Review by: Tom Chick

It's easy to see what id Software is trying to do in Rage. Here is the laconic -- well, in this case, utterly mute -- hero of the wasteland and his trusty automobile. It's an ancient myth nearly as old as Star Wars (Mad Max came out two years later). But it hasn't been done justice in videogames. We have to walk everywhere in Fallout, the cars in Borderlands are throwaway rentals, and no one's going to grind long enough to find out whether the muscle car in that Fallen Earth MMO is any good. Enter Rage.

You have to give credit to id for trying something other than its usual corridor shooter. Here the intention is a quasi-RPG in which you drive around the wasteland, play minigames, do side missions, race races, upgrade your weapons and armor, manage your limited ammo, and drive around the wasteland some more. Along the way, storyline missions happen. And almost none of it comes together. Rage is a collection of things in search of a game that never shows up.

It's astonishing that id has been around so long, and has made so many successful games, without figuring out the basic tenets of good game design. Rage knows enough to attempt a Bioshock style economy and sandbox combat, but it has no appreciation for that game's careful tuning and personality. You scoop from tabletops meaningless loot to sell and crafting ingredients to accumulate; play minigames that wouldn't feel out of place in Shenmue; select a "class" early on, but you'll never know if your choice has any effect. A lot of the additional equipment feels useless, whether it's a Half-Life 2 turret that falls over in a stiff breeze or a Modern Warfare remote-controlled car bomb that blows up whenever someone shoots in its general direction. Two flavors of grenades. A boomerang. A buffing potion I never got around to using. At least the little crab robot rocks.

And the driving. Oh, the driving! If you haven't played a driving game in the last ten years, the vehicle stuff in Rage might seem pretty cool. But even then, one of the dirty little secrets that doesn't emerge until later is that all this car stuff hardly matters. Six years ago, Jak 3 managed to blend post-apocalyptic Mad Max driving with Naughty Dog's trademark platforming to pretty good effect. In Rage, id tries to blend post-apocalyptic Mad Max driving with their trademark old school gunplay, but here is yet another example of id not getting how to design a game. You have no sense of attachment to your vehicles, or their advancement, or their handling. If you've ever played a vehicle combat game, you know how tricky it can be to drive and fight. Rage has no solution to this conundrum, so it just drops you into the equivalent of a bare-bones Twisted Metal proof-of-concept played along long hallways. Expect to spend a lot of time turning around.

A single storyline mission pushes you into a better car, but once you've done this, there's little reason to work your way along the separate upgrade economy for vehicles. You're just driving through canyons that pass for an overworld on the way to the next shooting bit. I suppose it beats a loading screen. A series of races play like some free-to-play, physics-free version of Motorstorm Apocalypse. The driving is one of the many bits of Rage in search of a game and for some reason it's the foundation for the multiplayer. That's like making a God of War game in which the multiplayer is based on the quick-time events.

But all this stuff is ancillary to the shooting. id, the company who taught us what it's like to shoot a videogame shotgun in Doom 2, should get gunplay, right? So what happened here? A good combat sandbox has weapons that function like different tools. But what you get in Rage is a simple continuum from the more powerful guns to the less powerful ones you have to use when you run low on ammo. It's the usual triumvirate of shotgun, sniper rifle, and machine gun with something that shoots blue energy showing up just in time for the last level. Battles tend to be slogs of attrition against increasingly absorbent bullet sponges. Which will last longer, their hit points or your supply of special ammo? Or your patience with the awful interface, which reinvents the selection wheel to terrible effect and requires frequent trips to a paused and poorly organized inventory screen?