Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Just plain fun"

id Software: legends of gaming. Many consider them the fathers of the first-person shooter genre, one that has gone on to dominate the industry. Their games have become famous for incredible presentation value, standard-setting visuals, and satisfying gameplay. Yet, it has been some time since we've seen an entirely in-house game from the storied developer. Rage marks the first time we've seen such a title since Doom 3 was released in 2004, and the first time we've been shown an entirely new franchise from them since 1996′s Quake. Expectations – and hopes – for this game have been quite elevated. In some ways, they're certainly met. When firing on all cylinders, Rage is a beautiful, nail-biting thrill ride complete with exciting gunplay and far-from-filler driving sequences. But conversely, the engine sputters with RPG features that don't commit and a seemingly expansive world that isn't so explorable. It doesn't help that the PC release is feature-deficient and saddled by technical issues galore. While it might be a tad extreme to call a game with such lofty expectations a disappointment, Rage offers impressive thrills that are often countered by surprising limitations.

In 2029, the Apophis asteroid collides with Earth, causing devastating destruction and threatening the survival of the human race. Foreseeing this occurrence, inhabitants of Earth had banded together to launch the Eden Project, a last-breath effort to ensure the continuance of mankind. Through this Project, hundreds of "Arks" were constructed and buried under the Earth's surface, each containing several human survivors placed in cryostasis. Rage begins 106 years after the execution of the Eden Project, and well after the Apophis asteroid had decimated the planet. You play the role of the only survivor of your Ark, now awakened, and stepping back on to Earth for the first time with no memory of any previous occurrences. Immediately, you discover that this new Earth is not a friendly place.

First impressions of the sprawling landscapes should be absolutely breathtaking. And while they are impressively expansive and detailed, first you need to wait for all of the textures to load. This immersion-breaking moment is one that you're unfortunately forced to become accustomed to throughout your tenure with Rage. And particularly with the PC version, out of the box, it's horrendous. Turn left and textures will take a full second to load. Turn right and you'll find the same situation. Turn back left again to the same textures that loaded before and they'll start loading again, taking just as long. Everywhere you look begins as a blurry, muddy mess before transforming into something attractive. It's just the beginning of a host of technical issues that will mar your otherwise-enjoyable experience.

Texture pop-in aside, the environment is quite attractive in appearance as well as feel. Rage manages to carry a futuristic air while simultaneously feeling run-down and desperate. There's a true sense that people have banded together into whatever community they can find in an effort to survive in an utterly hostile environment, as there is surely a greater amount of barren wasteland than populated towns. The weapons are certainly generations ahead while still borrowing from the old-fashioned, such as the assault rifle that harbors a pleasing combination of gun metal and wood grain.

But the let-down about the attractive environment is that there really isn't much of anything to explore. What appears at first to be an incredible world at your feet turns out to be a tight little hallway once you try to hop over a road barrier only to find out that ye olde invisible walls are keeping you on the straight-and-narrow. And little things like the archaic "glide" up ladders rather than an actual climb take you out of the experience. It's harder to get away with mechanics like these in modern games as they've been largely phased-out over the years, and it's a bit disappointing that a typically cutting-edge developer like id Software is clinging to them.

The characters that you come across are well-acted and superbly animated. There's no immersion-breaking here; conversations with characters happen just as you walk up to them. You won't have to hit a button and enter an entirely separate mode to speak to them. The dialogue is concise with a solid balance between offering personality and information without getting too wordy. Through these conversations, you'll get a basic overview of the plot, but none of it is particularly engaging or interesting. Differing factions just seem like excuses to provide levels and don't seem to have any political or narrative impact. It really all boils down to the "Resistance" versus the "Authority" in a Half-Life-esque struggle for freedom.

As for the action, the game moves quite smoothly, with a solid, weighty feel. The combat in particular is fantastic. Aiming is accurate, whether it's down a scope or across iron sights. Enemies react to the part of their body that has been shot. If an enemy is barreling towards you (which happens quite often) and you pepper them full of bullets as they close in, their momentum will continue to carry them forwards as they stumble to the ground. On the other hand, hit them square with a shotgun blast and they'll fly backwards. Fire at an enemy in the distance and notice that blood will spatter on the wall behind him. Everything ebbs and flows with satisfying consistence in combat situations.

Rage also injects RPG elements into its otherwise-linear gameplay, but it only goes halfway. There's an inventory system that can store various throwable weapons as well as items like remote-controlled car bombs a la Call of Duty. There are a few weapon upgrades, but none of them make enough of a difference to feel like you've changed anything. There is a crafting system as well, though there aren't too many things that you can craft. Still, these extra features work well enough and do provide some variety and personal approach to keep things from becoming derivative, and the several different types of ammo are fun to change on the fly in combat situations.

