First Looks// Rage

The second we step back into the light, a small horde of about five of the little buggers (think Gollum from LotR), attacks and is quickly dispatched. Combat plays much like you would expect from id Software; guns blazing in classic FPS fashion, but with the addition of a three-bladed throwing knife/boomerang thing that's particularly good at detaching limbs and heads.

Back in our dune buggy, we are attacked by a few bandit-filled vehicles that are handled quite nicely by the machine guns we were smart enough to equip our buggy with earlier on. Handling said buggy seemed very solid, though we'll all have to wait for hands-on to judge for sure. It appeared to me much more like a real racing game than the likes of Half-Life or even Halo (though I love Halo's vehicle controls).

Open world games tend to have rather questionable vehicle controls for some reason, even the genre originator GTA (I'm not going down the Deus Ex route as originator). So, I'm hopeful this will play as well as it seemed to from the demo.

We then arrived at Wellspring, one of the many towns in the game, which is named for the well around which it's built. NPCs throughout the town will just make passing comments to you as you walk by; you can of course engage them in conversation if you want further information. It was noted that id has tried to make sure all the different locations throughout the world are unique.

The next town you visit is called Subway Town and is (of course) built in old subway tunnels. People there are more stand off-ish, they speak and act differently than those in Wellspring. While exploring we hear a lot of comments from locals about our odd appearance because we are still wearing the clothes from the Eden pod. Vault dweller much?

This is to help remind the player of their place in the story without beating them over the head with text or cut scenes. One group of locals at a restaurant/bar can be heard talking about the “Authority” and how they or it is always lying. Not much else was said about that in the demo but there does appear to be some sort of new government that is controlling peoples lives by regulating water prices among other things. Crazy Joe also makes mention of the authority doing things to make mutants bigger.

After a bit of exploring an alarm starts to blare and we learn that there is a problem at the well. Being the ever curious video game players that we are, we head off to investigate and find the Well Master looking for help. Bandits have attacked the well, killed several unarmed workers and are intending to poison the water supply. We (of course) volunteer to go help and, after being given some electro-bolts for our cross-bow, we set off to kick some bandit skulls in. The electro-bolts operate much like the lighting power in Bioshock; they can be shot into puddles that enemies are standing in in order to take out large groups more quickly.

At this point we have now seamlessly transitioned from a shack to an outdoor fight, to a long range vehicular battle, to a large town populated with NPCs and finally ending up in a classic corridor shooting scenario. The final battle is a large one and the player uses a pair of personal turrets, one of many items that can be built on the fly once you have the plans and the necessary parts. They can be placed and turned as necessary to help battle larger groups of enemies or just larger enemies.

It should be noted that all of this doesn't just look good, it looks great. Animation on characters is very smooth and lifelike, unlike the frequently mentioned so far Fallout 3. Nothing seems overly reused or just 'placed' into the world, it all looks hand-crafted and very much alive.