It's cold outside, so let's play some video games. Today we're going to have a look at Id Software's Rage, which came out in 2011.
Do you remember Rage? I don't. It passed me by. I wasn't aware it existed until years later, at which point I confused it with FEAR and Prey, which are different games. And Borderlands, I confused it with Borderlands. And Mad Max.
What is Rage? It's a first-person shooter set in a post-apocalyptic world, with driving sequences. There's a tiny, tiny bit of open-world gameplay but on the whole it's linear. It has megatextures, but more of that later.
I bought it recently because I was curious to see what Id Software had got up to after the disappointing Doom 3 (2004). It was on sale for £2.99 and I feel I got my money's worth. At full-price it would have been a bitter disappointment but as a budget game it's great fun. It's also hollow, frustrating, and extremely derivative, and as the reviews often pointed out it feels more like an extended technical demo than a completed game, but when you get past the driving sections and the empty plot the shooting sections are entertaining and it doesn't take long to finish.
Nowadays Rage is interesting mainly for the technology. It was the last Id Software game with substantial input from John Carmack, who was part of the team that worked on Doom back in 1993. In fact it was the last Id Software game with substantial input from anyone who had worked on the studio's pioneering titles of the 1990s and early 2000s. The company still exists, but modern-day Id is really a different company with a couple of executive staff from the old days. The only member of the development team for 2016 Doom that I can name is Mick Gordon, the musician.
I'm not complaining, mind. Rage was the last dreg of inspiration from a team that had run out of ideas, whereas 2016 Doom was a terrific return-to-form. I guess they didn't need John Carmack and John Romero etc after all.
Rage was supposed to show off John Carmack's then-new Id Tech 5 engine. In that respect it was a qualified success. The game has a mixture of indoors and outdoors environments that run at a steady 60fps on the PlayStation 3 and XBox 360, which by 2011 were six years old. It looks very attractive on a high-def television if you're sitting on a couch some distance away, less so if you're using a PC monitor.
Unfortunately I am using a PC monitor. The PC port was widely panned for its narrow fixed field-of-view and lack of graphics tweaking options. It also ran poorly on certain video cards and suffered from a mixture of texture pop-in and slow loading times. A patch cured most of the problems but even in 2019 it feels rough around the edges on the PC.
I don't want to give the impression that I hate Rage. The motion capture and monster AI are very good, the voice acting and writing are functional but far better than they should have been, and as mentioned some of the environments - particularly the Scorchers DLC mission pack - still hold up today. The core gameplay is solid. The game apparently sold over two million copies, but although publishers Bethesda Softworks tried to make it a "thing" - with a tie-in novel, a comic, a publicity deal with a new NBA player - it didn't catch on and was quickly forgotten by the gaming press and public. A belated sequel came out in September 2019 to widespread indifference.
Bit of backstory. Id Software was founded in the early 1990s. It began as a small indie developer, selling games by mail order, primarily for the PC. Id's early titles had a reputation for technical excellence. They tended to be a few years ahead of the competition - the Commander Keen games of 1990-1991 were fun clones of Super Mario at a time when PC hardware had trouble scrolling the screen around smoothly, the slick textured environments of Doom (1993) utterly transformed the gaming landscape and single-handedly established the PC as one of the main gaming platforms of the 1990s, Quake (1996) had a fully-3D world and polgyonal baddies at a time when competing Build Engine games had scaled sprites and fake 3D floors.
The poster on the left is one of the few bits of world-building. At the beginning of the game you get a recorded message from a President Davis, so presumably the asteroid hit during the final stages of an election campaign.
Id's subsequent titles were innovative in their own way, but even at the time I remember feeling that the studio seemed to be running out of ideas. Quake II (1997) was an early killer app for 3D accelerator cards and Quake III Arena (1999) demonstrated that a multiplayer-only title could be a big commercial hit. Id also made money by licensing the Quake game engine to other companies, notable Valve Software, who built Half-Life (1998) on a customised version of the original Quake engine.
