Rage, what is this game?  Dystopian future shooter?  Arcade-y driving al-la "Twisted Metal"?  Dungeon crawling slaughter?

Yes. all of that.

First off, the visuals.  This game is so pretty it hurts.  You emerge blinking into the wasteland at the start of the game and you completely feel like your there; the harsh sun glaring down on you, throwing the quarry you are surrounded by into stark contrast, the dry desert air blowing sand against the rusted metal walkway you stand on...  This attention to detail and depth extends to the characters you encounter, from the singular plot characters to the basic mutant that you will be shotgunning by the dozens, all are meticulously detailed and rendered, with tattoos, scars, dirty fingernails, dangling fetishes on their clothing... the list goes on and on.

On the bare face of it, some will say "yea, but whats the difference, this is just Fallout or Borderlands, but more linear."  In response to this, I will first smack you upside the head, and then say the following: The setting does not make the game.  I would liken this game more to Halflife 2 ...only now your car has miniguns on it  

So, gameplay.  over the first 6 hours of gameplay, I received almost all of the guns (pistol, shotgun, 2 automatic rifles, a sniper rifle, a crossbow, and a bladed boomerang thingy called a "wingstick" which is very good a removing heads from torsos (there is also a rocket launcher, but i haven't gotten there yet).  There is a fair degree of customization to be found, with each weapon having at least 2 ammo types that can do anything from turning your shotgun into a grenade launcher to using your crossbow as a remote electro-shock therapy applicator     there are also a number of permanent upgrades that can be bought from the vendors scattered in the various towns throughout the wasteland.  This brings me on to the economy.  There is literally TONS of stuff to scavenge in the wasteland, half of it worthless (to you) but still sale-able, and the other half of it...  lets just say it vindicated the packrat and jury-rigger in me.  There are a huge variety of schematics you can collect from all over the place, and each of these schematics allows you to combine some of the junk you have collected into all sorts of gadgets.

Say you come up against a locked door.  Dig around in your pack, and combine some gears, a battery and a wiring kit, and you have yourself a one time lock grinder, ready to shred that lock to dust.  Or you poke your head out and realize that the 15 mutants are just too much for your 11 remaining pistol rounds.  Another dive into your bag of tricks, a bit of soldering, and out comes a mechanical spider, complete with its own machine gun, ready to bring the lead rain to your foes.  

This is very much a game of details, the Guns feel real, both in the sounds that they make, and in the reactions of enemies when they are hit, shoot a foe in the leg, and it jerks back, causing the enemy to stumble, cursing.  fire a hail of gunfire in the general area of the enemy, and they will go scrambling for cover, ducking and covering their heads.  the movements of enemies are real and unpredictable, melee foes in particular never come at you in a straight line, preferring to dive and weave, juking around to throw your aim off.  Vehicle combat is a hilarious diversion, with armored and armed buggies blasting across offroad landscape and thumping away at each other with miniguns, rockets and mines.  

The weak points:  The graphics are SO detailed, that currently there is a degree of flickering and late texture pop-in whenever you turn you camera sharply, but I'm sure this will be patched out soon.  I am also experiencing occational crashes on loading screens, but its not enough to stop me coming back for more.  

There is a problem with the save system, the auto saves are soooo far apart that you can go 45 minutes of play without seeing one, but as long as you train yourself to compulsively hit "f5" (particularly before loading screens in my case) you will have very little problem with this.  

Now we come to the controversial one.  The dialogue.  There are no Dialogue trees, as a matter of fact, your character is mute, as far as i can tell.  But you have to keep hitting the action key to progress the dialogue.  Some say that this breaks flow immersion, but I'm not so sure.  I think it keeps you engaged, giving you a degree of interaction in the dialogue while still maintain the linearity of the game.  (yes there are sidequests, and a kind of open world aspect to the driving, but its largely linear and story driven)

Overall, I really like this game so far, its varied enough to keep me interested, and it has some very VERY solid gameplay mechanics.  The visuals are just eye-watering (making me look very enviously at the large 3d tv's at best buy) and the story is engaging and interesting.  Plus its like halflife 2 ...but in the desert... with boomerangs...

SSG.Braxis*BK*

Thanks braxis i know i am looking at getting the game (it not out over here yet) and i by the sounds of it i will enjoy it but i may have to find someone who has it to go and test it out

AMD released a Catalyst driver for teh RAGE release. Apparently it help with a lot of issues on older AMD drivers. There's a post in the Other Games section

Thanks for the write-up.

I was gonna aks U bout this, the review answered my ?, thanx Braxis

Nice write up Braxis!

Great review Brax! Was this on PC or Console?

Yea Abram, I have the new driver.

Baz, this was for PC, I don't have any console atm.

Hey Brax, I read this article in The Age - a Melbourne newspaper.  

Developer gets the show on the road
Author: mike wilcox
Date: 06/10/2011
Words: 508
Source: AGE
          Publication: The Age
Section: Green Guide
Page: 18


id Software is blending its shooter heritage with some maniacal driving in Rage.
HAVING notched up two decades as one of the games industry's most revered developers, id Software is not about to rest on its reputation as the pioneer of the popular first-person shooter gaming genre. The company is preparing to release its first new game property in five years, titled Rage.

Founded in 1991 in Richardson, Texas, id Software is behind the gaming pop culture staples Doom, Quake and the Wolfenstein series.

The company's creative director, Tim Willits, who describes his role as a mix of whip-cracking, motivational sneakiness and a little cheerleading, was in Australia last week to speak about the company's past, present and future.

"After releasing Doom 3 in 2004, we decided we wanted to do something completely different to any of our earlier franchises," Willits says.

"So we spent the next year and a half working on a totally different game ... until one day I saw John [Carmack] working on a prototype using our MegaTexture technology to build huge outdoor areas and I said we needed to take that idea and blow out a game where that's the centrepiece and we have all these cool levels and missions around this large outdoor area where you can play with cars and guns."

The focus on driving vehicles is all new territory for id Software and an area Willits admits was more difficult to implement than they initially thought.

"We had iterated, prototyped and tweaked the physics until we finally got it right. The vehicles now have a nice, solid arcade feel and I'm happy to say just about everyone that's played it loves that part."

Another area the developer is addressing in Rage is criticism from fans regarding the lack of an engaging story in past games. "With Rage, we've really worked hard to create some cool characters, make some memorable encounters and to drive home more of a story," Willits says. "It's not just a story of a game but the story of the whole setting and the different locations and people that you meet."

The company's new Tech 5 game engine is largely responsible for making several innovative new features possible in Rage. The game's expansive open-world environments, right down to the individual walls in each room that players enter, have all been uniquely hand-painted rather than the repeated use of images and textures found in earlier titles. The game engine also enables the developers to create equal-quality versions of the game for different platforms, including consoles and PC.

Finally, the other key feature of the engine is to provide gameplay at 60 frames a second, which results in smoother visuals and more responsive controls than games running at 30 frames a second.

It is not about the technology though, Willits says. "Rage is not just a shooter that revolves around a war, it's not classic corridor shooter and it's not just a racing game," he says. "It's the sum of those parts that make the experience really special."

Rage launches today on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.

yea, baz, that article is actually pretty spot on (which is odd for a paper about a video game these days...)

Awesome job Braxis

Just purchased this on PS3. Awsome graphics on my 46 " LCD Bravia