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.
