RAGE

I am not sure why I bought RAGE. I guess I wanted to play another first person shooter. I had even already watched a playthrough of the game when it came out in 2011 though by now I had forgotten pretty much all of it with the exception of recalling the ending being anti-climactic.

Light on the plot

And bit of a letdown it indeed was. Although, considering how undeveloped Rage's story is, I do not think the ending had any chance to be anything spectacular in the first place. There could have been a boss fight, though. The multiple mutant soldiers do not really make one, especially considering you are given a very powerful pulse cannon for the final mission.

Most of the game you are completing odd jobs for various denizens of the post-apocalyptic wasteland. Because of course that is what an Ark Survivor infused with automatically healing nanotrites should do. But since the Eden Project seems to not have gone as planned after the asteroid impact, I guess the mute protagonist is free to do whatever he wants.

Rage is mostly a shooter but there is a lot driving too, especially if you decide to win all the races. I think my playtime might have even been divided equally between shooting and racing. Driving is enjoyable and the controls work as expected -- no oddities like in the Borderlands games, though I kind of wished you could have been able to look around with mouse while driving.

PS3 level visuals

The game's graphics also look the best while driving. You do not get to see the simply awful textures from up close. I do not know if the texture detail option would have made a difference but I would not have been able to turn it on without the game becoming unplayable (even if it is a five-year-old game) as the option requires your CPU to have more than 4 cores. I also sometimes noticed texture-popping when quickly turning around. But if the sky was not static, the game could have actually looked gorgeous on the move.

Characters are animated well, however. NPCs seemed lively and the way the melee enemies jump over obstacles and climb walls is great. Enemy AI is quite believable as well. They cover for each other and retreat when it seems they are losing. Sometimes they do lean to the side even if they are not actually hidden from your sight at all, though. It looks tad silly.

Controls mostly fine

Consoles, or at least a controller, being the target platform shows in the game in many things. For instance, the "press enter" screen the game goes into instead of the main menu when quiting. There is also no FOV slider and you have to set your degrees as a launch parameter (which I think worked). Surprisingly enough you can however carry all weapons with you at all times and switch between them from the number keys. Manual saving is also a thing which definitely was unexpected. And you better remember to do those quick saves too as the automatic checkpoints are few and far between.

There is no negative mouse acceleration apart from when transitioning between the first and second area on the air ship. I guess they forgot to remove it from there. Mouse sensitivity is a slight problem, however. Menus have much higher sensitivity and pushing the slider to my preferred level for aiming made the inventory and such quite difficult to use.

One thing Rage definitely does right is giving enough enemies to shoot at. Singularity, for instance, had them run out way too quickly. In my opinion the assault rifle and machine gun could have used a damage boost. Enemies feel very bullet spongy while using them. The shotgun was easily my favorite gun. Even against the heavily armored gearhead bandits it seemed to be most efficient at accomplishing the job.