not likely to win awards for storyline, but it should certainly fill up some gaming time in the lull till the next batch of titles come round.