I’ve never played anything by id before, though I knew they made Doom and Quake (shows how much I know), so I wasn’t sure what to expect when I walked out of Walmart with the PS3 copy of Rage (also the Anarchy edition stuff).  I went home, ran the update ritual as is standard with any game you don’t buy within the first hour that it comes out, and dived in.

As I have played through on normal and I’m currently attempting Nightmare difficulty I can definitely take a position on this game.  The most obvious is that it’s of the unofficial wastelander genre (includes games like Fallout 3, Jak 3 and Borderlands) in that it holds many of the qualifications.  A wasteland, scavenging to some degree, an endless supply of bandits and a technological smear of junkyard and futuristic design.  I am judging this as a wastelander game since this category cannot be easily compared to similar games of official genres.

First off, you have the story, the environment and the people in it.  Fallout gives you the rich, textured characterization and a decent story to go with it.  Borderlands gave next to no story (probably from lack of necessity) and made some good attempts at characterization but fell short with most of them.  Jak 3 (probably one of my favorite games of all time) rose the series’ story to its peak while doing a great job with a large variety of characters.  Rage is different from these.

To withhold spoilers, Earth was hit by a meteor and you’re a person that volunteered to be in a time capsule in the ground.  You get out and you’re immediately thrown at one of the friendliest people you ever encounter in the wasteland.  You’re told to kill stuff, and you go kill it.  The characterization is mediocre at best.  Each person has their own style, accent and dialect that fits their appearance, but almost all of them are flat characters, with generic reactions and no real change.  It’s enough to hold up the wasteland feel, but just barely.

The gameplay is mostly in two separate parts, vehicles and on-foot combat.  The vehicles are well done, they drive smooth, they have style and they have speed.  The two forms of vehicle gameplay involve either racing in order to afford vehicle upgrades or running over whatever is in your path from point A to point B.  The entire vehicle feel is very similar to Jak 3 when on the wasteland, just with more balance and less outrageous ideas (although it would be fun to drive a Turboslam in Rage), and like Jak X: Combat Racing when you’re in the races.  Overall, the vehicle gameplay is very satisfying and fun, not like Borderlands where you had to drive ugly cars with retard controls and weak weapons.

The on-foot experience itself resembles Borderlands more than anything else, arguably a refinement.  The gist is that you wander into places closed off from the main areas that you can drive in, and you charge through a linear path while shooting whoever is living inside, with the occasional minor detour for some extra loot.  You are then encouraged to go back again for the purpose of optional quests where the experience is almost exactly the same (you might run the path backwards or be fighting different enemies) and usually more tedious.  Rage utilizes this often and it’s usually not worth the trip unless you were out of lock grinders the first time you went through the area.  The first time through is always fun, at least.

To get further into the FPS aspect, the notable features are the weapons, crafting and the health system.  The majority of the final weapon loadout is the wasteland equivalent of your generic weapons (shotgun, machine gun, sniper, etc.) and some notable weapons I will not mention in this review.  What sets it apart is how the alternate ammo works.  For example, the pistol can have normal bullets, stronger bullets with a half-clip size, a special ammo that fires the whole clip at once, or the kill-all bullet that is so big you can only fit three or so bullets in the gun at once.  Then some weapons try to diversify a bit more like the shotgun getting exploding slugs so it doubles as a grenade launcher, and the crossbow having shock bolts that are useful for turning water into a deathtrap.  I consider it to be above average as a game that uses set weapons that you can’t lose.

Crafting is actually a nice setup.  Rage’s system involves a very limited field of ingredients that you have no penalty for collecting when you find them in order to make anything from wingsticks (the heavily featured decapitation-boomerang), special ammo, buffs and combat assistance.  It is usually worthwhile to have a diverse supply of ingredients so you can craft a sentry bot or lock grinder when you need to, and it adds a little more strategy to the game since almost all of the ingredients go with multiple recipes.  It helps add some extra depth to the gameplay.

The health system is often a controversial issue with shooters, especially regenerating health.  In Rage, you get regenerating health with a low maximum health, and should you actually “die” then you get thrown into a very short minigame where you use some sort of built-in tech to revive yourself and electrocute nearby enemies.  You then actually die should you mess up again before your defib recharges (which actually takes a while).  It is still very easy to deal with since it is still regenerating health which removes the consequences of taking a bullet every time you move from cover to shoot someone, and the defib system makes it feel like a rechargeable “extra life” that takes the edge off of the danger.

Overall, also considering id’s inability to make long games, it is a somewhat worthwhile experience that tries to counterbalance its faults with the few really fun aspects of the game.  If I had to rate it I’d probably give it an 8 out of 10, since while it’s good, it could be better and longer, not to forget more challenging (this nightmare difficulty isn’t really that hard).