Rage 2 (2019)

Having a lot of fun with Rage 2 at the moment. No matter what you think about the narrative, I think it's safe to say that the immersion is pretty spot on. The environments are gorgeous, they have personality, and despite going into the game not caring about the story, I found myself listening to conversations and engaging with characters.

One of the things I'm finding myself paying attention to a lot is just the visuals and the environments. I've spent most of my time in photo mode if I'm honest simply because everywhere I look there's something interesting to see. The style and direction of the game makes it very cinematic in this respect. I also love the callbacks to the original game - particularly an early sewer level that reminded me a lot of the levels in Rage 1.

The open world has a fantastic Mad Max feel to it, whether that be the environments, the buildings, the clothes, or most notably the vehicles. Engines pop and roar, bullets rattle out of machine guns, and flames burst out of exhausts. A small detail that I love is how the engine doesn't start automatically when you enter a vehicle, instead you have to tap the accelerate button to ignite the engine - combine this with the overly distorted overdrive sounds of the game, it gives a really satisfying punchy feeling to the controls.

Combat is in your face and intense. In one word it's meaty. Heads explode and bodies fly as you smash through the various enemies in the game. Think Halo meets Doom. My only gripe is the aiming feels a bit sluggish no matter the sensitivity. Must be some kind of acceleration setting.

If you love pos-apocalyptic settings, if you enjoy the Fallout franchise, if you like the Mad Max films, I think there will be something for you in Rage 2.

The original Rage is one of my favourite games, so I was really looking forward to playing this. Compared to the original, this was a bit too colourful but they used it to good effect by making the open world more beautiful. The way the colours transition as you move from one region to another is impressive.

This game probably has the best combat ever in an FPS game. Once you boost your abilities with nanotrites, the combat becomes an absolute treat.

The main story is a big disappointment, it is too short and uninteresting. In comparision to the original, a lot of things were added which are excellent in themselves but a lot of things that made the original great have been discarded. This is one reason I deducted one star.

Intro

You drive around a desert-ey alien planet and shoot stuff. You get new abilities, weapons and vehicles along the way - all of which can be upgraded.

The Good

• It's fun.
• Solid gameplay.
• Lots of upgrades give a good sense of progression.
• Some of the abilities and weapons are really neat.

The Bad

• The setting, story, characters, etc. are all utterly forgettable. And i mean that literally. I played this yesterday and can't remember a single name.
• The defibriliation tutorial is so bad i had to look up how to complete it. Turns out, i was pressing the buttons too fast. This isn't explained at all.
• Objective markers can't be disabled (AFAIK) and show from the other side of the map.
• Save system uses checkpoints. Christ.
• If you lose your ride you have to fast travel to a trade town or walk.
• Fast travel uses fast travel points and there's only a handful.
• After completing the space port mission i couldn't fast travel back to the relevant character because the objective marker completely covered his location.
• The crafting system has a huge delay for some insane reason. You literally have to hold F for several seconds to craft a single item.
• No "sell all junk" button. There's a sell 20 button but no "sell all" button despite not having any purpose other than selling.

Conclusion

Rage 2 is basically Borderlands 3 except with an even worse setting and far less enemy variety, but also without the shitty upgrade systems and the toxic F2P inventory bullshit.

If you just want to ride/walk around and shoot stuff this is a perfectly okay option. The dash bash and jump smash are fun, as is the weapon that lets you drag an enemy towards any point.

PS: I played this game for 17,5 hours but didn't finish it because the shitty Epic Launcher lied about my cloud save being newer than my disk save so i lost 6 of those hours and i just uninstalled. So i guess it doesn't really have replay value, lol.

Here's a weird one to start off 2021. I don't know why I decided to give it a try, maybe because it's available through PSNow, but I have been playing Rage 2 for the last four days or so.