Quake III Arena was Id's high water mark. It had strong competition from Epic Games' visually dazzling Unreal (1998) and Unreal Tournament (1999), and although a dozen titles used the Quake III Engine many more used the engine Epic had developed for Unreal. As of 2019 the Unreal Engine is still an industry leader whereas the various iterations of Id Tech are only used by Id. After Quake III the studio seemed to enter a state of semi-hibernation, putting out a new game every five years or so.
Partially this was because the pace of games development slowed in the 2000s. The original Doom was developed by what was even in 1993 a very small team, on a tiny budget; I don't know the exact figure, but major A-list titles of the period had budgets of $1-2 million, and Doom was a shareware game from an indie team, so presumably far less. Ten years later a new wave of high-definition games required dozens of artists and development costs in the $10-15 million range, and ten years after that budgets had ballooned ten times over.
Partially it was because Id found it difficult to retain staff. During the 1990s Id's key programmers were familiar names to computer games fans. Programming wizard John Romero even managed to attract a certain amount of mainstream press attention for his lavish ways, but by the end of the decade most of the people who had worked on Doom and Quake were gone.
Bits of the game are extremely derivative of Half-Life 2.
Designer Tom Hall was dismissed during the early stages of Doom's development, despite coming up with a number of key elements that were used in the final game. Romero was sacked in 1996 during the development of Quake. Designers Sandy Petersen and American McGee brackets his real name close brackets left or were dismissed around the time of Quake II, and programmer Adrian Carmack and designer Tim Willits were let go during the early 2000s, which meant that by the time of Rage John Carmack brackets no relation close brackets was the only one left.
Incidentally, for this blog post I have been experimenting with speech recognition, because I talk afterwards the Beatles Boys. Am I more intellectual bye-bye than I type question mark select back back delete talk faster than I type
Id's early games had personality and charm, but as the original staff left the games started to become bland demonstrations of the company's new engine. The original Quake in particular had a monotonous single-player campaign, and although Quake II was more polished in that respect it feels like a dream when I think about it nowadays. I can remember individual bits of it, but I can't remember how the bits fit together point new line
Id's next big thing after Quake III Arena was Doom III, but development took longer than expected, and when the game eventually came out in 2004 it was not the competition-crushing triumph Id envisaged. The pitch-black environments and clever lighting tricks were ambitious, but the gameplay was a monotonous series of jump scares in a series of cramped, nondescript metal rooms.
Id's early games had personality and charm, but as the original staff left the games started to become bland demonstrations of the company's new engine. The original Quake in particular had a monotonous single-player campaign, and although Quake II was more polished in that respect it feels like a dream when I think about it nowadays. I can remember individual bits of it, but I can't remember how the bits fit together point new line
Id's next big thing after Quake III Arena was Doom III, but development took longer than expected, and when the game eventually came out in 2004 it was not the competition-crushing triumph Id envisaged. The pitch-black environments and clever lighting tricks were ambitious, but the gameplay was a monotonous series of jump scares in a series of cramped, nondescript metal rooms.
Furthermore it was overshadowed by Far Cry and Half-Life II, which came out within a few months of each other. I wasn't a fan of Far Cry, but its open-world gameplay was refreshingly different and totally unlike Doom III. On a technical level Half-Life 2 was simpler than the other two games, but the visual design was excellent, and in almost every other respect - characterisation, tone, variety - it made Doom III look simplistic and old-fashioned.
A further and final Quake game, Quake 4, was released without Id's involvement in 2006; I mention it for completeness' sake but I can't think of anything to say about it. I haven't played it. I remember seeing retail boxes in the local computer shop in 2006 and wondering why I was unaware of the fourth game in what had once been the dominant PC first-person shooting franchise.
But what about Rage? What is there to say about Rage? Not a lot. In the near future an asteroid smashes into Earth, but a few people are secreted away in underground bunkers that resemble the vaults in Fallout but are called Arks because Borderlands also has vaults and you can't have three games with vaults, can you? You can't have three games with vaults.
