Play Relevant Month: Raging off the Rocks

When Doom was put out all those ages ago, it didn't really have much of a story. Like a good horror film, it presented itself through powerful visuals. It had lighting, it was spooky, you strapped in and off you went against the demon hordes. Game storytelling has moved up a fair amount since I was a little kid all those years ago, but there is something to be said for the Mario, the Sonic, the Doom style of gameplay introduction. You pick it up and go.

Rage on the other hand wants to have a story, so it opens with a cutscene, then what amounts to tutorial. The first time through, I got bored through the tutorial before I could save. I assumed it did the checkpoint autosave thing! So I had to do the start again. I stands out when you think about Doom, where I'd have been knee deep in the dead (hehe) in the same span of time.

The open is so jarring and weird to me besides. Like I said, you have your classic pick up and go games, and then you have storied games. In this, you're a guy in a pod, you wake up suddenly. And then pod opens to like, outdoors? So you think you're in the middle of some wasteland, which I guess you are, except some guy jumps you and bullets start flying seconds later. The pod was right there! If they wanted my delicious meaty bits, why didn't they just open the pod?

And then you're talking to John Goodman. He wants you to help out. For lack of anything else to do, you do. Spoiler: That describes the entire story.

The first thing that stands out about RAGE beyond the rather goofy opening segments is just how startlingly pretty the game is. To say that the engine is probably the best available is a risky statement, but probably true.. CryTek's engine looked really great too, and they are very different scenarios in terms of visuals, but RAGE really beats it in terms of character models. Maybe BF3's engine is better, but I've never played it and probably won't any time soon.

Probably a little too pretty, and a bit exposed?

One thing that I personally really like, other than how much variety there are to the models, is how nice the female character models are. It's nice to see pretty but not oversexualized cheerleaders, you know? It's just so artistically lazy to draw the same smooth skinned blondes with huge breasts. Rage has women who actually look like they fit the setting, though of course some are a little too pretty. Granted the same could be said for a quite a number of the dudes, who again, a bit too pretty. On the other hand we do see the return of Miranda's Ass, or maybe I should call it Miranda's Ass Sticking out Syndrome? I dunno, but that one broad's behind gave me Mass Effect 2 flashbacks.

I mean hey, I like asses and at least this gal wasn't murdering people at the time. Seriously, Bioware - there's sexy time, and then there's murder time. Please don't conflate the two. Unless you're Bro team, then you're allowed to scream about loving murder and sodomy. See also: being insane.

Not a very sweet ride

The weird element of Rage's engine or more so the choices the development team made was in how it highlights how gorgeous a mutant wasteland can be. On the other hand, the graphics really draw out some of the game's flaws. There's the odd moment of utter silliness when an enemy is spewing bullets across the wasteland in your general direction, locking on through cover, Because the game actual looks so much more realistic, the cartoony goofiness of FPS games really shines through. Once you get yourself a vehicle you're too busy driving to notice, but here and there you lose some of the game's shine through it.

Driving and vehicle sections are an important part of Rage, with several elements running through and into the whole concept of your "wasteland ride". I've heard mixed responses to the driving stuff and I think I take to it a little better than other people. One of the biggest problems is this weird delight the designers seem to take in making the roads either ridiculously small or having weird chunky bits sticking out of everything. You often find your car spinning out of control, having bumped into some poking out bit of rock or whatever. As design choices go this is likely the worst of Rage's decisions, as it makes driving really unenjoyable. I realize there's an element of both realism and design limitation, but the game feels like paralleling parking half the time. Ugh.

Outside of driving, there's gunplay. In this regard I was surprised at how ... Doomlike the game is. Like Doom, there's a long list of different weapons and they're all in your inventory once you get them. And like Doom, other than the pistol, they're all useful even past having huge amounts of ammo. In the dead city areas I found myself flipping between crossbow, shotgun, MG, sniper rifle all while using two kinds of grenade - And actively feeling like weapon choice mattered at different combat ranges. This is a surprising experience in two ways; first, you rarely get to use "all the guns" in other games. In Crysis or Bulletstorm, a selection is made based on a best fit armament for the two primary arenas of ranged combat - near melee and long distance - often leaving you with a hankering for a third or fourth weapon. In Rage, like Doom, you change weapons for short, medium, long and extremely long range, though admittedly Doom didn't really have an extreme long rage weapons what with the huge pixels and the no zoom.

The weapons are a little samey in parts, but they feel good and look good. I don't find myself favoring a given weapon (as I did in Crysis and as I was forced in Bulletstorm) which is the mark of good design. I do feel like being allowed seven weapons, plus quick weapons, is a little ridiculous at times, but this is also a game where your heart being shocked back into beating heals bullet wounds.

The one thing I find really dismal about the game is how weapons connecting with melee enemies doesn't have the same feel hitting normal enemies does. It's strange, most enemies stagger or wince at hits, but melee opponents can take shotgun discharges at point blank in the face without the slightest quiver in their movements. I get that it's a balancing aspect, but it isn't exactly easy to nail a mutant in your face at point blank.

So basically RAGE is a competent, attractively engined shooter with confusing art direction and some half-decent driving sections that don't feel too shoehorned into the rest of the game. The engine is pretty and responsive with tons of detailing on every model, though the GUI and windows within the game are pretty mediocre, but likely crippled by the "console vs PC" struggle that all games seem to have because development can't code two UIs or something. In all of these senses, the game is pretty solid and offers a pretty decent amount of content for its Steam sale price.

But then you get to the story...

Rage is unique, special even, for how miserable the story is. This is not to say that the story is really bad or at all offensive, I mean it is actually miserable in the sense of a sulking teenage boy, up in his room crying over his lost ex-girlfriend. In Rage you are offered no real motivation, your character simply does things because he does them. It really is "for lack of a better thing to do". You care about no one and no attempt is made to make your care, fear or feel anything towards the various characters in the game. There are no friendships, little camaraderie and no sense of romance.

They built this! They MUST be evil!

There is no ultimate antagonist in the game nor any real form of antagonistic structure or struggle. The various cities, while grateful and in theory holding on precariously, really do not feel over much like they need your hold or the help of the "rebels" in the game. There are a few vague statements about whatever the "bad guys" are doing that you need to stop, but little justification for why they're doing and no real visceral moments to really drive it home. Women and children are left unmolested, pretty girls hang out on street corners smiling at you, and wastelanders thank you in the street for driving a good race. They don't seem to like "the Authority" but the Authority seems to have a much better handle on what it is doing than anyone else.

The game just doesn't connect with you at all and really doesn't try to. It feels at times as though the game designers sought to product a game with a conflict as self-asserting as Doom. In Doom, there are demons, which you naturally feel inclined to fight - a demon is, by definition, a creation you are never meant to feel sympathy towards. But nothing in Rage really feels sufficiently dehumanized to create that fierce logic. So the game is unique in how floaty and detached its justification feels, carrying you through a variety of pretty and detailed locations with so little in the way of sentimentality.

It's a unique game for this, though I doubt many other people are going to get excited about the conceptual oddity of a story presented that entirely lacks subtext. In spite of being titled Rage, the game is probably better titled Ambivalence. There's lots of iconography and weirdness in the game, but it's all presented "as is" without any meaning. That's a very different experience, which I find exciting in a way I doubt others will, but I still think the shooting and driving produce a solid enough title even if the story is strangely empty.

I played through the game and finished it a day after the announcement that, apparently, the game is receiving DLC. I liked the game enough to recommend it to others, but I'm not waiting around for the DLC. I need to free up space on my SSD! Sorry Rage, you just weren't that exciting. More of a low anger, maybe a disdain? Loathing?