But what feels missing is any sense of character progression. There are no attributes to customize, no experience points, no levels to advance, no new skills to learn. As a result, completing missions lacks that satisfaction that you'll find from games like Borderlands or Fallout 3. And along those lines, there's much less incentive to hunt out all of the side missions that you can find. Your rewards for such amount to cash – which you're just likely to spend on more ammo for the next mission anyway – and satisfaction for your obsessive-compulsive, completionist tendencies. The problem is that once you open up the door to RPG elements, you can't leave out something as necessary as character progression. It makes the extra missions feel like filler, as if nothing is different as a result of completing them.

Speaking of filler, the driving sequences are anything but. You'll receive your first vehicle early on in the game, and it's immediately a blast to zip around the wasteland even with nothing to shoot and no destinations to reach (if anything, it actually makes the world feel smaller, as you'll be dying to find a large, open area to do donuts in). And as you move on to the following towns, you can participate in the racetrack events, the winnings from which provide a unique currency used to upgrade your vehicles in the form of weapons and armor, and even some limited aesthetic customizations. And while there really aren't any vehicle-centric missions to contend with, you'll be driving to most of the mission locations in the game. And on your way, rest assured that you'll be attacked, and those upgrades will come in handy. Plus, these ambushes can result in cash rewards if you clean out all of your attackers. In this way, these otherwise transportation-only sections actually amount to little minigames during your travels, providing satisfying deviations from the linearity.

After about 15-20 hours, you'll reach the end of the campaign in a moment that can only be described as abrupt, and certainly not satisfying. But fret not, because you can go back and battle it out with some buddies in the online combat driving multiplayer. It's fun for a short while, but it amounts to a Mario Kart-influenced competitive battle with gameplay that's not quite as deep and varied as its inspiration, and it grows stale. The included FPS co-op missions are a lot of fun, though, and you'll wish for more when you're through with them. Hopefully, we might see some come down the wire in the form of DLC.

The audio elements in Rage – both the music and the sound effects – contribute greatly to the palpable excitement and tension during the action sequences. Gunfire from every weapon illicits tangible power. The growls of the Mutants, war cries of the Jackals, and banter of the Gearheads pull you in to every environment, particularly with a surround-sound setup. And the score is bang-on awesome. Just when the action ramps up, the music complements it perfectly, transforming an already nail-biting situation into absolutely raucous combat. These are truly the situations in which Rage is firing on all cylinders, and the moments when you feel that you are playing something special.

But so many of these situations are sabotaged by technical issues on the PC. Too often, you'll find yourself in the middle of an intense firefight, calling on all reflexes to place each shot perfectly as enemies clamor up the walls to reach you when the game inexplicably stops. A handful of seconds later, it will start again. Twenty more seconds pass and yet again… stop. This maddening situation does not seem to be persistent with on-screen activity, polygon count, or audio events. It truly seems to be a random occurrence, and it can bring forth an unfortunate second meaning to the game's title. You might want to go to your video settings to experiment and find the source of your problem, but you'll find that there's nearly nothing there to adjust. No texture quality options, filtering, VSync, field of view… You're given resolution and aliasing, and that's about it. There is a GPU Transcode option which may help to enable or disable, but if you're using an nVidia SLI setup, it's not there, because a resource hog like Rage doesn't support SLI. Facepalm.

Patches have been incoming from id Software, and they have offered up additional video customization options, but for many people, the stuttering issue has actually worsened. Fortunately, as always, the PC gaming community has banded together to find solutions to nearly every last one of these problems, and the Steam forums are abuzz with fixes. If you're prepared to put in several hours creating and editing config files, you're likely to have Rage running quite well on your PC. But it will take a measure of trial and error that not everyone will be willing to contend with.

Rage might not be everything we'd hoped it would be, but all the waiting wasn't entirely for naught. This game offers up FPS action in some of the most thrilling forms that we've seen in years. It's in-your-face, intense, and satisfying, and when coupled with the addictive driving sections, they're both enough to carry the game on their shoulders. But don't count on the RPG elements to take you somewhere that you've never been. The lack of character progression along with the linearity that's sadly governed by invisible walls will mean that you won't be fooled for long before you realize that you're playing a straightforward shooter. And while the game is incredibly attractive and plays wonderfully when all is well, the technical issues with the PC release are many. Shooter fans are certain to get a hefty dose of enjoyment out of Rage, but for those of you who want a working product out of the box, you may want to seriously consider the console platform for this title. Either that, or at least hold out for more patches before making a purchase.