Rage Review

• All The Rage

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  OK first off this game is really amazing, I enjoyed every second of it, but that said there is no actual main story to this game. The entire main game is made up of side missions for one person or another and every so often if you can be bothered doing them are the races. The fire fights are truly enjoyable and feel almost like Call of Duty in their intensity.

  
  

  
  

  
  

  The story, to begin with is straight forward.  An asteroid is about to hit the earth and destroy all life so the clever folks in charge make a bunch of tunnelling machines with stasis pods inside. The game starts with you emerging, very much like Fallout 3, into the sunshine and a ravine where you immediately get attacked and luckily saved by a local sheriff. This is where however the main story pretty much stops as from that point on your quests are simply given to you by one character and then another without any real explanation of a main quest apart from staying alive. Eventually however you start to realise that the main quest is to stop the authority and save everyone around you from enslavement. Although a good question here is why the hell should I, with the only answer being because you can, you wonder what’s the point. The menus are rather dull and the only real weapons you get are ranged or point blank, pretty much. You do get some cool types of ammo for each of your weapons but in the main it’s simply a strategy of duck, pop and shoot.

  
  

  
  

  
  

  The controls on rage are genius, allowing you to change guns with your right stick and change your ammo type with the left. On top of this you have the different mechanical help you can build such as turrets and bomb cars. All in all a wide range of weaponry but not quite as wide as I would have liked. All controls are easy to navigate and smooth throughout the game, even the racing is enjoyable to the point of playing the online racing for several hours being perfectly understandable. Think Mario cart for grown-ups with rockets instead of shells. The varying difficulty levels allow you to replay the game several times without becoming annoyed by dumb enemies, but that said once you’ve completed this game on its hardest setting the campaign has little else to offer you. However luckily it then has its online racing feature and also a co-op style set of missions called 'Legends of the Waste' in which you and a friend can play through some of the old stories from within the campaign. The graphics are beautiful to behold like most id and Bethesda games are. It’s a cross between cartoon and reality and looks amazing to say the least.  I at no point came across any glitches or bad looking areas which is definitely a plus. The game's sounds are, to put it bluntly pure joy, they really make you appreciate them from the sound of the guns to the sound of you revving an engine in your car, it really helps to get your blood pumping. The sounds are really very gritty and it fits perfectly into the wasteland that you are situated in, each sound feels right.

  
  

  
  

  
  

  This game is a definite must buy for me, the only down side is the campaign although fairly long has no real main quest which I feel lets the game down as a whole story-wise. Every so often you’ll come across another part of the story which does not make sense from what you have actually done yourself through the game, such as beating a driver in a race and then speaking to them later in the game and them telling you that no one has ever beaten them, erm yeah they have, I did remember mate? This causes you think some fine tuning story wise would have been a good idea. That said the whole experience of the game was thoroughly enjoyable and I never wanted to stop.