It doesnāt really hit me until about half way through the game. Iāve been spending so much time worrying over the trick of staying alive that I havenāt notice just how insignificant I am.
Itās not until Iām sent on another armed errand, off to save a general from a federal prison, that I realize that Iām risking my virtual life not to be the hero, but to save the hero.
Itās a subtle mindfuck. One that I think some people might not pick up on initially. Who would blame them? Rage is a distracting video game.
***
By far my favorite distractions in Rage are the people of the gameās desiccated Earth. The friendly ones, the ones that cluster like tribes in run down gas stations and subways, are a plentiful mix of personalities and attitude. Thereās the grandmotherly doctor with the steel, two-pronged robotic arm and reading glasses hacked together from bits and pieces of other glasses. The cute girl hanging out in Subway Town whoās only purpose seems to be telling me how terrible things are going to get. The mayors, the racers, the shop owners, the survivors.
The unfriendly people, the enemies, are a wild variety of mutant, gearhead, Eastern Bloc militant, high-tech enforcers and hooting, wild-eyed outlanders. These are the guys (I donāt think I ever saw a female enemy in the game.) who provide the grist in this mostly-shooter. What separates them isnāt just the look of their faction, the flavor of their insanity, but the way they come at you, literally. Early on in the game, youāll come up against people who jump, scramble, roll and swing at you, ping-ponging off the walls and clutter of their dens to attack you. It forces you back, as you try to pick them off along their unpredictable advance. Later the game sends enemies at you who use traps, strategy, flanking tactics, bots and armor to take you out.
These ever-changing enemy types donāt just keep you on your toes, they keep the game from feeling old. Ten hours into my 12 hour or so play-through of Rage, I came across a group of enemies that grumbled about how terrible their lot in life was. They seemed the most human of the gameās bad guys. When you shoot at them, they turn and run, sometimes tripping over their own feet, scrambling to get back up as they shoot at you or covering their face or body with a waving hand as they seek cover.
And enemies donāt all come at you on foot. Youāll also have to do a bit of driving getting from the safe zones of those few settlements to the hang-outs of this worldās bandits. On the road, in an armed buggy, ATV or car, you can face-off against other drivers, blasting away at them with mini-guns, rockets and pulse canons, or just try to outdrive them to your destination.
The driving is deliberately loose, the physics completely unbelievable, but in a good way.
They turn and run, sometimes tripping over their own feet, scrambling to get back up as they shoot at you or covering their face or body with a waving hand as they seek cover.
Survival in Rage isnāt just a matter of skilled aiming and shooting, on foot and in car, itās also about weapon and ammo selection. The first weapon youāre handed in the game is the worst, a bulky Settlerās Pistol that can hold a variety of ammo, each in cylinders that snap in and out of the gun. While better, more interesting weapons come along as you make your way through the game, assault rifles, machine guns, shotguns, crossbows, sniper rifles and rocket launchers; the gameās real shooting innovation comes with those weapons many ammo types.
Most weapons have a variety of bullet types you can load up in a gun. The pistol, for instance has bullets called Fat Mammas that tear through targets as if theyāre made of paper. It also has an ammo pack that turns the weapon into a machine pistol.
Other weapons have far more interesting ammo types, though. The shotgun can shoot off grenades or EMP charges. The crossbow can shoot electrified bolts that kill and electrocute, taking out groups of clustered enemies if they happen to be standing in water. The mindcontrol bolt turns your target into a staggering, jittering zombie that you can force to walk toward other enemies for a few seconds before they explode.
While you can buy most of this ammo, itās not cheap. There are two ways to deal with the cost of the gameās few general stores. You can earn money through side-quests, or by competing on foot or in car. The gameās two big towns have racetracks where you can drive in a variety of races to earn a special cash used only for upgrading your vehicles. You can also head over to Mutant Bash TV, a post-apocalyptic television show that pits you against rooms full of mutants for cash prizes. You can also sell off the bits and pieces of clutter you collect on your wanderings through the world. Empty beer bottles, old Doom coffee mugs, radios, bits of scrap metal, can all be picked up and later sold. You can even gamble, trying your hand at the gameās many mini and not so mini-games, like finger fillet, Strum, and that amazing collectible trading card game.
