RAGE.

I know I promised you all a RAGE post. I know I did. I even bought it on launch day and effectively sequestered myself in my apartment until I beat it. Here’s the thing – it sucked. It really sucked. It sucked so hard that when I was finally done with it, I wanted nothing more than to forget I had ever played it. Since it’s not like you guys pay me for this shit, it seemed like a pretty solid idea. Sorry about that.

I mean, I didn’t really think that it would be that bad. How bad could it be? I mean, it’s by id Software – these guys brought us Quake and DOOM. It uses a gorgeous new engine, and it uses it well – the game world is beautiful and enthralling, the landscapes never duplicate, and even the details of how enemies take a bullet are fantastic to view. Shoot someone in the leg, they topple over like you’d expect them to, and then they crawl to cover.

That’s all great and ducky, but at its core, RAGE is still a poorly-told shooter with an identity crisis. It can’t decide what kind of game it wants to be. From the RPG-esque quest system, to the shoehorned driving segments, to the Magic: The Gathering-like minigame, RAGE is a game that constantly wishes it were something else. This would be all fine and dandy if those aspects were, well, good.

Wanna talk story? Let’s talk story.

Think of the most bland, boring, and overdone post-apocalyptic story you can imagine. It’d probably be something along the lines of Beyond Thunderdome meets Fallout meets Borderlands, right? (I’m not dissing those stories; I’m saying they’re overdone and commonplace at this point). Yeah, that’s the story of RAGE. Despite being in production for four years, the story itself read like something you and your buddies would come up with while drunk and high after a night of a Mad Max marathon.

An asteroid (they at least use a real asteroid) hits Earth and kills off/mutates most of the population, but the government made all these “ark” things with people in them to survive and rebuild society ages later. They were also jacked full of some silly special nano-things (I forget what; it was a while ago, and it was a stupid attempt to make you feel special). Ark breaks open, everyone but you dies, you crawl out into a post-apocalyptic wasteland, are about to get owned by some mutant freak, and then John Goodman’s voice shoots him in the face and saves your butt.

You hop into John’s dune buggy and he just blabs away and gives you the setup. Then despite his obvious caution that has kept him alive in a harsh and foreboding world, he wants to help you out, and sends you on some missions. A few of those in, and you’re helping people over here and people over there, for no real reason beyond the fact that there ain’t much else to do in this wasteland. Occasionally you’ll hear mention of some super-powerful “Authority” group (word on the street is, they’ll be after you).  You’ll kill some mutants, kill some raiders, and get corralled down a plotline into doing fuck-all for randoms that don’t matter at all.

By the end of the first disc, you’re a wanted man in Wellspring (the first city) and you’re shipped off to Subway City to help out The Resistance fight The Authority (really, guys? Subway City? The Resistance? Did you forget to remove the placeholder names in post-production?). Despite the stunning graphics, the landscape in part 2 is bland and tiny, there are only a couple places of interest, and then you’re off to fight The Authority on their own turf, working toward a goal that is so foolish it’s a wonder they’re serious. Big credit goes to the voice actors who managed to get through the explanation dialogue without cracking up; you guys are pros.

It’s contrived, it’s boring, it’s hackneyed, and whoever turned it in should be chastised for letting their kid write the basis of the storyline. Shame, shame, shame.

So the story sucks. Ok, what about quests, you may ask? Sure, you’re constantly being bombarded with quests, both main-storyline as well as side-quests. But are they really RPG-esque? You can either do them, or not. I’m not saying that to be a smart ass, I mean it. There are yes/no “quests” that advance the plot, but no way to advance in the plot unless you say “yes”. Why give me the damn choice, then? I’m pretty sure that when I put the game in, I was at least implicitly agreeing to play the game. Why, then, do I have to constantly reaffirm that desire within the game by saying “yes, asshole, I’ll go kill so-and-so”? How about this – when I don’t want to play the game anymore, I’ll take it out of the Xbox, ok? Until then, stop asking me yes/no questions that effectively mean the same damn thing.

The side quests don’t really further the plot so much as fill in time to make the game feel more full. This is at best the stuff of a lazy RPG, but more like a game that realizes it doesn’t have much going on but looks and wants to distract you from that fact in any way possible. Poor form.

Next up – driving. I admit, I’m hit or miss on vehicle mechanics in games. Sometimes I dig ’em, sometimes they make me want to stab orphaned infants. I will say, RAGE’s driving mechanics are pretty fun. The vehicles are responsive, the weapons systems are decent, and the explosions are satisfying. The encounters, however, are canned and tedious. There are only a few places in which you encounter enemies on the road, and in those places you will ALWAYS encounter enemies. Beyond that, it’s a simple drive-fest that reeks of filler. Sure, there are a few open-world driving mini-quests, but you can finish them all in about ten minutes (truly, all of them in the game can be completed in about ten minutes) and then that’s that. There are races within the TWO towns in the game, but even that’s pretty simple and boring.

The collectible card game was actually one of the more enjoyable aspects of the game, and even that was not free of annoyance. In each of the two main towns, there is someone in a bar waiting to play this card game with you. No one seems to mind the fact of the broken fourth wall necessary for such a game to exist, but that’s quite alright. We’ll just gloss over that.

Buy yourself a starter deck and then start playing. It’s a pretty fun game, where you make a deck out of your available cards and then fight your opponent’s deck, hoping to beat out his cards before they beat yours. There are other collectible cards that you can find throughout the world, just lying around in random places. Find those and you can make your deck better. It’d be almost fun, if not for the fact that some of the best cards available early on are only available on your first playthrough of a given area, so if you miss them, oh well – your deck is going to suck until you get to the second half of the game – and on top of that, the main reason I ended up playing a lot of the card game was so that I could afford ammo and parts for little robot minions.

All of this from what is supposedly a shooter, mind you. The shooting aspects themselves are a little boring and simplistic. Maybe I just overdosed on run-and-gun shooters in the 90s, but come on – cover-based shooting can be so fun when done correctly; I don’t understand what’s innovative or fresh about the same old game that we’ve been playing for the past 15 years, but prettier. Maybe I’m reviewing the wrong type of game, or maybe people just need to try a little harder.

All told, RAGE is barely a noble effort. It’s a stunning graphics engine, certainly, but it’s just polishing on a turd sandwich. A boring turd sandwich. A boring, bland, schizophrenic turd sandwich. The fact that this game is getting positive reviews makes me think that journos don’t want to risk falling out of grace with PR departments. You guys suck, and so does this game.