Rage makes a great tech demo, but a poor game

By BatRastered — November 3, 2011
Tags: id-software rage

This is not a full-on review, but I fn hated this game. Bethesda 0 for 2 this year, after this and the Brink. I hope Skyrim can save them.

I don't think you should give a full-on review of a game if you haven't put in enough hours to beat it. I'd make an exception if the game was so hard or broken that I couldn't beat it, but that's not the problem with Rage. The problem is I just don't want to play it anymore. So... this is not really a review, you should take my opinion with a huge grain of salt because I've only played about 4 hours of Rage.

Let me start off by saying that Rage is beautiful. As a tech demo for id software's new engine, it is amazing. The lighting, the textures, everything looks great even on the now 6 year old Xbox 360. Once you get beyond the game's good looks though, you start to realize that you're not having any fun. This took me about 30 minutes to realize.

Rage looks like it has an open world, but you don't really have anywhere to explore, and the game doesn't offer any rewards to do so (at least not in the first 4 hours). When you talk to the townsfolk to get a mission, Rage doesn't take you into a cinema, but instead dialog takes place in-engine. This is good, but there is no way to skip any of it and the way it works is downright annoying. You push the button to talk, listen to them yap for a minute, then they sit there with a blank look on their face waiting for you to push the button again. You push it again, and they talk for another few minutes and this repeats for the whole conversation... it should be noted that your character doesn't talk, and there are no dialog trees, so these weird pauses serve no purpose other than to annoy.

We thought there was a co-op to this game and it'd be sort of like Borderlands, but it turns out the co-op is not the story mode, that's single player only. There is a separate co-op campaign, and it's only two player. The multiplayer for some reason is a racing game (WTF? yes really, a racing game).

The missions are sometimes just absurd, they want me to deliver something or pick up something. Instead of just going about my mission the way I want to, I have to do it their way... their way involves doing a favor for someone in order to get some new clothes, put guns on the car, etc. To upgrade the car, you can't use the money you've collected, you have to collect "race tickets" by playing the stupid racing mini-game. You have to talk to two different people to enter the racing. Once I started the mission, I just zoomed by all the bad guys anyway, I didn't feel like trying my hand at vehicular combat just yet, but the game wanted me to take out 5 of them to complete some other side mission. Whatever. At this point I'm getting frustrated by the game.

I'm climbing a ladder in an enemy controlled area; after fighting my way through dozens of enemies I am cautious. I poke my head up and try to get a quick look around the area before committing to fully climbing up there. Rage interprets this motion as me wanting to jump off the ladder to my death. Great, now I have to wait for this loading screen... and I'm back in the first town... WTF? Oh, you didn't know? Rage only auto-saves once in a blue moon. I lost an hour of progress. I'd say the manual save system was something out of the 90's but the truth is there were better save systems back then. I'm now officially done with this game.

We promise a full-on golden video review with FnJimmy later (he can't stop playing it), but for now, I'd say don't waste your time with this garbage.

Rage

Rage makes a great tech demo, but a poor game

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