Reviews// Rage

The other half of the game revolves less around gunplay and more around driving your own upgradable vehicles around the Wasteland, as well as using them to take part in a variety of races.

While having such a big focus on the racing could potentially have felt very tacked on and gimmicky if it didn’t live up to the shooting side of things, thankfully it works out just fine. The controls are tight and responsive and vehicle combat is simple and straightforward. There’s quite a bit of variety in the stuff you’re set to do as well.

The races are split into time trail runs, non-combat races as well as the more deadly kind, and a capture-the-flagesque mode where you race to certain points on the map in order to earn points. Winning these races earns you racing certificates, which serve as the currency with which you buy upgrades for your vehicles to increase their performance. Upgrading your car feels rewarding. In fact, a top-end ride makes future races a cakewalk and lets you travel across the bandit-infested Wasteland more safely.

Aside from the different facets of the main gameplay, there’s a host of mini-games that are well done in their own right. The card game is particularly fun, with a simple blend of luck and strategy that only gets deeper as you upgrade your deck of cards. There are even plenty of hidden cards to be found as you explore the various locations you traverse throughout the game. The other mini-games lack the depth of the card game, but they’re still fun enough distractions every now and then when you want to test your reflexes and make a little cash on the side.

Despite all this, after the first half a dozen hours you’ll probably notice that there’s not quite as much to do as the massive environments would have you believe. It feels like Rage is trying to come across as more of an open-world kind of game, but really the Wasteland itself is just a big empty hub for you to drive across to get to the next proper level.

Things are spiced up a bit as bandits are thrown at you, but this doesn’t really change anything. The game isn’t helped by obvious padding in the structure of the job board missions, most of which involve you revisiting the area you’ve only just explored. But once you’ve driven back it’s hardly a chore to explore these places twice considering there are always freshly respawned enemies waiting for you to wipe out.

Perhaps my biggest issue with the game is the autosaving frequency; it only kicks into action when you enter a new area. Relying on autosaves can easily cost you twenty minutes or so of play and Rage is challenging enough that you probably will find yourself dying every now and then.

It should be a small flaw and it admittedly didn’t take long for me to fall back into my old PC gaming habit of manually saving regularly, but it seems like an old-fashioned problem that few other modern games fall into.

A surprising aspect of the game is its lack of multiplayer features. Rage foregoes all the usual Team Death Match stuff, instead opting for two modes of play. The first is the Rally mode races seen in the campaign, allowing four players to compete in car combat while racing for points. Fair enough. The second, Legends of the Wasteland, is slightly more interesting, offering two players the chance to team up in standalone cooperative missions. Again, fair enough, but it’s strange in this day and age to see such limited online options in an FPS.

Conclusion
Without doubt, Rage is one of the best looking games of this generation. Obviously graphics aren’t everything but they sure don’t hurt. Not that Rage’s gameplay lets the side down.

Everything in Rage is fun. Shooting and blowing stuff up is fun. Racing dune buggies and blowing stuff up is fun. Even playing cards or that knife around the fingers game while hopefully not blowing anything up is still fun.

The FPS mechanics at Rage’s core are competently done and combat is more than exciting enough to carry the game, but it’s how well executed all the extra bits are that really makes the game stand out. Admittedly there’s nothing really ground-breaking about Rage outside of its fantastic graphics and combat animations. People could certainly complain about the lack of exploration and free-roaming, but in my opinion it’s the games fast-paced action that makes it Rage something slightly more than just Fallout 3 in a prettier package.

SPOnG Score: 90%