#sometimes impromptu gameplay shots really pop off

[thebramblewood]

A day in the life of a brat.

[zydrateacademy]

Review - Rage 2

I have little to no experience with the first Rage. I have about two hours on it, last played five years ago. I remember a lot of brown, and I think I immediately quit because it didn’t engage me very much. To the surprise of everyone, last year we get a teaser trailer set to Andrew WK’s “Ready to Die” in a semi live action setpiece telling everyone that Rage has returned, and it’s gonna be wacky! In practice, it’s just a very colorful shooter. A fairly decent one, but it lacks the general humor that Borderlands has, which yields a common comparison. Indeed, Rage 2 feels like a union between Mad Max (the driving), Borderlands (the environment), and DOOM (the gunplay). This review will have several comparisons to all three, but I’ll try to explain the systems so my readers won’t require previous knowledge of other games. I’ll start with the game’s main selling point, the zany gunplay and abilities. You play as Walker, gender of your choice but you cannot customize them as they both essentially exist as their own beings in this world. You are some kind of military trainee in a fairly safe and stable stronghold that gets annihilated in the first fifteen minutes of the game by an organization called “The Authority”. You put on a suit of armor of a now-extinct sect of “Rangers”, you being the last one in an impromptu promotion. This armor facilitates all of your guns and abilities. Even the guns are acquired through ARKS dotted around the land that are specifically designed for rangers and their suits, so right off the bat you’re more or less more equipped than every bandit in the wasteland.

Other than some odd key bindings to start with, the abilities and guns feel very good. One of the first you acquire is imminently useful, as it was designed to shatter armor of the enemies (and the ability is in fact called “Shatter”). This is also very satisfying as you play through the game, whether you use that ability or shoot it all off, you can actually see mob’s armor plating fly off as you whittle them down. It’s a good signifier as any that they’re ready to be killed outright. Considering the game shares much more with DOOM than with Borderlands, enemies are not at all bullet sponges. Most enemies can be taken out in just a couple shots, or a single headshot. The armor is what makes them spongey, but you’re very quickly given the tools to deal with it. Other abilities include a bullet barrier, a ground slam, a super sprint, a dash, a vortex that pulls enemies in and detonates, an overdrive, and a few others. Considering that DOOM developers have worked on this, this is not a cover shooter. Everything is designed to keep you moving and shooting and the set of abilities you acquire serve this goal incredibly well, and the gunplay is very fun. However, like Mad Max (from Avalanche Studios, which also served as developers here) strongholds don’t tend to respawn which leaves my usual fare of sandboxing starting to dry up just 11 hours into the game. I’m starting to get the feeling that the game is rather short, and I wish it took a similar idea from recent Far Cry games to reset the strongholds, maybe add some extra difficulty to it, and let us play it all again. I do not believe there is a New Game Plus at this time, so when I’m done, I’m done. This is essentially a twenty to thirty hour game it feels, so take that as you will.

Everything can be upgraded as well, DOOM-style. This is not Borderlands, and you will be staring at the same guns throughout your experience. There are about ten of them though (two from the preorder bonus, or potential DLC) and you can change their capabilities, level them up, and add extra mag sizes, reload speeds, and so on. They’ll function differently as you see fit but I find myself defaulting to the assault rifle you acquire, upgradable with armor piercing rounds which really tear through most enemies.

Returning from Mad Max are the convoys, one of my favorite mechanics from that game. There were only a handful there, and this game serves many more and they’re certainly more engaging in their own way. They boast an entire caravan with a War-Rig like truck that serves as its own boss (complete with a health bar), where you must wipe out the allies and then hit “weak points” that pop out periodically. I’m not sure if they constantly spawn or are as temporary as the strongholds, but I do enjoy them.

So the gunplay is good, the environment is interesting to look at. There’s plenty of lights, colorful characters, and even trees and wildlife in certain zones. The writing leaves something to be desired. For example you get a Borderlandsy splash screen introducing a few characters, one of which was “enjoys manipulating others, and once tortured a guy just to get his approval”. Meeting him just screamed “This guy is going to betray the fuck out of you”. Sure enough...

So let’s move on to some points I have “mixed” feelings about.

As I alluded to with the guns, this isn’t really a Loot-N-Shooter. It’s just a shooter. Everywhere there are chests to get “feltrite”, the main upgrade currency. You also get money, which also helps buy upgrades outright as well as ammo for you and your vehicle. There’s even an upgrade just to help you triangulate and find these chests so you don’t abandon every stronghold at 3/4 chests found because it’s hiding in a tiny alcove somewhere, but sometimes I do it anyway because it kind of kills too much time when you’re running around for a while. The gameplay encourages constant moving, shooting, and ground-slamming, but after a while you actually run out of things to do all of that with. To the game’s credit, it doesn’t make Anthem’s mistake of “go here, kill everything”. Sometimes you defend a pylon, sometimes you shoot fuel tanks, sometimes you destroy a power silo. All of which involves a lot of shooting but none of this respawns or comes back.