This is all explained in a brief cutscene at the beginning of the game but never really explored. Rage has none of the rich worldbuilding of Fallout or even the stupid-but-evocative details of the Borderlands games. I can't tell if Id wanted you to read the novelisation first, or if they just didn't care. Why was there a novelisation? I realise that there were novelisations of Doom, but why Rage? Tradition? Did they really think that Rage would be a franchise?
Your character is a mute nobody called Nicholas Raine, who is apparently a trained soldier, but the game doesn't tell you any of this. You wake up hundreds of years after the asteroid impact into a world that resembles the Mad Max films. Within the first five minutes you are rescued from mutant attack by a chap called Dan Hagar, who runs a nearby garage. He immediately gives you a pistol and asks you to kill everybody in a nearby bandit base. He doesn't try to ease you into the new world, he just hands you a pistol and tells you to go off and kill a bunch of people. This happens a lot in Rage. No-one asks you about the world you left behind. The game has about as much narrative depth as Quake II, which was fine in the 1990s but feels unsatisfying today.
The ironic thing is that whereas Far Cry had masses of awful writing and terrible acting that went on for ages, the voice acting and writing of Rage is okay, but there's very little of it. The characters are all broad stereotypes, but they are at least unique. It has the typical thing whereby the characters gesticulate wildly as they talk - in exactly the same way that film actors don't - but it's not offensively bad.
The perfunctory worldbuilding was one of the major criticisms of the game back in 2011. Some games feel as if the developers were full of neat ideas, and were prepared to work overtime to implement them, but Rage feels like the kind of thing IBM might have put together if they had been contracted to make a post-apocalyptic shooter with vehicle bits. It meets the specification, and that's all it does.
At heart Rage is a linear corridor shooter. You raid a series of bases. To pad things out the game sometimes asks you to raid the same base twice, and in one case you clear a base from back-to-front. The bases have a lot of environmental detail but the background props are almost entirely non-interactive and you can't jump over small objects. Each base has a "track" that you follow. The enemy motion capture and AI is very good, but as with Half-Life 2 you mostly fight the baddies in small rooms and cramped corridors where they rush at you, so the AI never has a chance to shine.
You travel from base to base by driving there in your car. Pre-release publicity suggested that the game was an open-world role-playing game, but you can only enter bases when you need to and they're just combat zones. While driving between locations you are attacked by enemy cars, but your missiles generally destroy them in one hit. The driving physics are okay but ultimately the driving aspect feels half-baked. The distances involved aren't long enough to feel satisfying and the car-on-car action boils down to locking on to the enemy cars and firing missiles at them.
A further and final Quake game, Quake 4, was released without Id's involvement in 2006; I mention it for completeness' sake but I can't think of anything to say about it. I haven't played it. I remember seeing retail boxes in the local computer shop in 2006 and wondering why I was unaware of the fourth game in what had once been the dominant PC first-person shooting franchise.
But what about Rage? What is there to say about Rage? Not a lot. In the near future an asteroid smashes into Earth, but a few people are secreted away in underground bunkers that resemble the vaults in Fallout but are called Arks because Borderlands also has vaults and you can't have three games with vaults, can you? You can't have three games with vaults.
This is all explained in a brief cutscene at the beginning of the game but never really explored. Rage has none of the rich worldbuilding of Fallout or even the stupid-but-evocative details of the Borderlands games. I can't tell if Id wanted you to read the novelisation first, or if they just didn't care. Why was there a novelisation? I realise that there were novelisations of Doom, but why Rage? Tradition? Did they really think that Rage would be a franchise?
Your character is a mute nobody called Nicholas Raine, who is apparently a trained soldier, but the game doesn't tell you any of this. You wake up hundreds of years after the asteroid impact into a world that resembles the Mad Max films. Within the first five minutes you are rescued from mutant attack by a chap called Dan Hagar, who runs a nearby garage. He immediately gives you a pistol and asks you to kill everybody in a nearby bandit base. He doesn't try to ease you into the new world, he just hands you a pistol and tells you to go off and kill a bunch of people. This happens a lot in Rage. No-one asks you about the world you left behind. The game has about as much narrative depth as Quake II, which was fine in the 1990s but feels unsatisfying today.