But it wonāt take long for you to realize the best method for getting the high end ammo is to make it yourself. The gameās engineering system is pretty straight forward. First you need to purchase or find schematics for the ammo or item you want to build, then you need to find the required bits and pieces to build them. Some items, like quick healing bandages, only require two items to build. Other items, like games AI-controlled, spider-like sentry bot, requires a half-dozen or so items.
Once you have the ingredients, you can engineer anywhere: Just hop into your inventory screen, choose what you want to build and press a button.
Items, like the weapon selection and ammo types, offer another neat twist on just running and gunning. These buildable objects include grenades, decapitating Wingsticks you can whip at enemies, gun turrets, lockgrinders and those nearly sentient sentry bots. The sentry bots, when set loose, drop down at your feet and then scramble around an area looking for enemies to unloose machine gun spray at. Once they clear an area through gun fire, or the occasional pouncing attack, they scramble back to your side to walk through an area with you until theyāre blown to bits. Itās almost like having a sidekick, though they rarely last very long.
Having someone by your side, even if itās only a dog-like spider bot, helps to give you a bit of companionship in your wanderings across the gameās surprisingly broad settings.
The Xbox 360 version of the game comes on three discs. The first two contain the campaign, the third the gameās multiplayer. The first disc of the two is the half of the world that includes Wellspring, the second includes the world of Subway Town. Both areas feature one major town, a wide mix of hang-outs and enemy dens and plenty of places to drive around and explore. Rage does an amazing job of delivering an eclectic mix of settings that provide gamers a chance to shoot their way through a variety of crumbling set pieces.
You will fight through collapsing hospitals and malls, shoot it out in an old garage, in bunkers, through a future military fort and an old prison. Most of my favorite backdrops, though, are on that second disc. My favorite of the lot is one of the end-game settings, a place that stretches its route through the teetering tin structures of cliff dwellings. Itās one of the only places where youāll feel like youāre not pushing your way through nearly always claustrophobic settings.
While id typically does a solid job of obscuring the required invisible walls found in these sorts of games, channeling players down set paths filled with enemies and objectives, they never really make use of their expansive world.
The gameās biggest missed opportunity is that while there are massive outdoor settings packed with hostile vehicles and intricately detailed interior levels loaded with scrambling enemies, the two rarely meet.
When youāre sent on a mission you nearly always find yourself driving to a door, getting out of your car and then entering a level. I would have loved to experience a more seamless transition from outdoor to indoor, one that allowed me to hop in and out of my vehicle, pick off enemies, approach the objective the way I wanted to.
Itās one of the few design decisions Iām unhappy about in Rage, though overall I relished the experience of separately shooting and driving my way through this new id world.
The game also does have some technical issues, problems that may or may not bother you depending both on your willingness to put up with visual imperfections and which platform youāre playing the game on.
Played on PC, the launch version of Rage was plagued with issues for some. Many of those problems are fixed or are being fixed, but even fully repaired, the computer version of idās latest title will be, at its best, the equal of the console version.
I was hoping for a game that would push my gaming rig to its full potential, but instead found a game that took some odd shortcuts in arriving on the computer.
The gameās defibrillator is a the most obvious example of this. In Rage, when you die you get a second chance: A defibrillator hard-wired into your character kicks in, shocking you back to life and killing or stunning nearby enemies. On console the percentage of health restored and the amount of damage inflicted is determined by how well you match up thumbstick movements on your controller with whatās on screen and then the timing of twin trigger pulls. On PC you just have to press a single button at the right time. Itās a watered down equivalent, one that could be used as a metaphor for idās approach to the PC version of the game. The graphics and settings all seem like echoes of what you experience on the console.