Is it a good game? Not terribly. It's also not a bad game. It's a perfectly ordinary game with slightly elevated FPS that borrows from a handful of other games to deliver one solidly average game. It's a lot like Far Cry set in a post apocalyptic world (yes, I am aware there are two actual Far Cry games that fit that description). The story fees perfunctory, simply the bare minimum to justify the vast amount of wasteland killing you will do. The gameplay loop is pretty simple, your standard open world game littered with outposts to blast your way through. There are several mission types, but most of them involve shooting your way through crowds and blowing everything up. The actual combat is quite fun. The range of weapons and their abilities are clearly inspired by Doom, even if the game doesn't play like Doom (it is far more standard FPS fare). But you have a handful of kinetic abilities that keep combat lively, as well as some fun to use throwables. Everything is upgradable, giving you a vast arsenal of gadgets to pull from. It's a bit like an Insomniac game in that way (Ratchet & Clank or better yet, Resistance). The combat is enjoyable enough that the gameplay loop hasn't grown stale (yet). Basically I agree with most of the points in this Polygon review.

It's also the first Avalanche game I have played that is only mildly janky, rather than made entirely of jank like Just Cause 3.

Do I recommend Rage 2? No, probably not. I went in with sub-basement level expectations, and it turned out to be a low stakes, low investment way to have fun. I don't feel obligated to see the story through, or even finish the game because I am not particularly interested in the bare bones paint-by-numbers story. Which means I am free to play until the fun wears off. So far, it hasn't and I'm still going. We'll see if that holds up for long.

Game Summary

Game starts with your city under siege. Adoptive sister runs in to tell you. Run out there and fight! Giant monster. Badass Ranger runs in and attacks the giant monster! Badass Ranger is killed. You take his armor! Adoptive mother isn't happy about it. Big bad guy lands! Kills your adoptive mother. City is in ruins. Get out there and get revenge! I put as much effort into summarizing this as the writers put into creating the story.

Review Portion

The gameplay is extremely fun. Varied weapons with interesting twists, such as a pistol that you shoot rounds into enemies with and then remotely detonate them at your convenience. Interesting powers like the defibrillation power to bring you back from the brink of death. Upgrades also add to these, like the defibrillation power gaining damage reduction after a revival or adding a radius of damage after revival. More thought was definitely put into this aspect than anything else.

The world is varied, with different habitats, but the enemy and mission areas in each do not. Bandit nests are bandit nests, regardless of region. They are varied in structure, but aesthetically they're all the same.

No mission struck me as creative. The combat was fun, but every mission was essentially "kill all the things".

The story is VERY basic. Big bad guy wants to rule the wasteland. Resistance wants to stop him. Help them out and take him on. Grizzled veteran is your combat guy, mayor of the main city, and a mad scientist who has more personality than everyone else combined. Notes around the world were far more interesting than the actual story or dialogue. The ending was so anti-climactic and unsatisfying that it immediately went down a point in my mind. A post credits scene helps a little bit, but it still feels like a game cut off in the middle expecting a sequel that will most likely never happen.

One final technical gripe, the game lets you prioritize frame rate or resolution, which I appreciate. However, it also lets you alter the field of view. It's not properly implemented though, as the game's HUD does not properly fit on screen, even after adjusting the setting in the system settings to try and make it work. Multiple times it would take a few shots before I could tell if I was actually hurting an enemy because the health bar was off the screen.

Summary

Want an open world with very fun combat? You're in luck! Want any sort of decent story, variety in missions, or interesting dialogue? Look elsewhere!

Personal Score : 8/10

"Objective" Score : 6.5/10

The game was short. You can skip most of the side missions and get all the characters to over level 5 in no time (which is part of otherwise short time line). The entire game fell flat, the ending was unsatisfying, and took little to no story development through out. Now i know, story may not be the key point of this game. It in large part 'go in guns blazing' type of tale. However, the time line was so generic, I think it is worse than it predecessors and missed an opportunity for even a 'Duke Nukem' type of story, and that was a mother of all misses

Gun play is satisfying and fluid. Selection of weaponry is fair, but I cracked open just half of the arsenal and I can finish the game without a sweat. Just press V for overdrive...

Sure, the first Rage was stifled, but other than +1 graphics, i am not sure the new release has much to offer. This was a miss, sadly, and no DLC will fix this.