The ironic thing is that whereas Far Cry had masses of awful writing and terrible acting that went on for ages, the voice acting and writing of Rage is okay, but there's very little of it. The characters are all broad stereotypes, but they are at least unique. It has the typical thing whereby the characters gesticulate wildly as they talk - in exactly the same way that film actors don't - but it's not offensively bad.
The perfunctory worldbuilding was one of the major criticisms of the game back in 2011. Some games feel as if the developers were full of neat ideas, and were prepared to work overtime to implement them, but Rage feels like the kind of thing IBM might have put together if they had been contracted to make a post-apocalyptic shooter with vehicle bits. It meets the specification, and that's all it does.
Rage has a card game minigame-game. Off the top of my head this is the only time you see your character's face. He's a voiceless, personality-less nothing.
At heart Rage is a linear corridor shooter. You raid a series of bases. To pad things out the game sometimes asks you to raid the same base twice, and in one case you clear a base from back-to-front. The bases have a lot of environmental detail but the background props are almost entirely non-interactive and you can't jump over small objects. Each base has a "track" that you follow. The enemy motion capture and AI is very good, but as with Half-Life 2 you mostly fight the baddies in small rooms and cramped corridors where they rush at you, so the AI never has a chance to shine.
You travel from base to base by driving there in your car. Pre-release publicity suggested that the game was an open-world role-playing game, but you can only enter bases when you need to and they're just combat zones. While driving between locations you are attacked by enemy cars, but your missiles generally destroy them in one hit. The driving physics are okay but ultimately the driving aspect feels half-baked. The distances involved aren't long enough to feel satisfying and the car-on-car action boils down to locking on to the enemy cars and firing missiles at them.
You have the opportunity to raise some cash by participating in stock car rally races, but there are only a handful of tracks and it's not hard to beat the enemy drivers. The main reward is a form of currency that upgrades your car, which I suppose is a good thing because it means you can finish the driving sequences quicker.
There are a handful of hub towns where people give you missions. They're a bit like Megaton or Rivet City from Fallout 3, but there are only a few interactive characters and you don't have dialogue options. Technically you can "accept" or "decline" missions, but if you decline a story mission the game simply stops progressing until you accept. There are no time limits, so the option to decline is pointless. In addition to the main storyline missions there are a few repeatable filler maps and some minigames, but the rewards never justify the time spent playing them.
I don't want to give away the plot, but one of the game's big problems is the lack of a satisfying final battle. Mid-way through the campaign you fight a big mutant monster. It's simple but exciting and the build-up is executed nicely. You see the mutant from a distance first, then you see its enormous hand as it smashes the building you're walking through, then its feet etc. It's the best scripted sequence in the entire game. After that you have some more bread and butter missions that lead up to the final confrontation with the main villain, except that there isn't a final battle. You do a series of bread and butter missions and then the game ends. You never meet the chief baddy. The Scorchers DLC pack adds a second boss battle, but even so Rage feels unsatisfying and I can understand why it was forgotten so quickly.
The game's saving grace is the combat, but I'm going to digress a bit here. Rage was the first game developed by Id Software primarily for games consoles, in this case the PlayStation 3 and XBox 360. It was later ported to the PC. As such it feels like a console shooting game, in the sense that combat feels more like a tactical exercise than a test of mouse skill. You fight a limited number of baddies at a time, your health regenerates, the level path is linear, and there's a big emphasis on using special weapons when things get tough. You can fling lethal boomerangs and deploy remote-controlled bomb cars, and if you pick up enough background objects you can build replacements. The boomerangs - they're called wingsticks - are one of the best weapons in the game, almost a game-breaker because they kill most baddies with a single fling.
