DON’T MAKE ME PLAY! RAGE
Don’t like it. Never tried it. Every month we force one of our team to play their most feared game
When Rage came out in 2011, it seemed like the best days of Id – developer of Doom and Quake – were behind it. Worse, coming at a time when postapocalyptic wastelands shooters were (excuse the pun) all the rage thanks to Borderlands and Fallout 3, Rage looked like a desperate attempt to stay relevant. So I stuck to Pandora and Megaton One.
Flying into Rage for the first time now, following the recent, unexpected announcement of a sequel, it doesn’t do much to bust my preconceptions.
I step out of an Ark bunker – nope, not a Vault, definitely not – where I’ve spent the last century in cryogenic freeze, and straight into a postindustrial desert filled with bandits, mutants, and ramshackle vehicles.
What awaits me there is essentially a checklist of the features which were starting to dominate games at the time: a string of quests in an open world, offering materials that I can then craft into equipment for future missions.
Underneath the dusty exterior, though, I find the occasional splash of brilliant colour. Its defibrillator, which ties post-death revival to a rhythm minigame. The cars – jumping between shooting and driving sections still feels novel today. And, most importantly, some very cool toys to play with, including explosive RC cars and ‘wingsticks’ that lop enemies’ heads off then boomerang back into my hand.
But then I find myself emptying an inexplicable quantity of bullets into the Union Jack-tattooed torso of an enemy, and it’s like travelling back in time to a pre-COD era. Rage might not be the derivative wasteland I expected, but to get at its more interesting ideas, you have to dig through others which feel cryogenically frozen in Id’s ’90s heyday.
RAGE LOOKED LIKE A DESPERATE ATTEMPT TO STAY RELEVANT.