[lpkmckenna]

I've had a few things to say about AAA gaming around here since I got into it about a year ago: that the supposed masterworks of games like Half-Life 2 and Bioshock were not the story-driven masterpieces I expected, that Borderlands is a dull shooter with endless inventory management and pointless RPG levelling tacked on, the Force Unleashed is a lousy QTE-driven snoreville, that Batman Arkham Asylum has great stealth missions but the worst boss fights I've ever seen.

But they all looked very nice. Then I played RAGE. Holy crap.

RAGE reminds me of another favourite game of mine that was destroyed by a terrible and buggy launch: Unreal Tournament 3. And RAGE was savaged by the public: at Metacritic, professional reviewers' aggregate score is 79, but users gave it a scorching 4.4 points, which was well-deserved because of texture pop-in and crashiness. id made it worse by accepting none of the blame and pushing it all on AMD and NVidia drivers. But they pushed out updates and texture pop-in complaints were resolved.

Aspyr published the port for RAGE, which scared the crap outta me. Their port of The Force Unleashed was a nightmarish hellspawn like I never expected. But I just had to see RAGE for myself.

Ars Technica gave RAGE the harshest review I'd even seen for a game: "an airless, inert experience, unsatisfying gunfights, Borderlands with the fun stripped out," etc. Ben Kuchera also tells a bunch of lies about the game, like "You go from realizing everyone you love is dead to shooting bad guys in about 30 seconds," which is false, and a several other exaggerations and pointless complaints.

He makes some good points too, like the old-school save game system. It's actually worse than that, because the game is prone to corrupting its own save game database. This happened to me three times, meaning I lost my progress in a level but was kicked back to the beginning of the mission.

My thought: play that awesome mission again? Fine by me! I eventually stopped saving altogether and just relied on the built-in checkpoint system. That meant no saving during missions, which was fine by me.

There are three utterly amazing things about this game:

1. The combat is top-shelf amazing. All the weapons are fun to use, all the enemies are fun to fight, the environments are fun to fight in.

2. The game is stunning to look at. The game has no detail textures because of the "megatexture" tech that id used to build the game, so objects up close look blurry, but the trade-off is: hand-painted detail everywhere, and extremely high geometry modelling of the environments. I was often completely gobsmacked by how intricate, enormous, and beautiful the environments were. Character animations were awesome too.

3. The "inventory system" that I normally hate in games was completely painless in RAGE. Crafting items was fun, and the things you could build like remote controlled bomb cars and "pop rockets" that turn your shotgun into a grenade launcher were all clever and unusual. Most importantly, it didn't feel like work, it didn't slow down the game, it wasn't hard to understand, and I didn't need to look up a wiki to learn it.

I do have some game design complaints:

1. The final mission was the worst in the whole game, with "monster closets" that made me think id was making fun of the player. And I was saving the ammo for the super-minigun I was just given for this mission, expecting a big boss fight, but there was none, just endless waves of goons and mutants. Playing the final mission a second time using the mini gun was a total cakewalk. Did they plan to have a big boss, and dropped it during development? Because that's how it feels. The environment is also dull and repetitive.

2. There are immersion-breaking moments everywhere. For instance, if you picked a side-mission from the job board or the postal service, the game would just "teleport" you to the mission location, and "teleport" you back when it was over, and would "magically" give you the money for completing the mission without interacting with someone. Basically, none the main missions functioned like that, so you had to travel to your mission then come back to pick up the reward. It made the side-missions feel extremely tacked on and unpolished. The "sewer missions" also felt very tacked on, so if you buy used for 360 or PS3, you aren't missing much, since the sewer missions require an unlock code on those platforms.

3. I wish the game didn't end after the final mission. I would like to have gone back to the hub towns, talked to the townsfolk like Dan Hagar (who disappears in the middle of the game for no reason and never comes back), played some more mini-games and races, and wander the Wasteland for bandits and stranded Authority goons. BTW, there should have been free-roaming mutants in the Wasteland, which otherwise feels too empty and too safe.

I recommend this game to everyone who likes shooters.

[gradient]

Interesting perspective, considering the comparisons you've made. Bioshock and Borderlands were easily two of my favourite games from the past decade, while I find Rage....pretty boring. It does look amazing, and the gameplay mechanics are stellar but after playing around 5 hours of the game (just picked it up used over the weekend) I'm quite underwhelmed by the actual content. Fetch! Fetch!

