Rage

Rage

Rage is a game released in 2011, it is not so young any more. Several friends had advised me, boasting about his post-apocalyptic atmosphere. So I let myself be tempted, and I took Rage during a small promotion that Steam has the secret. Were my friends' advice sensible? Did the game age well enough? What suspense!

You are a survivor of an ark, put in stasis just before a meteorite crashes on the ground and shaves everything in its path. You wake up after a hundred years of sleep in a ravaged universe, in a world torn between bandits and so-called civilized scrapes, all dominated by a tyrannical authority. A dream world, then. The game will not give you much more information about his universe; it will throw you into the bath directly, and it is not the quests and dialogs that will inform you much more during the game. We walk from mission to mission, as the lambda lackey accepting anything and everything to make a place in the crappy communities you visit.

At the gameplay level, we are on the basic: a very naughty FPS where you have a dozen very typical weapons: assault rifle, shotgun, revolver, sniper, rocket launcher ... To this are added some useful gadgets that you can buy or craft: sharp boomerangs, automatic turrets, remote-controlled explosives. The weapons propose to use different types of ammunition which will be more effective against the armored enemies, or even the robots for example.

The quests are offered at the level of hubs in the form of cities also offering various merchants, a funny but useless card game, as well as vehicle races. You will be forced to use these vehicles to join the departure of the missions. The enemies you come across are very varied: bandits, mutants, military forces of authority, to which will be added some bosses. These enemies are rather interesting; they have different behaviors depending on their origin, and in general, are rather clever. Indeed, they take cover, they dislodge you with the grenade, while some snip you while others charge you.

Forced, when talking about post-apocalyptic FPS it's hard not to compare with games like Fallout or Borderlands. In terms of artistic direction and atmosphere, Rage works pretty well. It has the merit of offering credible ruined cities, more than in the Fallout. At the technical level, the game is doing well for its age; apart from some really disgusting textures, the rest is pretty good. The music as for them are not striking.

But beyond that the game is much less fun than the competition. Clearly, Rage suffers from many problems that have irritated me quite a bit. Enemies are huge hit bags, weaker opponents need two or three bullets in the head with a sniper rifle. The assault rifle and the machine gun only kill the enemy after forty or fifty rounds. And even the rocket launcher almost never kills enemies with a little armor. Each commitment becomes painful.

The second detail that really tired me is the design of the levels. These form systematically loop-shaped corridors that take you back to where you started from. To say that one could have done three meters, to pick up the requested object, and to leave in stride leaves a taste of artificial in the choices of conception. And then the invisible walls that are everywhere; impossible to sneak where it is not planned, and therefore develop a strategy not planned by developers. Do you want to go behind a counter to take cover behind? Invisible wall! A metal plate seems to leave enough space to sneak? Invisible wall !! Do you want to jump over a bench to escape? Invisible wall !!!

The third detail that has completed my pleasure is the vehicles. Those proposed are obviously armed to fight bandits always stronger. Regularly, a mandatory mission will force you to make a race to unlock a more resistant car. Except that the races are nil! And worse, it's a FPS brothel, not a racing game!

In the end I did not like Rage. The superhuman resistance of enemies associated with the design of levels from another age have cooled me down. The obligatory passages in vehicle completed my already dying pleasure. There are much better FPS on the market that are waiting for you, among the games released at the same time, we find Fallout: New Vegas, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Far Cry 3, or even Bioshock 2. games clearly of another standing; do not waste your time here.

Walker arrives in his apocalyptic bolide, armed with a Wingstick he sends crashing next to the head of Gelukpa. The latter notices the arrival of the editor of the apocalypse, and is preparing to report the interference of the backpacker, but remembers that whatever happens, the guy is bounded. So if he has anything to say, he will say it.

"So how you do not like Rage huh? "

Walker is loading cartridges into his shotgun, eaten up by the sand of Wasteland.

" OK. I can understand. That said, I have long wanted to write on Rage, so I will not leave you the exclusivity of the article, so I just put my grain of sand.

