Playing “Rage” is like tearing into your Happy Meal only to discover somebody’s replaced your fries with apple slices. The meal still makes you happy, but something just ain’t right. Developed by id Software, the “Doom” and “Quake” makers who invented the modern first-person shooter, “Rage” hearkens back to when the genre was more about destruction than precision. To those of us immersed in twitchy military shooters, “Rage” is more kinetic than we’re used to. It’s not so much about headshots as knocking people around, disrupting their momentum, trying not to get your sternum stabbed by a maniac doing somersaults and spitting one-liners Freddy Krueger would envy. The bad guys in “Rage” take too many shots to kill, but at least they act like they’ve been shot, and in general they’re the most dynamic, unpredictable and just plain fun adversaries to grace the genre in years.
Thanks largely to rocket-launching behemoths who look like Sloth from “The Goonies,” “Rage” has firefights so thrilling, I was startled by my own character’s shadow. I was also startled to be spending so much time in an id game doing three-point turns and scrounging for coffee cups.
As much as the game rages against the “Call of Duty” machine, it bears the obvious influence of the new crop of scavenging-heavy, save-a-minute shooters like “Borderlands.” Consequently “Rage” suffers from an identity crisis. Is it an action game, like “Doom,” or a war of attrition against the environment, like “Fallout”?
| ‘Rage’ |
| » Systems: PS3, Xbox 360, PC |
| » Price: $59.99 |
| » Rating: 4 out of 5 stars |
The driving I don’t have a problem with. Tearing around the game’s desert basins on a dune buggy is quite fun, actually. Moreover, crafting supplies from random loot is simpler than in “Fallout 3.” The problem is the requirement to, as the game tells you right off the bat, “save early and often.” This may not sound like a big deal, but think back: How many times did you save in “Doom”? That’s right! Never! “Rage” is effectively divided between the overworld, where you drive around, and buildings, where you blow people away. Manual saving puts constant pressure on you to make sure no progress is lost, and something as simple as automated saving at checkpoints in the buildings would have freed you from having to interrupt firefights every 30 seconds.
“Rage” disrupts the shooter marketplace with uncommonly fun, vital gameplay. But it disrupts itself with its own mechanics.
