Rage, completed [video game, review]

[elfs]

I finished Rage, and I have to say that, in the end, I was not terribly impressed. Rage is basically a technical demonstration of the ID Tech 5 gaming engine: a whole bunch of different games, all thrown together into a stew, but made without enough meat, or vegetables.

There are three acts: Wasteland, Wellspring, and Subwaytown. But Wellspring is "in" the Wasteland and you can drive back and forth between them easily. Once you go to Subwaytown, you can never go back to the others, and if you haven't finished all the sub-missions (not critical to the central plot, but still fun), you can't. Worse, Subwaytown feels rushed: there are only four real "missions," which felt like far fewer than those in the Wasteland part. Part of that was due to there being only one "side job" in all of Subwaytown, and while there are seven sewers in Wasteland, later there are only two.

And the final act is, well, dumb. It's like suddenly you fell into Quake III, with no explanation, no build, none of the critical revelation. Just wham!, and you're in. Also, two things you were promised never happen: You never meet Dan Hagar a second time, and I won't spoil the other one but believe me, it's a big promise never delivered.

Rage has a problem: it needs to be popular enough to justify producing downloadable episodes to round out the story, but it had to be shipped on time. It has failed at this balancing act, and I'm oddly not sorry. This is the first game ID has released since being bought by Bethesda software, and it's the first one since Return to Castle Wolfenstein that has failed to grab me in a serious way.

Comments

[oldhans117.livejournal.com]

So it's just like the original quake, someone else will have to build a game out of the engine. As least it's pallet is not just brown and gray.