Rage

I've been sitting on this one for a long time. I bought Rage when it came out; I might have preordered it. Hey, I don't have any other id game, they seem to be rather reputable (they made the FPS genre), and a wizard lives there, so you can't go wrong, right? Well, it's easily my third worst gaming disappointment.

Rage Screenshot, driving through one of the many canyons

I was sold on the vehicular combat. I was hoping that there would be vehicular carnage like that of yesterdecades, but there was not. To say that racing is the central part of the game is incorrect. Generally, you have a gun on your car, because everyone else has guns on their cars, and they start attacking you when you drive around to your missions. I'm not sure whether or not the driving feels "arcadey" or not. Though, what racing or game with driving isn't arcadey? Is there any other kind? It's like cameras being "point-and-shoot". Aren't all cameras like that? What camera do you not point at something then "shoot" it?

For all that it is, Rage is beautiful. The wizard seems to have chased all visual duplication, as supposedly there are no repeating textures. I think that is a little overkill. If something came out of the same factory, its sensible for it to have the same texture. Unless there are a few of them beside each other, I won't even notice that the pattern of dirt is the same. Also, this game "weighs" over 20 gigs, so it's fat for a 2011 game. The weapons handle rather well.

The game itself I can't really get into. I simply don't care about the world it presents, and it's only the desire to get to the end that makes me play it. It doesn't end well either. The characters are bland, and they don't do much besides dispense missions and rewards. The story doesn't build up to anything, nor does the action at the end make any real sense. Later on in the game, I was looking at all the dudes with really cool armor, and I wanted a suit of my own or something like it, but nope. The town gradually had more of those dudes, and I was expecting them to suddenly go crazy and wreck the place and start killing everyone, but that didn't happen either.

I have a policy about DLC: I will get it only if I like the game itself. Rage fails that test. I recommend not getting this game. It's like really good origami: pretty, but ultimately flat.

Since you've made it this far, you might be interested in reading:

Taking down a vehicle convoy in the canyons. — Rage 2

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Skyrim's initial wow, look at that moment, with Bleak Falls Barrow in the distance. — The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

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Screenshot of Papers, Please, showing a multitude of documents and a man with killer sideburns — Papers, Please

Papers, Please is a bureaucrat simulator where you man a border checkpoint in a fictional totalitarian country during the late cold war. Gameplay mostly involves examining people's passports and other entry documents and calling 'gotcha' on them. Otherwise, you let them through if you can't find anything or you're lazy.

Project Twentieth Century: Planning