When the world ends, blow more stuff up.
While post-apocalyptic settings certainly weren’t pioneered by games like Fallout and Borderlands, titles like those have developed our current expectations for what a video game wasteland should be like. You may expect the desire to explore, as well as the freedom to do so. You may also expect having a lot of tasks to keep you busy. It would have been pretty easy to apply those expectations to Rage before it was released, despite id Software making it clear that they were making a shooter and not an RPG as we have come to expect from our post-apocalypses.

Knowing this, I went into Rage determined not to compare it to those aformentioned titles (a feat easier said than done). Since it is mainly a single-player FPS, I wanted to hold it to those standards. After doing so, I found myself with a game that made its version of the apocalypse seem fun, but ultimately shallow.

The game starts you out as the only survivor of one of the world’s “Arks,” cryogenic pods created to protect a select few from the Apophis asteroid impact. You pop out of your slumber and almost immediately start heading down a small, linear path to the game’s “open world.” You get attacked before you can even begin to take in the beautiful, ruined planet, but you’re given a ride to a small settlement, which essentially acts as your tutorial location.

This is where Rage does something interesting for a shooter. It uses a sort of open world and a mission-based system to transition you to the FPS-type levels you would expect, rather than just putting one after another. Unfortunately, this invites those comparisons to other games that I mentioned earlier, and also ends up making the world of Rage just feel small and much more stagnant.

Along with that tutorial settlement and all the faction territories you’ll blast your way through, there are only two actual towns that act as your hub to progress the main missions. The game does provide a decent number of side missions as well, but they’re entirely optional and often have you revisiting places you have already gone through during a main mission from before.

The open world does a perfectly adequate job getting you from mission to mission, and also gives you a few occasions to have some fun with your vehicles outside of the races and challenges you can experience in either of the towns. It’s when you get to the location of one of the missions (usually the location of one of the many insane factions that inhabit the game) that the world really starts to feel flat, yet the gameplay starts to grab you.

These levels are home to a linearity that was a reoccuring annoyance. You don’t get a mini-map once you enter these locations, and that’s because you’re on such a strict pathway that it’s almost impossible to get lost for any lengthy amount of time. However, more than once I would find myself staring at a part of a room that looked like I should be able to get to, only to find myself blocked away by an invisible wall. This isn’t a big deal on its own but when combined with the small world overall, it only adds to that feeling of not so much being on destroyed planet but rather being on a well-designed stage.

At the same time, though, these levels are also where you’re going to find what Rage does really well. The combat in the game is some of the most satisfying I’ve played from an FPS in quite some time. Your arsenal of weapons gets to a reasonable size before you’ve even really begun, and it grows throughout the game. The weapons can be upgraded as well as supplied with different types of ammunition to assist you dealing with the hordes of monsters and maniacs you’ll commonly run into.

The guns all felt heavy and satisfying to shoot (a point-blank shotgun blast has never felt better), and the enemies always kept me on my toes. In fact, I would go so far as to say that they were pretty clever as far FPS enemies go. Enemies would often effectively get away from a nearby grenade, and even melee enemies would often be unpredictable in their movements that they could actually be a potential threat. And because there are so many different factions in this game, there was always a new type of enemy so I only occasionally felt burnt out fighting an enemy type.

The fact that Rage is fun is really what saves the game, because nothing else about it really keeps you going. For a single-player shooter, you would think there would be more built into the story but the game really takes its time building any. There are some unique characters, but nothing that would really get you to invest your attention. By the time a story did develop, it was pretty generic. It mostly boils down to “vague Authority vs vague Resistance” and it all leads to a pretty unsatisfying conclusion.

So, with all these faults in mind the question, I had to keep asking myself was, “Would I have kept playing this if I didn’t intend on reviewing it?”

The answer is, “Yes.”

Like I said before, Rage is a lot of fun when you can put its faults aside and focus on its gameplay. If id can make anything it’s a satisfying shooter, and Rage provides enough in side missions, co-op missions, and an arena that you’ll definitely get your fill. But the game has more going on than just shooting things. For example, shooting things with cars.

The racing in the game is pretty simple to dive into, but also very chaotic and enjoyable. You throw some miniguns and missile launchers on your vehicle and just enjoy the spectacle of it all. I found myself getting sucked into upgrading my vehicles so much that a good percentage of my overall game time was spent on the racing. Unfortunately, the multiplayer is limited to just the rally races, but they’re still fun and it’s a nice little feature to kill some time.

Along with those “main attractions” Rage comes with a couple mini games you can find around town. The most notable for me was its collectible card game. Again, it’s a very simple game to understand and play, but it gets its hooks into you through the idea of getting better equipped for it over time. Throughout the main game, you’ll find new cards along the way. So, by the end of the game, the potential for a better deck was motivation enough for me to almost get my head blown off.

These things combine to make Rage an enjoyable experience when the dust settles. There’s a good shooter here with plenty of other things thrown in to keep you entertained. It’s beautifully detailed, and a lot of fun to play.

That being said, Rage is also a game that keeps asking you to move forward, but doesn’t really provide enough motivation to do so at the pace that it really needs. You find yourself stopping and noticing how small things feel, or how those beautiful clouds aren’t moving at all.

It’s easy to sit here and wonder what Rage could have been if everything else had gotten the same care as its gameplay and visuals. It doesn’t change what it is, though. What the game does well, it does really well, and that’s provide a few hours of mindless, loud fun. At the same time, it’s probably something that you’ll only play while you wait for something with a little more substance.

The fun to be had here won’t hide this game’s lack of depth, but it does enough to make it a worthwhile experience overall.

2 Responses to “Review: Rage (PS3)”

1. How about a Spoooooky Update? « Ben's Laboratory says:

   October 30, 2011 at 10:28 pm

   [...] Rage: Overall, I liked Rage but, even by shooter standards, it was a very shallow [...]

   Reply
2. Rage Demo now available on 360. (Dec 6. for PS3) « nJoystic says:

   November 22, 2011 at 5:50 pm

   [...] all seriousness, I did enjoy my time with Rage despite some really noticeable problems on its part. Give the demo a shot if you’re [...]

   Reply