Quote:
Originally Posted by bleffo19
Rage, 2011, PC
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4/10
Just finished this, and have to say I disagree with bleffo and found it to be a very fun game. Given that this will probably be $3-4 during the Summer Sale, I'd say give it a try if you're at all interested and have a machine capable of running it well now that it's almost two years old. I'm running an i5 3570k and a GTX 670 2GB and had no FPS problems, though the texture streaming is a bit wonky until you mess around with some custom settings. This is my biggest mark against the game, and it's pretty silly this far after launch that this hasn't been patched to work well out of the box.
The story is that the asteroid Apophis hit the earth in 2029, and a program was set up beforehand to bury capsules filled with genetically engineered troops in cryostasis, to come out after like 100 years or so. You wake up early for some reason, it's never explained, and spend the game working through different quest hubs siding up with a rebel group fighting a military faction called the authority.
Obviously, this being id, the story is not its strong suit, but it's not cheesy or too cliche, and each hub has a ton of different NPCs that you can interact with. After each mission they'll have something new to say that might be related to something you've just done, or something about the city/world/other characters. The voice acting is great across the board, and the dialogue is better than average. The character models are the real standout, with lots of unique mocap gestures and actions each individual will do while idle or interacting with you, and they react very naturally to your presence, like turning to address you if you get close to them or cocking their head to follow you. id clearly put a ton of time into little touches here, and as far as NPC interactions go, this is the gold standard I've never seen another game live up to.
The hubs also have other things you can do. There's a racing pit where you can tune your car or find races, and there are four different vehicles you can get. I was pretty indifferent to the racing, the ai felt like early Mario Kart ai that never gets too far behind or ahead of you, and as long as you don't **** up the end you always win. You can safely ignore all of this, except I think for two races where you have to race an NPC to win a new more powerful car that'll be needed to get to new areas. Then there are four or five different gambling mini-games which are all mostly forgettable after a time or two except for a pretty cool collectible card game you can play. You start out buying a starter pack, and you can buy rare cards from vendors in different places, and also find them as hidden items throughout the world. This was one of the most interesting things in the game, and I wish they had gone a little farther with it; but as is, I found myself playing a round or two whenever I was in a town and had a new card to try out.
The missions themselves are all pretty varied and cool. You get them in the hubs by talking to people or checking a job board, then go out into the wasteland, which is basically a series of corridors down canyon valleys or mountains, and follow your minimap to get to a location. A few times you'll backtrack to mission locations you've been to before, but the areas are altered so it's not exactly the same and new parts are opened up. It is very much a disguised corridor shooter, you never really have any options as far as what path to take, but the areas are usually large and open and the exit points not obvious, which has the benefit of making you look around a lot without being overwhelmed. Unfortunately, the game doesn't really get into the story until the last few missions, and then ends very abruptly. Either a case of them not having enough time, or they had planned on doing a DLC to tie things up.
Being a FPS, it really should come down to the combat and weapons, and I had no complaints. The weapons are your standard fare, a few different rifles, a pistol, shotgun, sniper rifle, rocket launcher, crossbow and a type or bladed boomerang. They're all well balanced to be useful in the right situation, and I found myself swapping between all of them instead of falling back on to a single clear favorite like most games find me doing. And again, I think Rage wins another award for the best enemy AI in a game ever. There isn't a lot of variety, you have a few different types of humans and mutants, but they do a great job of working together to press and flank your position, or if they're being beaten, falling back and covering each other retreating to the next room. The melee enemies, especially the mutants, do an amazing job of being hard to hit by juking and rolling and being a PITA, if they ever get too close you're really stuck just using the shotgun or trying to strafe away from them and spray bullets with whatever other gun you have. Together with the AI, the animations they use are on a different level than anything I've ever seen. Shoot a guy running at you in the foot, he'll trip on that foot and take a while to recover, hurt them bad enough and they fall down and try to recover enough to shoot at you from the ground, and eventually get back up and limp away. Shotgun one running at you in the head, he'll go limp and momentum will carry him forward to topple over a ledge or go sprawling, or if he's juking go crashing into a wall and crumple up.
I could go on, but I won't - best FPS I've played in years.