I had a good hour to play ID’s upcoming shooter Rage, after about half an hour I asked myself, ‘Why aren’t I enjoying this?’ I walked away very underwhelmed by what I had played. With that in mind however, I’m still going to buy it.

Rage is an ID game, made by the veterans who brought you Doom and Quake, ID are known as pioneers of graphics technology in videogames and Rage is no exception. I’ve not seen an XBox game perform as well as this did, the graphics are sharp featuring incredibly detailed textures and the whole thing runs at 60 frames per second without fail, all the time. Unlike with Gears of War 3 where there’s that console fuzzyness to the visuals and an inconsistent frame rate, Rage feels like it’s being played on a high end PC. I can’t wait to see what it’s like on the PC, much the same I imagine.

Just having a pretty face doesn’t make it worth taking home, so I spent my time trying to figure out the meat of this shooter. I had 3 modes available to play, a slice of the singleplayer campaign, an arena or ‘challenge map’ style game mode which is similar to the iOS version of Rage and finally a race. Yeah so Rage has cars and it’s a big part of the game, I jumped into the race – it was pretty much what I expected, the driving controls wouldn’t be enough to warrant its own game, forgiving and imprecise. The race mode was a little like a terrible Mario Kart, there are floating cubed shapes to drive over which grants the driver weapons of which I only got rockets. Racing could serve as a reasonable diversion in the campaign, breaking up the action but having it’s own mode seemed pointless.

The campaign section I played dropped you straight into a pretty but generic looking facility building with no idea what was happening. I had a bunch of weapons including what you expect, shotgun, assault rifle, sniper and pistol plus a few extras. Two gadgets I enjoyed were this Frisbee-like oversized Shuriken blade you throw at a relaxed pace as it glides in the air. The other gadget I liked was the RC car, placing the car down changes the controls and perspective to reflect driving a car and then you can drive it to where you want and explode it.

I’m trying to think about how I can provide some context to the dank, concrete facility I was in but I  can’t really, it was just a matter of running into different rooms and shooting different enemy types. I found the shooting hinted at something excellent, it was smooth and responsive – especially the shotgun. The AI was a mix of armoured dudes ducking behind cover and weird mutant dudes running straight at you. There’s that beautiful rhythm to the combat which is rare to find, the shooting felt somewhere between Doom, Halo and FEAR. Nailing one guy to your right with a shotgun while throwing the Shuriken out to a charging enemy to your left, swapping out for a sniper rifle to get a head-shot at a distance and finishing the rest off with the assault rifle…it all just flows real nice.

I died quite a few times and it annoyed the hell out of me. Not being killed – that was fine as I was playing the game badly, what annoyed me was this stupid and lengthy mini-game that pops up when you’ve eaten too many bullets. It’s such a long and convoluted process of aligning the left and right sticks to match different patterns and timing the correct presses of the triggers like in some fucking rhythm action game. It lasts for anywhere between 30seconds and a minuet – every time you die. It’s worse than being killed in Deus Ex and having to wait through a long loading screen. If they want to keep the action moving and not have to force the player to repeat sections because of being killed then the revival mechanic has to be quick. Take El Shaddai for example, you just hammer the A button to keep yourself in the game, it’s the equivalent of the game asking ‘do you want to continue?’

Stupid death mechanics aside my biggest worry with the game and I what I think is partly responsable for my bad impression of it is that I’ve walked away not knowing what the hell is going on. Aesthetically the game looks like Boarderlands and Fallout – it’s a style I’m very bored of in shooters now. Mechanically the game playes like Doom but with smarter AI and a greater variation of weapons. There’s driving…but that’s all I can think of, I didn’t see any NPC interaction and there was no space for exploration at all, so much of the heart of the game was blocked off from the Eurogamer version and all that’s left is just another pretty shooter. I’m still going to get it though, because I’m a sucker – but I’d recommend waiting for the reviews to come out before purchasing.

About the author

Michael Manning

Michael is a sound designer and composer working in the games industry. His portfolio can be found at www.manningaudio.com