RAGE being developed by ID Software had made many leaps in the gaming industry, from graphics, gameplay and innovating the FPS genre, but now have fallen flat on their faces when making something that could have been fantastic in every way. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic setting, the intro tells of a group of people been assigned for preservation of the human race from a catastrophic featuring an asteroid wiping out civilisation. Staring as one of people being preserved, you are woken up from your cryostasis in a preservation pod, finding out that you’re the only one alive, once leaving the pod you find yourself in a desolate world surrounded by mutant, bandits and a group called the Authority.

The story is non-existent including your character’s personality, back history, or even an authority and reason for yourself. The character being played is nothing more than a blank slate, ID Software (though never really praised for its story) failed horribly on this aspect of the game, most of the time, nothing was interesting about what you were doing or why you were doing it, every time you go out to fight, the sense of achievement is seldom. Even though ID Software tries to create some dynamic characters to interact with, all of them seem to have this inauthentic feel to their personality, though their designs of the character and clothing fit the bill of someone who has a certain type of personality, the dialogue and the voice acting is forced. When interacting with characters in a main mission, the game forces you to be with them at all time when giving their briefing, listening to what they’re saying, there’s no skipping these moments nor is there anything interesting for them to say.Some quests and mission such as racing are also required to get through the game. ID Software could have done better.
But looking at some positives, RAGE’s gunplay makes the game very enjoyable to play. Featuring the generic pistol, shotgun, sub machine gun and a few apocalyptic weapon. Each weapon packs it own punch, the fights and the AI interaction with the enemies you face can be a fantastic experience, each enemy has their own intelligence when fighting. This is possibly the best aspect to the game.
Audio is crisp and sounds great to listen to, with most sounds being quite authentic for the genre. The graphics are another positive, the developers have put extra special care into making some of the best graphics at the time, there’s much artistic detail put into every nook and cranny of the environment (even if it’s somewhat generic). Though fantastic, the graphics PC version (which I own) has tons of texture pop-ups, every time I look at a valley or turn around, I see smudgy looking textures all over the place. This is part is unacceptable on the part of ID Software.

Conclusion: Overall such experience was left wanting, the game had potential but ID Software didn’t take notice of it, instead we are left with a game that somewhat generic game and also technically problematic on the PC.