Walker marks a silence accompanied by a stupid smile; he realizes that his joke is really not good, really.

"Eh .. I admit that I read two-three things that made me tick and that convinced me to come to insert me in the editorial process. Are you mad at me ? "

Walker stretches the barrel of his shotgun at Gelupka's mouth and begins swinging his weapon from right to left.

" So let's go ? "

Rage is probably the game of ID Software that has the most divided players. It must be said that the studio was a bit stupid. Seven years after the rout Doom 3, it was better to reboot the series instead of starting directly on a new intellectual property. However, it is Bethesda / Zenimax that will support this project with long development, and ambitions a little too big ... and misleading.

My comrade Gelupka quoted, perhaps a little innocently, Fallout 3 and Borderlands. It must be said, that for a long time, Rage is presented as FPS-RPG, as our multicultural generation and who does not identify with anything precise knows how to categorize them so well. The truth is that all of this is marketing. Rage is a "loose" shooter, where you hide behind a cover before replying by sticking two-three bastos. There are also vehicles to reach a point B, and a little bit of craft and other very secondary stuff. But Rage is an FPS. And a pretty good one actually. In fact, I would say that apart from the concerns already mentioned by our friend Gelupka, it is one of the best of his generation

Already, Rage, it's Mad Max Fury Road before the hour; ID Software has captured the Mad Max stuff, and has translated it to perfection in a dusty, punk, and filthy aesthetic of the most beautiful effect. The aesthetic impact of certain places has been preserved from the passage of time, thanks to the work of the teams that gave birth to DOOM. Whore is beautiful, and it's the rest. The worry is the textures; a problem inherent in ID TECH 5 which has been partially corrected recently. The game weighs its weight and the textures are poorly rendered. Yet, overall, it peeps the retina. Better, the optimization is perfect, 60 fps on Xbox 360, PS3, and even Xbox One. We take full mouth, and it turns perfectly well.

But Rage is especially good when it comes to making you hold a gun in your hands ... God this power! This feeling! This work on the sound and impact of each petal. It feels like you're really holding the gun in your hands the first time, and when I go back there, because I went back to Rage some times, I'm always surprised at how pleased I was with the first discharge of the shotgun , or the first roll of the Wingstick. Tasty, and it's priceless.

The boredom of Rage is that by wanting to do too much, he may not focus enough on what he's doing really well. Thus, the clashes in the car are really passable, and the driving barely suitable. We will of course welcome the clashes on the ground, but if they represent half of the adventure, the rest does not really follow, even if it brings a bit of variety. That said, Rage did not seem boring for a single second. It is just horribly frustrating, because once the first part of the game is over, know that you will have only three to four hours of games, which means that we will have a FPS not so intense, but that also allows to have a fairly limited life in a straight line: a dozen hours at most, twenty for the most fierce.

Rage also has level design defects, inherited from an engine not quite developed and that will also pose a problem for a certain Wolfenstein: The New Order. The invisible walls reported by Gelupka have nothing to do in an experience as careful as Rage can show. However, overall, I think the game has something. It's not just a question of shotgun or Wingstick, it's something that goes through a more global feeling; I see Rage come back with a continuation that will end what is already in my opinion a brilliant draft game.

Because if Rage is sometimes fantastic, it is for us to make a mistake these limitations that cool, so he would have so much to offer. Between his AI able to surprise by new behaviors, its context still as pleasant to browse, its esthetic finally quite particular, and its slight hybrid side that it would be better to dose, one is in front of a game which could be big And believe Walker: Rage is back soon, and sooner than you think.

Finally, since Gelupka spoke about music, know that they are indeed discreet and not very memorable. Nevertheless, I do not see the relationship between Bioshock 2 / Fallout: New Vegas / Far Cry 3 / Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Rage apart from the subjective view. I advise you four, in addition to Rage, because a shotgun like that, we pass not next. It's not every day that you have a pump that blows you away from the rest of the competing proposal; it was not until DOOM 2016 to review a weapon of this caliber after all.