Rage

Battlefield 3 is Electronic Arts’ prize horse in the shooter arena. With it they hope to capture back some of the market from Activision’s mega Call of Duty franchise. While Battlefield 3 is a large step up from many other first person shooters, it does fall into some of the familiar trappings of the genre, and past Battlefield games.

After over 100 years of being stuck in stasis your character, the sole Ark survivor of your squad, awakens and finds himself in a wasteland of a planet. You’re soon found by one of the survivors of this world and he tells you of The Authority that now rules over those beneath them. For the most part that’s all your told in the beginning and the rest of the game is composed of you doing fetch quest like missions for other survivors in The Wasteland. Though there are a few story moments sprinkled throughout the game, it’s mostly non-existent until near the end.

What Rage has already become known for is its amazing visuals and they do not disappoint. Though the 360 version of the game doesn't look quite as good as its PC counterpart, it is still one of the best looking games on the console. The Wasteland as it is called in the game looks amazing and everything else to the people, the buildings and cars are like nothing I’ve ever seen in a game before. The art along with the textures just pop and seeing it may even make you open to living in a post apocalyptic world.

While technically an open world game The Wasteland is cool to see but I never felt motivated to actually explore it. During my 12 hour playthrough the few times I actually tried to venture out and look for hidden areas but they ended up mostly being blocked off by invisible walls or just lead to areas that I would explore later in the game. The map actually works a little like a Zelda game. In the centre you have The Wasteland which is like Hyrule Field and the different paths mainly just branched off to the almost dungeon like areas which take up most of the missions.

In reality Rage is just one big fetch quest. Instead of focusing on a story the game mainly has your character going off and just helping people with their problems. “Go get this for me”, “fix this thing over there”, “find some area and tell me what you find”, are the kinds of missions you’re given throughout the game by the NPCs. There are some story points sprinkled throughout the game but it's not very interesting and ends very abruptly. In fact most of the later half of the game slows down significantly, with the entire final mission and cutscene probably becoming one of the worst I've ever seen in a long time. While the pacing of the game may be a glaring negative, the game engine that id software has created is nothing short of amazing.

Id’s new engine doesn't just impress with the visuals, the artificial intelligence and animations of each character are also some of the best I've seen from any game. Enemies know which way to move so they can dodge your bullet fire and they will even jump onto the walls and ceilings so they can get closer and attack you. When you throw a turret for supporting fire your enemies will try and find a way to get up close to it and kick it down leaving it useless. Moments like that were both impressive and unexpected making you think fast about what you were going to do next.

The incredible animations that the mutants can pull off add to the appeal of the AI with each movement looking so realistic that its feels a little strange to see a fictional character actually doing it so well. The animations also come into play with NPCs that are just entertaining to watch and even hear because of the great voice acting, unfortunately they don't really have anything interesting to say. Most of the characters are stereotypical like a hardass cop to the jolly major whose names I can’t even remember because I cared so little for them.

What stands out the most of course is Rage’s gunplay and it shouldn’t be a surprise with the game coming the people who made Doom and Quake. The guns while mostly standard affair for most shooters, all control perfectly and even have multiple ammo types that you can switch to on the fly to help combat different types of enemies. Along with the guns are different weapons that you can craft anywhere in the game assuming you have the necessary parts to create them. Explosive RC cars, turrets, grenades and throwable objects called Wing Sticks are at your disposal along with others to help fight the enemies in the Wasteland, providing a magnitude of ways to take on each fight differently.

The other half of Rage is driving and while in most FPS focused games the driving seems to be an afterthought, in Rage it’s almost like a second game built in and is really enjoyable. Assuming you like arcade style racers like Burnout or Motorstorm, you’ll feel right at home. Driving vehicles is your mode of transportation around The Wasteland along with the Racing/Battle side modes in the main cities. Racing is what you would expect, doing a couple laps around the track using your nitro and when activated, weapons to pass your opponents. The Battle mode is similar to the one in Twisted Metal, where you use your machine guns, rockets or just slamming into each other to take out your opponents. All of that mixed with great controls makes a surprisingly awesome racing section to the otherwise gun heavy sections. The same modes are also available as the game’s multiplayer instead of a standard versus with guns. With versus modes in games like Quake being such a hit, the only reason I could think of as to why id would not including similar modes in Rage is the popularity of Call of Duty taking over any other games that come to challenge it, though it’s still a missed opportunity.

If you thought Rage would be more of a Borderlands meets Fallout kind of game look elsewhere. Rage is more of a standard FPS game with an open world thrown in that branches off to each level. If id were to use the same tech but added a more present and entertaining story it would be more worth your dollar, but for now Rage just sits as a good incarnation of a genre we’ve played a million times already.