Desert Wisdom

Rage

The primary premise behind this game is an asteroid is falling to earth and you are one of the few people being put into a capsule-like vault… sound familiar? This game is essentially a bunch of games all smashed into one. Rage has some great features like different ammo types for your weapons as well as the fun car races/battles. However, I am fairly disappointed with this game.  It feels like it can’t make it’s mind up if it’s an open world game or a linear path game. I’m sure they designed it to be open with the choice to do missions and then linear when you do the missions, however, it just feels rather like they don’t know what they’re doing (the developers that is).

Graphically, it feels like they have taken almost every design cue from Red Faction Guerilla, as all the vehicles, landscape and even some of the weapons look like they were based on the Red Faction game.  Now I’m a huge fan of Guerilla and so I like the design of this game, it feels good. When you’re outside it feels great, it looks great and everything feels like it should be for a post apocalyptic game, with good textures and good game play. However, when you go inside, either in to a town, or entering a mission, you start to feel like the textures were rushed, or at best, poor quality.  I’m sure they were as good as they could be, but the problem with post apocalyptic textures is that it’s all based on rubble, dirt and, well, destruction, meaning you need to put so much time into creating textures which look right, you have to have great texture artists. Here, they’re either not producing the quality of textures needed to pull this off or it’s being dumbed down for the consoles – probably the latter.

It would have been better if they had set the inside sections in a cleaner environment where, say, the evil authority had set up camps for the remnants of humanity to live in where they patrol and essentially force people to live their way. Then, the textures would look better and only when you go outside would you see the true wasteland destruction.

Anyway it’s a good game with some fun game play and some very fun weaponry, although I personally would have liked more bosses and particular bad guys who needed to be killed by specific weapons, but over all the game play was a lot of fun.

Rage is filled with poor storytelling and poor textures, however, if you can push past the fact that you have little to no idea what’s going on and just enjoy the game play of simply racing and shooting then you can enjoy this game.

I feel that this game is best played now when the game is worth about $20/£15.  I was able to get about 12 hours out of it and I didn’t play every mission. So you should be able to get a fair few hours worth of game play.

In conclusion, this is a mediocre game at best but it is good for wasting a bunch of hours, it’s not Bethesda’s finest work but you can see their influence and hearing the sounds from Quake is fun.  If you want a rich storyline or great graphics then you might want to avoid this game, but if you simply want to shoot bad guys and race cars then this is a good game to get – especially if it’s on sale.