9saves

 It’s the year 2135 and you wake up inside an underground shelter called Ark to find out civilization, as we know it, has been destroyed by the impact of an asteroid 106 years ago. This is the world of Rage, a FPS developed by id Software in 2011, and every fan of Mad Max will get a familiar feel for its setting, the art direction here is fantastic. But unlike the movie, my time with Rage has been a bag of mixed feelings, at first it was fun and enjoyable but as the game progressed it started to show all those flaws that populated the so popular FPS genre a few years ago.

After leaving the facility you are brought to the a settlement where you start to meet the first characters, and with them, one of the game’s weak points. The writing here doesn’t stand to the art direction, the world in Rage looks like a really inspiring place populated by one dimensional characters, where the story never got me really invested in it.

Luckily, it doesn’t take long till Rage shows its strength, and that is the combat. id Software really does know how to make a good shooter and Rage clearly shows it. The combat is fast, enemies usually attack you from all directions, sometimes even crawling from the walls or ceilings, making the encounters frenetic and intense. The game also provides you with a wide variety of weapons and different ammo types for them, allowing for different playstyles and smart approaches to some encounters. One of my favorites is the “Wingstick”, boomerang-like projectiles that can cut through enemies killing most of them in 1 hit.

 In between all of the shooting, Rage also offers different activities if you want to take a break from missions, contributing to a better game pace. This is where your car, or cars, become the protagonist. You own different vehicles that allow you to travel the world and engage in combat with other rebels, but you can also take part in races and similar events. These will earn you credits that you can use to further upgrade your set of wheels. Driving is very arcade-y, nothing special, but it feels very responsive even on a keyboard.

 Unfortunately, the more time you spend in Rage the more shallow you feel it is. The game is presented to you as an open world but it doesn’t encourage exploration at all, in fact, it doesn’t even allow it most of the time. For example, one of the early missions takes you to the so called “Dead City”, a post apocalyptic metropolis that you can see from a distance upon entering it (through a loading screen of course). Once you get inside, eager to explore it, you find out that it’s nothing more than a corridor, different paths are conveniently blocked and doors are closed except for the ones you need to go through. There are some zones where the game will instantly kill you if you try to jump to an “off limits” area.  Suddenly, that feeling of being in an abandoned city is gone, and your motives to be there don’t help either.

You spend most of the time being the “errand boy” for whoever is in charge. “You need to take this to X place”, “Go to X and retrieve this item”, “You have to blow up X structure”. The same formula that we have already seen in countless shooters over the past years. Games like Bioshock made a good job at pointing this out, but still offered no solution. 5 years later it feels like the industry has moved on from corridor shooters, now being actual open worlds the most popular genre. And yes, there are a lot of flaws that we can see repeated in most of these games, like inconsistent narrative and/or gameplay pacing, but overall they feel like a big step forward over the FPS saturated market from the previous generation.

 Going back to Rage, combat also takes a hit towards the end of the game. Instead of fighting “Mutants” you tend to face more humans. This changes completely the pace of the encounters. Enemies no longer run towards you but maintain a distance staying behind cover, making each fight much slower. Since the combat shifts to mid to long distance battles, guns like the pistol or shotgun from before become less crucial in favor of assault rifles and the likes. These don’t feel as fun to use, enemies get tougher and they become more and more like bullet sponges, just like the mini-bosses. Having to empty an entire magazine from an Assault Rifle in order to kill just one single enemy is not satisfying. The fast paced combat from the beginning is gone and what you get are waves and waves of slow battles, forcing you to take cover constantly, against clones repeating the same lines over and over again.

 The final nail in the coffin is the ending. Basically every new area of the game features some sort of final boss, so you expect the ending to have a big one. Well… there’s no final boss. What you get is alternate waves of mutants/humans on one of the easiest levels of the game. So when the credits rolled, I couldn’t believe that was the end of the game. It felt anticlimactic even for the poor story it was telling.