[lpkmckenna]

I liked Bioshock, I didn't want to give the impression that I didn't. But it was sold to me as stellar storytelling when it was really endless radio jabber, but everything else was fine. Maybe the twist was just so good - and it was - that people forgot you spent the whole game listening to Atlas and Ryan over the radio.

What bugs me most about Borderlands is the tedious inventory management: click on a crate, click on every item individually to pick it up, analyze and compare every gun thru a terrible, frustrating GUI and decide to keep or sell. The RAGE inventory system is just so painless.

Yeah, the missions and story in RAGE are threadbare, just excuses to go shoot people, of which I have no complaint. Having played the entire game, I don't think "more story" was needed.

[mattyb]

Originally Posted by lpkmckenna 

that Borderlands is a dull shooter with endless inventory management and pointless RPG levelling tacked on

Heathen.

[gradient]

Originally Posted by lpkmckenna 

Yeah, the missions and story in RAGE are threadbare, just excuses to go shoot people, of which I have no complaint. Having played the entire game, I don't think "more story" was needed.

It's not that I want more story from Rage, it's that I want to be able to interact with the story on some level, which there is no room for. If they didn't want to allow any kind of player interaction with the storyline, then why have a storyline at all, is my question. They built the game around an rpg-like setup yet didn't include any rpg elements; kinda strange if you ask me. They might as well have just made it a straight up COD style shooter, which it basically already is except the game forces you to do all kinds of pointless running around and listening to NPCs in order to get to the next mission.

[lpkmckenna]

Originally Posted by gradient 

It's not that I want more story from Rage, it's that I want to be able to interact with the story on some level, which there is no room for. If they didn't want to allow any kind of player interaction with the storyline, then why have a storyline at all, is my question.

I think this is an unfair complaint. All sorts of stellar games have story-structure exactly like this: every VALVe game, Batman, even Bioshock (the only affect you have on the story is killing or not killing little sisters, which is really the dumbest "moral choice" system in games ever). People don't seem to complain about the extreme linearity of Portal 2, they don't complain that it doesn't "allow any kind of player interaction with the storyline," but when RAGE does it, everyone howls. I don't get it.

EDIT: I'm not saying you're wrong to want to interact with the story, I'm just commenting that RAGE seems to be held to a requirement other beloved games are not.

They built the game around an rpg-like setup yet didn't include any rpg elements

Why do people say this? iD never promised an RPG, they promised a corridor shooter with side quests and vehicle driving.

The only half-assed RPG-like element in the game was "changing your clothes," where you had to decide between 3 types of clothing that gave you different bonuses (5% off store purchases? Really?), which felt like a meagre class system. But the Mac version includes the Crimson Armour from the Anarchy Edition, so you're saved from having to decide between three stupid options with one suit that gives all the bonuses.

...the game forces you to do all kinds of pointless running around and listening to NPCs in order to get to the next mission.

There are pointless missions (firing off the flares was literally "drive here, push a button, drive back," but there are great missions too, like being on Mutant Bash TV to win a sponsorship so you can get a better car, or the sniper cover side missions, which were a nice change of pace. I thought the delivery missions were a clever way to shoe-horn in more timed racing trials into the story.

And I liked listening to the NPCs. Like I said, I wanted to go see them at the end after the final Authority mission.

Maybe people are bothered about RAGE because you had to travel to get to the next character interaction, while in Half-Life or Portal the character interaction scenes are "along the way" in your journey thru the infinite corridor that is VALVe game design?

I also thought Borderlands and Batman character interactions were really painful to sit thru. Having to talk to that damn talking trash can over and over again was annoying. And every time Batman talked to Oracle or Cash or Gordon I just rolled my eyes.

For me, RAGE seems to hit the sweet stop between open world and infinite corridor. If Half-Life 3 is just another infinite corridor, I'm gonna be a bit let down.

BTW, while everyone likes to compare RAGE with Borderlands, it feels a lot closer to Half-Life: excellent character animation, post-apocalyptic environment, unusual signature weapon, Authority vs Resistance, long vehicle sections, and really similar weapons load-outs, including a peculiar crossbow and the "special Authority assault rifle" that no one else uses.