RAGE is creatively and mechanically bankrupt, but it sure is pretty
By Ben Kuchera | Published October 3, 2011 11:01 PM

RAGE does a few things right. The game runs on the id Tech 5 engine, and it's absolutely beautiful. PC copies of the game haven't been unlocked yet—we'll have coverage later—but on the 360 the game is an absolute stunner. The engine handles internal and wide open areas with ease, with a solid frame rate and only a little texture pop-in after we installed the game on the 360's hard drive. The racing sections and minigames are fun. We've now reached the end of the rosy section of this post.

Many reviewers went to an event where they had two days to sit down and play the game straight through. I can't imagine being put in that position; forced to play this airless, inert experience for long stretches. The story doesn't matter, and the world mixes Fallout with Borderlands for something that feels both routine and bland. Your character wakes up in a dystopian future, and then another character hands you a gun and tells you to start killing. You go from realizing everyone you love is dead to shooting bad guys in about 30 seconds. Of course, your mute character is just fine with all this.

To give you a sense of how ridiculous this game can be, here's a sample mission: my goal is to go to the next town to drop off some supplies. First I have to speak to the mayor, who tells me I need to change out of my conspicuous clothes before he'll talk to me, so I have to find the tailor. No sweat, right? Back to the mayor.

Once I get my new clothes, the mayor says I have to rent garage space and talk to the sheriff. So I do those things, but the sheriff tells me I can't have the supplies that need to be delivered unless my buggy has guns. To get guns, I need to talk to the guy at the race track. After talking to the guy at the race track, I'm told I need to speak to another guy to set up races for the slips to get the guns—when I find that guy, he tells me to speak to his guy so he can schedule the race...

It's absurd and pointless. Why can't the first guy just set up the race? What designer sat down and said that the player should have to track down and speak to FOUR PEOPLE to get to the actual action?

The sense that gamers are being trolled extends to many of the missions. Some of them go so far as to force you to drive to a location, hit a button, and then drive back to tell someone you hit a button. Action scenes take place in discrete areas where you simply fight from point A to point B before the game tells you that you've accomplished whatever the mission needed you to do. The only thing that adds tension to the game is the knowledge that death means you'll lose an hour of progress unless you've saved manually.

That's right, this game has the worst save system I've seen in years. The save points are few and far between, and they seem to be placed randomly. I've started a new mission and gotten halfway through it, only to die and be sent to the last autosave, which was the end of the last mission. You're forced to save manually repeatedly unless you want to lose huge chunks of progress, and going into the menu and waiting for the save to write to memory is a clunky process that takes you out of the action.
RAGE commits the sin of blandness

In fact, you're always being taken out of the action. The game just doesn't seem to have a good way of getting information to the player; as I was about to leave a town, a message popped up to say that I should talk to Sally at the bar for a lucrative opportunity. There's no other way to say that to the player without breaking immersion?

There is also no dialog tree, but you have to click on characters repeatedly just to get them to talk. "Listen, I need a favor," someone will say to you, and then just stare at you stupidly until you click on them again. Based on this game, a town's mayor simply stands behind a desk, holding his suspenders, waiting for people to ask him to speak, over and over again. There is no personality in anything or anyone, it's just cardboard cutouts giving you to-do lists.

Here's how you can tell the creative team has checked out completely: the Resistance is the group fighting the Authority. The Authority seems to be bad, and no one has really explained why, but that's fine; you seem perfectly content to just slaughter whoever your new friends tell you deserves death. I'm seriously beginning to wonder if my character was also lobotimized at the beginning of the game.

In the final hour of the game you get some idea as to why the Authority needs to be stopped, but it never feels like anything is at stake. The ending scene falls completely limp because the game never makes you care about anything that's going on.

The game is completely linear, so it's silly when the menu asks if you'd like to accept a quest or decline it. If you decline it, the game simply doesn't continue, so why would you say no? The open world is also a complete waste—it's only a space to drive across as you go from mission to mission, sometimes fighting a set number of enemy buggies for money. There isn't much reason to explore, so the driving sections feel like filler, something to break up the unsatisfying gunfights. The crafting system is likewise stapled on; just be sure to build the machines you need to unlock doors before you go on a mission and you're fine.

In which Ben continues to RAGE

Imagine Borderlands with the fun stripped out, or Fallout without actual choice, characters, or consequences. None of the game's ideas are thought out or fully explored, so the game feels like a series of dead ends in a world that is hard to care about, in which you play a bland character doing boring things against stock enemies using weak guns. I only finished RAGE because I was paid to do so, and the process was a struggle; the game never presented me with a hook to continue playing,

The game starts with a fine engine, but it never justifies its own existence, and I only experienced brief flashes of fun in my time with the game. I'm going to play the game on the PC once that version of the game is unlocked and then write another post, but I felt like I had to get the warning out the second the embargo dropped. At the very least, you need to rent this before you buy it. Most shooter fans will be fine skipping it altogether. This a game that seems content with getting in its own way as much as possible; it works as a satirical look at why open world games often fail, but as a standalone game it's maddeningly bad.

The best games are created when a team is passionate about some aspect of the experience: be it the lead character, the setting, the story, or a new game mechanic. There is nothing about the characters, setting, story, or mechanics in Rage that's interesting, new, exciting, or fun. It feels like a group of people had to create a game because they were under contract, not because they honestly enjoyed any aspect of their own creation. This is a great tech demo for the engine, and that's all. It's merely competent, but never special.

So, just to sum up my nine plus hours with the game so far:

No story to speak of
No characters that make an impression
Linear
Broken save system
Dull mechanics
Tedious quests
Weak shooting
Stock weapons
Racing is fun
Minigames are enjoyable
Very pretty

We'll be testing on PC and playing multiplayer in the coming days, but I felt it was important to share what the game is versus what people expect it to be. This is a massive disappointment.

Verdict: Skip