Rage Xbox 360

Rage is looking to be my choice for game of the year, yes, over the FPS greats Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3 and co. All of which I am a big fan of.

Rage has similar FPS gun mechanics that us FPS gamers are familiar too but it breaks from the linear story-based campaign we're so familiar with in Call of Duty, Battlefield and others.

Id Software are the true pioneers who helped popularise the FPS genre in the 1990s with Wolfenstein, Quake and Doom, so one knows that they have truly taken their time in creating something great, something different, something campaign-wise which is the focus of the game and won't take 4 hours to complete like others like Call of Duty whose understandable focus is, and should be, online multiplayer and customization.

I'll be playing this game non-stop, when I'm not at work that is. From the trailers and game play that I have seen so far, Rage looks amazing. Literally.

Rage sports the new id tech 5 game engine, Battlefield 3 has the amazing looking new Frost bite 2 engine, Unreal has created an updated version of Unreal engine 3 with anticipation for the Unreal engine 4 (which Epic games appears to be holding out for the coming next generation of console), hopefully Modern Warfare 3 will be based on an updated version of the IW engine, more polished and refined.

First-Person-Shooters like Rage, Battlefield 3 and others are leading the way for the coming next generation of game engines and video game consoles. I believe the games being released in Q3 and Q4 of 2011 are the purveyors and start of this process. If people haven't noticed, then its time to take notice! Rage is going to be the game of the year!

I have to concur with others when they say that this should be ‘game of the year’. Great graphics. good soundtrack. very quick and responsive, no lag during the game at all. I like the homage they pay to other games with the little clues to there origins within the game. I thoroughly enjoyed this game and for entertainement value gets 10/10 for me

id Softwares first game in 6 years. Yes, Carmack has been slaving away at this for a long time. As a 60fps console game I think this looks amazing. Hopefully they do the PC version justice too.

To those that are calling out the originality of this game, as said above this game has been in development for 6 years. Well before Fallout 3 and Borderlands were released they had put years of dev in this, it's unfortunate that there are 2 thematically similar franchises out there right now but Rage is it's own game and I wouldn't be surprised if it was considerably better than either of those games.

This game is good. Don't get me wrong, but i think that the hype its being given here is a little to overwhelming.
I honestly recommend hiring it out at the local video store before buying it. And if you enjoyed Borderlands, just don't bother playing it. As it will constantly feel like its missing the mark every time.

The graphics are great and the story is fun. But otherwise, wait till its on sale.

You’ve got to give credit to any shooter that deviates from the shoot-your-way-to-the-end-of-the-level formula, but Rage isn’t quite as revolutionary as the hype suggests. It adds the element of driving from mission to mission through a series of narrow canyons that link the mission areas. This is fine but you shouldn’t mistake this for sandbox or some kind of “open world”.

At its heart Rage is a solid, but fairly standard and linear shooter. There are settlements where you can pick up jobs, buy and sell and participate in races. You can interact with NPCs in a very limited way in that they talk to you but you don’t talk back or have any option how to respond except to accept or decline a job. These little settlements are cool but they’re not particularly well fleshed out or elaborate, and here the ugly spectre of linear gameplay raises its head. You first come to Dan Hagar’s settlement, you do all his jobs then you’re allowed to move on to Wellsprings. You do all the Wellsprings jobs then the story takes you on to a new area and Subway Town. Do all Subway Town’s missions ect ect. Not to say it’s bad, but you shouldn’t think the gameworld is a huge free-roaming sandbox with settlements and other locations that you can travel back and forth between at will.

The mission areas are even more linear, and here the game makes its most fatal mistake and degenerates into the aforementioned shoot-your-way-to-the-end-of-the-levels… Very, very linear levels. The levels look great, with their wonderfully derelict, post apocalyptic look which I adore, but it’s not enough to keep me from getting bored. The combat itself is solid and enjoyable, but what makes the levels even more tedious is the very limited type of enemies you face. It’s either the same one or two types of bandits, or one or two types of mutants, or one or two types of Authority enforcers ect. And for the most part the enemies behave completely predictably. Mutants will charge you mindlessly, while anyone armed with a firearm will hunker down behind some cover and stubbornly refuse to budge. It’s not until much later in the game where the enemies finally start to mix it up a bit and some may rush you while others stay back to cover them. This behaviour is rare however.

The game has a few other neat little features like modifying your vehicle, and to a lesser extent your weapons, a rather elaborate crafting system and there’s even some character customisation when early in the game you’re given the option of one of three armour types that give a particular benefit. You see yourself occasionally in the gameworld, but you can also check yourself out in the journal. The journal is where you keep track of your inventory, weapons and jobs and craft items (I’d prefer it if you required a work bench or something instead). Then there’s the driving, which I have to say is quite cool, but for me it’s a bit too arcady, with floating pickups that you drive over to get bonuses and endlessly respawning enemy vehicles.

Something I certainly don’t like is the profoundly stupid defibrillator which magically brings you back to life whenever you are killed. This is just thinly veiled player respawn which sucks. It removes most of the challenge from the game because it’s almost impossible for you to actually die. You will die occasionally and have to reload, but most of the time the defibrillator will bring you back, after you’ve activated it with a stupid mini game. On top of that your health auto regenerates very quickly, and you have bandages that you can apply even in the thick of combat to instantly and fully replenish your health. I loathe auto health regen, but it seems to be just something you have to put up with in modern shooters, but hey… At least it doesn’t use the checkpoint save system. You can save and load as you like.

So a solid shooter if not particularly long and nowhere near as revolutionary as you may have been led to believe. The setting is great, the shooting mechanics and controls work well, but the game suffers greatly from linear level design, repetitive and predictable combat, and a lack of dramatic narrative and emotional impetus.