In relation, the map does feel a bit small. After gaining reputation with a certain main character, you’re awarded the Icarus, which is a flight vehicle. No weapon capabilities and it’s made out of paper but it’s very useful for transit. I’d almost recommend not using it at all, but it does help nab a few points of interest that you wouldn’t necessarily drive past on wheels, as some things you need to actively search for rather than drive by. As I said before, after 11 hours it feels as though I’ve complete most of the side-stuff already. Side missions can be picked up in towns but they’re much simpler and less interesting than the main story itself, and there’s little reason to do them.

The game is also very buggy. I suffer a crash to desktop (no error message or anything) every couple of hours. Much more often the game will freeze on me for an extended period of time (forty-five seconds or more) before coming back to me. I was on a “clear out the bandits” objective and one of the enemies was clipped into a building. Thankfully the “Shatter” ability has some AoE capabilities that got through the wall and I got him eventually. Those are the main three I’ve suffered but if you read around, you’ll no doubt find much more. These aren’t the usual funny “dragons flying backwards” Bethesda bugs, these are actually game breaking and rage inducing.

Oh, Bethesda. What has happened to you? It felt like it’s just been a couple years since you were the gaming community’s golden boy. It really all went downhill with Fallout 76 (which I’m still waiting on single player and modding capabilities) and has never really recovered. Yes, their new fare of “microtransactions” are here. I don’t normally have a hate-on for cosmetic shops like the community as a whole does but in Rage 2 it’s particularly pointless. It has some gun skins, both of which can be acquired in game. The golden skins are 10,000 dollars in certain shops (which is a lot, mind you) and the other ones can be acquired by farming the Mutant Bash TV enough. I enjoy the mutant-killing arena but I find it’s far too damn easy, and it really needed extra difficulty levels attached. Those skins cost 2500 MBTV tokens and you can get ~1500 every run you do. Considering how easy it is, I earned most of them in like, an hour. Now let’s get to some of the things I actively hate.

I don’t like the driving. Not nearly as much in Mad Max, anyway. The convoys are indeed still fun and more rewarding than Max’s were. To Max’s credit, that entire game was built around the car being a major mechanic and hell, even plot point and Max’s entire motivation. In Rage 2 it’s more of a sideshow. The cars don’t feel like they have much weight to them (at least, not until you spin them out and try to push yourself out of a ditch, which I often do) and when I was given the flying Icarus, I felt little point in returning to the sassy-AI that hosted the Phoenix, the only car you can upgrade and customize.

To wit, I actually quite despise the driving in certain contexts. Early in the story you have to impress someone enough to enter his suite. To do so you must play through the Mutant Bash TV (fun, but easy) and... a race. You enter the race and the NPC there tells you that you’re starting on the bottom. Now, in other games this means they usually give you idiots for AI. The first race in GTA5 was laughable, and even in Mad Max their one main “race” was actually just a deathmatch with a six minute timer. This newbie race in Rage 2 actually made me Rage-Quit the night the game was released. They give you their own car, every other racer has the same one and they actually match your speed. At any given point I always had two to four other racers ahead of me at all times. You know what bots and AI don’t do? Make mistakes. They never spun out, rammed into each other, or hit a wall unless you yourself did all that to them. After getting a night’s sleep and three tries in the morning later, my only strategy was to ignore the other drivers and concentrate harder than I ever have in a game. I basically had to do a perfect run, not hitting anything. I did so well and ALMOST lost the ENTIRE race to one single spinout near the end of the track. When I won, I could hear one or two car engines right on my tailpipe. They never lost traction like I did, and that’s just garbage.

I hated it. I do not look forward to dealing with this required mission in future playthroughs. By the way, it’s required to unlock an entire upgrade tree.

One final point of annoyance before I summarize my thoughts ultimately. This one is much more minor but it actually irritates me more than the driving does because this one is a constant threat. Every time you clear an objective, no matter how quick or small, you get an unskippable popup announcing your victory and rewards, as well as the reputation gain. This could have so easily been put on the side, like they do their radio-bound dialogues. Instead it completely stops the show and I find myself slamming the enter key so I can skip it the very split second it allows me to do so. In a game that wants you to keep moving, in a very successful and fun way, this thing is just a complete show stopper and I don’t know how their beta testers weren’t yelling “Come on, let me PLAY!” constantly. Ultimately, I do feel like there’s a good game to be had here. The cosmetic store is easily ignored and beyond that, you’ll have to deal with some bugs, janky driving, and bullshit “OBJECTIVE COMPLETE” popups. If you can deal with that, you’re left with some excellent gunplay and skillfully crafted environments. It’s not as long as I had hoped, and I really expected more to justify an eighty dollar preorder but I have not at all hated the experience.