Initially, I would have put the gameās multiplayer in that category too. I was surprised and disappointed after wrapping up the game to be reminded that it doesnāt include the sort of multiplayer I like to play most: Deathmatch.
It seemed a weird choice for the people who pioneered the mode, who coined the term, to not include it in their latest game. But after talking with some of the id folk about why they decided to bypass the typical multiplayer modes for a different take on multiplayer, I decided to spend a chunk of the day checking it out.
I found a game that took some odd shortcuts in arriving on the computer.
There are two types of multiplayer in Rage. Wasteland Legends is a batch of cooperative missions apart from Rageās single-player campaign that can be played and replayed locally and with folks online for high scores and leaderboard placement. Theyāre solid, challenging shooter fare that have you working your way through a level with a buddy, shooting up everyone in sight.
Road Rage drops players is the gameās only competitive multiplayer and, as the name implies, it takes place completely behind the wheel of a vehicle.
Initially, I wasnāt a fan of the gameās armed races and chases. But then I started playing around with the gameās fourth mode, Carnage. Carnage is essentially deathmatch in cars. Once you get used to the peculiarities of the gameās physics and odd assortment of gadgets and weapons, I loved it.
I discovered, while leveling up and unlocking new armor, cars, skins and weapons, that you can drastically alter the course of your airborne vehicle with a turbo boost simply by swiveling your car about in midair and hitting the thrusters. Suddenly, I found myself boosting through in-air bootleg turns, bunny-hopping over approaching enemies, blasting away at dune buggies with in-car nailguns. Itās a much more nuanced car combat game then Iām used to, and also a much more rewarding one.
The fact that thereās just the one weapons-centric mode may start to tax my interest, but Road Rage is no throw-away addition, itās an engaging, different sort of online experience, exactly what id seemed to be aiming for when they decided to skip traditional deathmatch.
***
What I wasnāt as happy with was the gameās conclusion. Rageās story isnāt bad, itās just light. It feels like the prelude to something much bigger, a table-setter for future games set in a world with a rich fiction and eclectic environments. You are, as I mentioned earlier, not the hero of this game.
That doesnāt bother me that much, just like the sometimes rough finish of the gameās technical presentation doesnāt bother me. Sure there are issues, but there is so much to fall into and examine that the fact that the game isnāt constantly stroking my ego isnāt a big deal.
In Rage you are a guy, one of many people, buried in the ground in preparation for a world-ending comet strike. When you pop free of the stasis youāve been placed in for years, youāre not the only one to make it out alive, just the only one who survived in your particular pod.
Early on, the survivors of Rageās world make it clear that you have special powers, but they also almost immediately get busy taking advantage of you and those powers.
Itās a vastly different experience than what youāll normally find in a shooter. There are several times in Rage when you show up to play the role of the hero only to discover your just the latest hero, sent in to fix a problem. More than once, I found myself searching through the pockets of the last hero, hoping to find a little extra cash or ammo.
The gameās first mission makes it clear youāre just the new guy, not āthe guy.ā If you die, things donāt end, they just find a new person to send. And that message never wavers. When it finally sinks in that Iām just an armed messenger, it didnāt really bother me.
But the developers could have done so much more with that decision. While it frees them from the need to build up a story around you as world saver, it shouldnāt preclude any sort of character development. Not being a hero doesnāt also mean not having a backstory or motivation to do anything other than be a messenger boy.
The ending, while a perfect fit for the notion of player as useful tool, misses a wonderful opportunity to highlight idās interesting narrative decision. They could have used the ending to shock a player into the realization that theyāre a nobody in a dying world, ultimately expendable now that things are nicely in motion.
Itās not a terrible misstep, just a missed opportunity that could have nicely strengthened the gameās final moments.
That said, I loved Rage. Itās rare when I set aside a bit of time in my hectic schedule to relish the final moments of a game Iāve spent a dozen hours playing through.
You can contact Brian Crecente, the author of this post, at [emailĀ protected]. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