At times Rage feels like an ancestor of the between-arenas sections of 2016 Doom, and in its defence there are some good fights. A simple battle in the Dead City where mutants trap you in a pair of rooms stands out, as does a base assault against a bunch of explosives experts that ends with the base blowing up. Your weapons are generally effective although some of them feel redundant. Near the beginning you pick up a Kalashnikov that is almost immediately replaced by a much more effective shotgun. In terms of realism it's "modern shooter lite", in that you can take slightly more punishment than in a military game - you can even resurrect yourself from the dead! - but you can't afford to stand still for very long otherwise you'll be killed. The baddies tend to be bullet sponges but the aforementioned wingsticks are a godsend.
The action picks up towards the end. At the beginning you fight a bland selection of mostly melee monsters who rush you in a straight line, but later on you meet a variety of military goons and metal-clad survivalists who are smart enough to take cover and even retreat when they are outmatched. The shield-generating military soldiers are reminiscent of a similar enemy in Doom and just as irritating.
It has one design decision that irritates me. You can't reload while sprinting. As such the combat often devolves into shooting at a couple of baddies, sprinting away, reloading, then shooting again. It's particularly annoying with the nailgun, which has a very long reloading animation. The game doesn't use the vertical dimension as well as Doom, but to its credit the mutant baddies often parkour towards you via ceilings and walls, so combat isn't just a lot of running backwards in figures-of-8 while reloading.
A bit about the technology. Id Tech 5's big thing was megatexturing. Instead of using conventional tiled textures Rage uses enormous, map-sized texture files that are wrapped over the whole level. The engine streams the megatexture from the hard drive - or Blu-Ray, in the case of the PlayStation 3 - but only portions that are visible from the player's point of view, and when the player's viewpoint changes the unused textures are discarded from memory.
Loosum Hagar is the stereotypical hot farmer's daughter a la Donna Douglas from The Beverly Hillbillies. She was a fan favourite because we live in an ugly world and beauty is rare. She has a much bigger role in the sequel. Incidentally Rage doesn't have a "holster weapon" command, so outside of hub towns you end up jamming your pistol in people's faces when you talk to them. It's another one of those minor little details that makes the game feel older than it is.
There are a handful of hub towns where people give you missions. They're a bit like Megaton or Rivet City from Fallout 3, but there are only a few interactive characters and you don't have dialogue options. Technically you can "accept" or "decline" missions, but if you decline a story mission the game simply stops progressing until you accept. There are no time limits, so the option to decline is pointless. In addition to the main storyline missions there are a few repeatable filler maps and some minigames, but the rewards never justify the time spent playing them.
I don't want to give away the plot, but one of the game's big problems is the lack of a satisfying final battle. Mid-way through the campaign you fight a big mutant monster. It's simple but exciting and the build-up is executed nicely. You see the mutant from a distance first, then you see its enormous hand as it smashes the building you're walking through, then its feet etc. It's the best scripted sequence in the entire game. After that you have some more bread and butter missions that lead up to the final confrontation with the main villain, except that there isn't a final battle. You do a series of bread and butter missions and then the game ends. You never meet the chief baddy. The Scorchers DLC pack adds a second boss battle, but even so Rage feels unsatisfying and I can understand why it was forgotten so quickly.
The game's saving grace is the combat, but I'm going to digress a bit here. Rage was the first game developed by Id Software primarily for games consoles, in this case the PlayStation 3 and XBox 360. It was later ported to the PC. As such it feels like a console shooting game, in the sense that combat feels more like a tactical exercise than a test of mouse skill. You fight a limited number of baddies at a time, your health regenerates, the level path is linear, and there's a big emphasis on using special weapons when things get tough. You can fling lethal boomerangs and deploy remote-controlled bomb cars, and if you pick up enough background objects you can build replacements. The boomerangs - they're called wingsticks - are one of the best weapons in the game, almost a game-breaker because they kill most baddies with a single fling.
