When you think to the beginnings of the first person genre, one name should come straight to mind and that’s ID Software. Their iconic games like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom defined a genre creating the foundation for any first person shooter that has come out since. While ID Software has always been in the forefront of games when it comes to graphics they’ve had a hard time creating a truly innovative game since the release of the original Quake. Now RAGE is the introduction of an all-new franchise from ID something that we haven’t seen in about 15 years. Will RAGE be just as innovative as Quake was or will it disappoint?

RAGE continues the trend of mixing RPG elements into your first person shooter that games have been adding to get away from monotonous linear first person shooters that were all the rage the last decade. While the game system uses some RPG elements the story doesn’t really take the same queues. You awaken decades after a giant asteroid collides with the Earth causing all signs of modern civilization to disintegrate while you’re in cryogenic suspension. This impact creates a wasteland that feels like a cross between Borderlands and Fallout, a desolate place full of mutants and bandits. This world feels like it’s been done before in other games and doesn’t create any sort of unique identity for the game instead feeling like I’m visiting a world I’ve already been to. The asteroid hitting the earth creates the basis of the main narrative where you go from one quest giver to the next where they send you on fetch missions and roaming through dungeons blasting anything that moves inside until you reach your objective inside. The story never really fleshes out instead you have the ‘authorities’ that are after you because you come from the old world before the disaster and people like you don’t seem to fit into their world picture and you must escape their clutches.

Getting back to the quest system, you can have multiple quests in your queue at once and you can pick any given one using the menu system and having your on screen instructions adjusts to the given one This works pretty well at letting you keep track of what you’re doing and picking what you want to do next with relative ease. Another way RPG elements have been rolled into RAGE is there’s a crafting system where you can create items that’d you’d normally have to buy in an shop buy using individual items you find within dungeons and on the bodies of dead enemies. Sadly the system never fleshes out to anything much besides a way to get a few extra items you don’t have to pay for within a shop and feels like something just trying to give an RPG feel. Now the only other way it’s like an RPG is that there’s shops that you can buy weapons and gear, which isn’t exactly anything special. While RAGE tries to give the feel that it’s an RPG FPS it doesn’t really do all that much to fulfill on that promise with its attempts in the end feeling half fast.

When it comes to being a straight up first person shooter RAGE does a decent job, but in the end feels like it misses out on a lot of what it promised. Your primary guns are all fun to use with the crossbow being my personal favorite, though the shotgun and the assault rifles being some others being satisfactory though a little on the ordinary side. The game doesn’t really make any attempts on making any sort of cover system unlike recent games like Killzone or Crysis instead just being satisfied letting your duck like in any generic first shooter and again standing when you want to shoot somebody. This feels like a disappointment and not learning from recent games which went to the trouble of crafting elaborate cover systems that add depth to the gun play. In fact the whole save system feels like it’s something that was lifted from over a decade ago where while it’ll save at first when you enter a dungeon but after that it’s up to you to save every once in awhile because the game certainly doesn’t it for you. So if you forget to save and get pretty far within the dungeon you could find yourself repeating it from the start feeling super frustrated. On the other hand the fact you have to save on your own every single time really brings you out of the emersion of the game where you should be concentrating on saving every 5 minutes which is something you don’t even have to do anymore when writing a document in Microsoft Word. The secondary fire can be pretty fun where the Wingsticks (sharp boomerangs) are some of the most powerful weapons in your arsenal. Your guns have multiple ammo types that do create some interesting special bonuses depending on what you use from bolts of electricity to mind controlling enemies. When it comes right down to it RAGE doesn’t do all that much to distinguish it from other first person shooters with the save system being a total step backwards.

The last piece to the RAGE puzzle is the automobile portions; you can compete in different races and events with your different armored vehicles or travel through the wasteland taking out bandits and doing challenges. The races are fun distraction that while aren’t nearly as intense as in say a game like DIRT 3 are fun and a welcome distraction from the constant shooting in the rest of the game. Doing races and challenges will earn you upgrades and new vehicles that you can use outside the races in the game overworld. Your car has plenty of extras like shields, machine guns, rockets, automated turrets, turbo boost to name a few that you can play around with. Since you’ll be spending plenty of time in your car when your travelling from one dungeon to the next I’m happy to say you won’t complain about the car mechanics as they’re quite solid and one the best planned parts of RAGE. The races while not all that challenging are fun to do where you could spend hours just doing all the races and challenges that are available.

The one place where RAGE is an exceptional game would have to be the graphics. Plenty of games this year have been gorgeous, namely Crysis 2 and Killzone 3 both pushing the current generation to it’s limit. The limit apparently hasn’t been reached yet as RAGE would have to be the best looking games on any current generation hardware running at a silky smooth 60 frames per second at that. The textures are all highly detailed and an awe to look at. The character design while not as realistic as in Crysis 2 quite nicely show the cartoonish look the game is going for looking awesome. While the graphics pushes things to entirely new levels the sound doesn’t really do anything for. The music can get mildly annoying if I keep it on for too long. The sound effect tend to get a little on the repetitive side where the same ones tend to be used a whole lot. While it’s not to the point of total annoyance it’s not especially great. The voice acting is pretty all right though the characters themselves have clichéd personalities that make them hard to connect to. The sound is just all right and doesn’t push the same limits as the graphics.

The game does have some multiplayer though it’s not to the same extent, as you’d find in other ID games. If you want to face-off against friends you’re limited to being against 3 other people in some racing events where you need to run checkpoints in a row, collect meteorites or just kill everyone in a straight up automobile deathmatch. It’s not exactly that fleshed out and I feel like they could have done a whole lot more given the plethora of events in the actual game. The only other multiplayer mode is a dozen co-op levels that are related to the main story but not directly a part of the campaign and end up never using your main character from the story. It’s something that you could play with a friend though again not something entirely fleshed out either.

RAGE feels like it could have been far more than it actually is but not enough work was done to make it exceptional game it could have been improving any of its individual pieces. The RPG elements feel on the limited side and the gunplay is really average. The automobile in the end got the most focus but in of itself isn’t enough to make this game exceptional. While that’s not to say what’s here isn’t fun but it’s not likely to be in the top five first person shooters that you play all year round though it’s certainly to be the prettiest.

Gameplay

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Click here to buy Rage New or Used Online from EBgames.com for a great price.

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