Rage
A few years back Bethesda and ID Software announced a fantastic looking post-apocalyptic FPS. Often confused with Gearbox's great looking post-apocalyptic FPS game announced around the same time, Borderlands, but in the end vastly different. Rage, brought to you by the same people that created Doom, takes place in a future over a hundred years from now where an asteroid hit reduced the earth's population to a Mad Max-esque group of survivors.
Your player character is an outsider to this population. You are part of a survival program called the Eden Project where a group of select people were perfected to survive the worst post-apocalypse and cryogenically frozen to emerge when it was safe to repopulate the earth.
When you awake, buried deep underground, you find that your Ark is damaged and you have very little idea what is going on. From there you discover what a mess the world has become since you were frozen. Survivors pull together battered settlements spread across desert wastelands, aggressive and deadly mutants roam the landscape and the Authority likes to call itself a governing body who controls all it can see and hear in this new world.
Rage ends up being a pretty straightforward, fairly linear shooter that is of average length but excels in a lot of areas. Firstly, it's beautiful. Running on the next generation of the engine that powered Doom 3, Rage looks exceptional on consoles. The landscapes are fantastic and the lighting is nice and accurate. All the characters are beautifully designed and animated gorgeously. Some are exceptional, touting just the right amount of caricature that is fleshed out colourfully with either well over-acted motion capture or more likely, exceptionally well keyframed animations.
Rage features a ton of crazy weapons, including ammunition you can craft, bomb-rigged RC cars and 'wingsticks', which are basically killer boomerangs. (And the single best weapon in the whole game.) Another large part of the game is the driving element. With a number of cars to choose from, you can dart across the landscape from settlement to settlement in rat-rods, trucks and buggies as well as race them for credits which let you upgrade and personalize each vehicle. The cars control so well that it really separates it from a large majority of other games which try to mix FPS gaming with driving where the driving almost always suffers. Though lately, this has been less and less the case. Regardless, Rage sure mixes the two nicely and the racing element is actually very enjoyable.
I really loved Rage. It was just chock full of character in places that tend to get overlooked. The combat was fun, driving was fun and the whole thing looked gorgeous. It was a nice departure from the Doom series for ID games and even though they are working on a Doom 4, I'd still love to see them put some work into a Rage sequel. Because it really felt like a great game, but definitely one that worked well as a platform to create an even better sequel.
A few years back Bethesda and ID Software announced a fantastic looking post-apocalyptic FPS. Often confused with Gearbox's great looking post-apocalyptic FPS game announced around the same time, Borderlands, but in the end vastly different. Rage, brought to you by the same people that created Doom, takes place in a future over a hundred years from now where an asteroid hit reduced the earth's population to a Mad Max-esque group of survivors.Your player character is an outsider to this population. You are part of a survival program called the Eden Project where a group of select people were perfected to survive the worst post-apocalypse and cryogenically frozen to emerge when it was safe to repopulate the earth.
When you awake, buried deep underground, you find that your Ark is damaged and you have very little idea what is going on. From there you discover what a mess the world has become since you were frozen. Survivors pull together battered settlements spread across desert wastelands, aggressive and deadly mutants roam the landscape and the Authority likes to call itself a governing body who controls all it can see and hear in this new world. Rage ends up being a pretty straightforward, fairly linear shooter that is of average length but excels in a lot of areas. Firstly, it's beautiful. Running on the next generation of the engine that powered Doom 3, Rage looks exceptional on consoles. The landscapes are fantastic and the lighting is nice and accurate. All the characters are beautifully designed and animated gorgeously. Some are exceptional, touting just the right amount of caricature that is fleshed out colourfully with either well over-acted motion capture or more likely, exceptionally well keyframed animations. I really loved Rage. It was just chock full of character in places that tend to get overlooked. The combat was fun, driving was fun and the whole thing looked gorgeous. It was a nice departure from the Doom series for ID games and even though they are working on a Doom 4, I'd still love to see them put some work into a Rage sequel. Because it really felt like a great game, but definitely one that worked well as a platform to create an even better sequel.
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