At times Rage feels like an ancestor of the between-arenas sections of 2016 Doom, and in its defence there are some good fights. A simple battle in the Dead City where mutants trap you in a pair of rooms stands out, as does a base assault against a bunch of explosives experts that ends with the base blowing up. Your weapons are generally effective although some of them feel redundant. Near the beginning you pick up a Kalashnikov that is almost immediately replaced by a much more effective shotgun. In terms of realism it's "modern shooter lite", in that you can take slightly more punishment than in a military game - you can even resurrect yourself from the dead! - but you can't afford to stand still for very long otherwise you'll be killed. The baddies tend to be bullet sponges but the aforementioned wingsticks are a godsend.
Id Tech 5's megatexturing technology was designed to eliminate texture tiling...
... without overwhelming the GPU memory of contemporary consoles.
In that respect it works, and the texturing also allowed the level designers to use low-poly models...
...but because this was 2011 and Id Tech 5 was new they went too far at times.
The action picks up towards the end. At the beginning you fight a bland selection of mostly melee monsters who rush you in a straight line, but later on you meet a variety of military goons and metal-clad survivalists who are smart enough to take cover and even retreat when they are outmatched. The shield-generating military soldiers are reminiscent of a similar enemy in Doom and just as irritating.
It has one design decision that irritates me. You can't reload while sprinting. As such the combat often devolves into shooting at a couple of baddies, sprinting away, reloading, then shooting again. It's particularly annoying with the nailgun, which has a very long reloading animation. The game doesn't use the vertical dimension as well as Doom, but to its credit the mutant baddies often parkour towards you via ceilings and walls, so combat isn't just a lot of running backwards in figures-of-8 while reloading.
A bit about the technology. Id Tech 5's big thing was megatexturing. Instead of using conventional tiled textures Rage uses enormous, map-sized texture files that are wrapped over the whole level. The engine streams the megatexture from the hard drive - or Blu-Ray, in the case of the PlayStation 3 - but only portions that are visible from the player's point of view, and when the player's viewpoint changes the unused textures are discarded from memory.
One downside is that this requires a lot of storage space. Rage is about 23gb, which was enormous in 2011. It was released on three DVDs for the PC and XBox 360 and a single Blu-Ray for the PlayStation 3. Sadly nothing was done to exploit the larger storage space of the PlayStation 3's Blu-Ray drive, although in Id's defence the PS3's Blu-Ray was relatively slow, so the console might not have been able to stream higher-resolution textures quickly enough. Id doesn't seem to be minded to release a remastered, high-resolution version for modern platforms.
Megatexturing has essentially three things going for it. There's the aforementioned visual richness, which is often subtle, but it's nice to have. On top of that the huge texture files allowed the designers to disguise Rage's low-poly environmental models by covering everything with textured detail, as in the following screenshots:
From a distance the rocks and pillars look great.
But up close the pillar is just a rectangular block, and this gouged-out area is just a flat texture...
Meanwhile the rock is a relatively simply polygon. Furthermore the grass in the left of the screenshot is made of flat sprites that always face the player, just like Doom.
Unfortunately Rage's megatexturing was only partly successful. The game ran at 60fps on contemporary consoles, and some of the levels still look great today, but the game is plagued by texture pop-in. My PC has eight times as much texture memory as a PlayStation 3, but when I turn the camera left and right objects at the sides of the screen draw themselves into existence, and when I turn a corner the wall in front of me shimmers for a moment as the texture is decompressed. It only happens for a split-second, but it's visually jarring.
The second problem is the low texture resolution. In order to keep the file size within reasonable limits Rage's megatextures were heavily compressed. At a distance everything looks fine, but up-close the environments are grainy and low-detail, and in order to maintain sixty frames a second a lot of the world objects are very crude. Furthermore the game's environments are almost entirely static. The boxes, chairs, and miscellaneous clutter that litter the floor are all built into the maps. You can't knock them over. Rage is perhaps the first post-1990 3D game I have played where you cannot open the toilet stalls. The game also has a very simple static lighting model - each room has a colour filter, but that seems to be about it - albeit that this isn't a problem with megatexturing per se.
