Rage: A Beautiful Tech Demo.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been a good 7 years since we saw a release from the famous id Software developers. For a company that had regular releases every 2 to 3 years for almost 2 decades prior the silence from them was rather unusual, sparking rumours that they were in a Duke Nukem Forever situation. Still their tech demos of the new id Tech 5 engine that was powering their next game showed that they were making progress and that has culminated in their next game release: Rage. After a good 12 hours or so with it over the past couple weeks I’m in two minds about id’s latest game, or more aptly their latest engine.

Rage puts you about 130 odd years into the future into a post apocalyptic world that’s been ravaged by the 99942 Apophis. Now the space nerds amongst us will recognise that that is a very real asteroid and whilst we’ve since eliminated the prospect of it hitting earth in 2029 as the game predicts it was none the less a gripping hook to get me into the story. You play as Daniel Tosh, one of the chosen few to be buried in a capsule with other survivors in cryogenic suspension, only to wake a century after the impact has occured in order to rebuild humanity. When you wake however you find that the pod malfunctioned and you’re the only survivor out of your particular ark and the world that you’ve come out in is a desolate wasteland.

Now Rage has copped a lot of flak for the absurdly broken release that it had on PC and when I first played it I was no exception. There was massive amounts of tearing, models glitching in and out of sight and textures not rendering properly or at the incorrect level of detail. The first patch plus a new round of ATI drivers fixed most of those problems making the game playable but it wasn’t until a friend of mine linked me to this post on the steam forums that Rage actually began to shine. After applying the new config the game was absolutely beautiful, both visually and performance wise with my computer running everything at absolute maximum settings I never had an performance problems. Rage still didn’t like to be alt-tabbed however as that would bring back tearing with mad vengeance. Such problems did not plague the console release however, so their launch day experience was probably much better.

Rage is very much like Borderlands in that it fuses RPG elements with FPS game play. The main story line is driven via quests given to you by various NPC characters and there’s a multitude of side quests that won’t further the plot but will get you things to help you along your journey. There’s no skill trees or levels per say but you will acquire various upgrades that will help to make the game easier. Most of the weapons have some form of upgrade but they’re usually not that useful, especially once you pick up certain weapons like the sniper rifle or the Authority Machine Gun. There’s also a crafting system that allows you to concoct all sorts of interesting things and, thankfully, there’s no limit on the amount of stuff you can carry so you can always have what you need when you need it. 

The game play in Rage is divided into 2 distinct categories: the vehicle sections and then your typical FPS run and gun. The vehicle sections, as pictured above, serve as being a break between quests where you’ll be accosted by bandits in the wasteland. There’s also a series of jump challenges scattered around the place for you to attempt, but since they give no reward apart from possibly an achievement there’s no real incentive to go for them. Your vehicle can also be upgraded with “Race Certificates” won from races or given as rewards to quests. Some of these races are fun (like the rocket races, where you get to blow your opponents up) where as others just feel like a chore. I only spent the bare minimum amount of time on the races however as once you’ve got the few key upgrades there’s no incentive to keep doing them.

The FPS component of Rage is a pretty typical affair, being a somewhat cover based shooter with the added advantage of you being able to heal and also revive yourself should you end up being overwhelmed. For the most part its quite servicable as you can choose to either strut out into the open and keep yourself healed with bandages (of which you can make an almost unlimited amount of) or pick people off from behind cover. The additional secondary weapons like the wingsticks (basically a bladed boomerang) and sentry bots help to keep the combat interesting and can be the difference between making it through alive or reloading your save for the nth time.

There are however a couple glitches in the combat system that need mentioning. If you’re say unloading shell after shell into an enemy whilst they’re doing a particular animation there’s no indication as to whether you’ve killed them or not. This becomes rather irritating when the death animations for some NPCs closely resemble that of them stumbling after taking a big hit, leading you to waste countless rounds in order to just make sure that they’re down. There’s also the fact that headshots, even with the sniper rifle, don’t usually one shot enemies like they usually do. This isn’t a glitch per say more of an annoyance as that one carefully lined up shot has to be two carefully lined up shots which you don’t usually have the luxury of taking.

The story that had such a gripping hook at the start is unfortunately quite thin on the ground with your character’s motivations for doing what he’s doing coming from other people telling him what to do constantly. Although the world is meant to feel open ended the story, and all of the missions, are completely linear with no real options for going at something another way. Rage’s storyline also suffers from major pacing problems as well, especially towards the end when you’re suddenly plonked onto the final mission with little more notice than the title of the mission indicating that it might be a one way trip. The end boss fight, if you could call it that, also pales in comparison to some of the other boss fights in the game leaving you feel like you’ve missed something along the way. Ultimately the intial hook that got me in was the pinnacle of the storytelling in Rage and that’s very disappointing.

Rage has its moments as a game but ultimately it feels more like a 12 hour tech demo than it does a fully fledged game that took 7 years to build. I would usually let id off the hook on this one since they’d be licensing their engine (which is a technical marvel) and thus the game wasn’t their main focus but outside of Zenimax companies (id’s parent company) the id Tech 5 engine won’t be available for licensing. Thus for the foreseeable future the only 2 games that will use this engine will be Rage and Doom 4, which is a shame because once it’s set up right it’s quite spectacular. Rage then as a game is a FPS/RPG hybrid that manages to deliver sometimes but suffers from multiple problems that detract from the technical beauty that it contains.

Rating: 7.0/10

Rage is available on PC, Xbox360 and PlayStation 3 right now for $108, $108 and $88 respectively. Game was played entirely on the PC with around 12 hours of total play time and 46% of the achievements unlocked.