In addition the megatextures implemented in Rage rarely have animations, so whereas other games are full of blinking lights and animated computer screens the background objects in Rage don't do anything. In the following screenshots the computer screens are low-definition static textures and the wall machinery isn't animated, so it looks very poor:
Incidentally that location has a dialogue sequence, but it's coded in the expectation that the player would stand in front of these two characters:
If the player stands to one side the viewpoint clips into one of the characters when the dialogue is over:
A bit more testing would have picked up that issue. Anything else? The world is covered in what looks like film grain. I think it's a noisy texture designed to make the world look gritty, but it doesn't work.
On a purely technical level the visuals of Half-Life 2 were functional even in 2004, but the visual design has aged well.
Ultimately Rage looks odd. It has the environmental texturing and detailing of a modern game combined with the low polygon models and monolithic, non-physics-enabled environments of something from the 1990s. And yet the character animation is still very good, so it confuses my brain. When you kill the baddies they don't just drop straight to the ground, they tumble forwards or recoil backwards depending on how they were moving before they died. That element of the game works very well.
On the whole megatexturing as implemented in Rage simultaneously feels over-the-top (most of the indoors sections could have been tiled without losing anything and the bland desert environments look very similar) and underdeveloped (couldn't they have layered a few animated textures on top of the megatextures?). As mentioned up the page Rage feels like a demonstration of Id Tech 5 that was hobbled by the limited memory of contemporary consoles and a lack of development time.
The original Quake was infamous for its monotonous colour palette - brown and purple. Rage adds cyan and orange.
In another world modders might have fixed Rage's problems, but megatexturing makes it difficult for fans to create home-made levels because the amount of work required to paint and light the maps is enormous. Id released a suite of development tools two years after Rage came out, by which time no-one cared about the game any more. There doesn't appear to be a Rage modding community.
One last thing before I stop writing. In 2011 reviewers pointed out that Rage felt like an anonymous imitation of Borderlands and Fallout 3, which are also set in run down post-industrial environments, but Rage is also extremely derivative of Half-Life 2. One level is a straightforward clone of Half-Life 2's Nova Prospekt prison level, complete with contrasting high-tech architecture and armoured soldiers who deliver radio patter as they flank the player. The armoured soldiers even look like Combine Overwatch soldiers, but painted black and red instead of white. Playing the latter levels just reminded me of how much character Half-Life 2 had.
Subway Town is the game's other major hub. Even today it's still visually impressive. The gameplay and missions however are just a copy-and-paste from Wellspring; you suck up to the mayor, upgrade your car, and then the baddies take over.
The game has a soundtrack, but it's not very good and pales in comparison to Mick Gordon's work on Doom. The action themes are short and loop around without much variation; the driving sequences have a short guitar theme that quickly gets boring.
Can I think of anything else to say about Rage? No, I cannot. It's an anachronism that combines the gameplay of a good early-2000s shooter with the environments and character models of something much more modern, plus the environmental detail of something from the late 1990s. It takes place in a world where physics-based gameplay never happened, where games do not have storylines. The shooting is entertaining, but it all feels empty.
An exceptionally rare physics-enabled object
Why is it called Rage? I have no idea. The main character isn't angry. He never says anything. He's infused with nanomachines, but they don't make him angry. The baddies are no more angry than any other video game baddies. Did the game originally have a different storyline? Did they just pick a snappy name out of a hat?
As always, if you know the answers to these questions, or any other questions raised throughout this blog post, please send your answers on a postcard to Iain Duncan Smith care of the Home Office. Just write "yes" or "no" on the postcard. Don't include a return address. It's probably a good idea to handle the postcard with kitchen gloves, even if this means wearing kitchen gloves when you buy the postcard. No-one will mind because it's 2019 and kitchen gloves are perfectly normal.
