RAGE 2

I wonder if it was Bethesda/id who saw Mad Max, thinking its engine would be a good fit for RⒶGE 2 (as it's stylized), and approached Avalanche Studios for a collaboration. Or was it vice versa. The credits have more Avalanche's people than id's so I would guess it was mainly their project.

Entertaining shooter to a degree

Rage 2 is a mixed bag. DOOM (2016) -like first person shooter gameplay sounds fun -- and it is, without a doubt -- but the package as a whole wasn't that solid. I think the problem is that Avalanche and their open world didn't bring anything worthwhile to the table. The open world's sole function is to increase the distance between fights. And traversing that distance isn't exciting -- you don't get attacked on roads outside few potshots while passing by enemy vehicles; no one will chase after you.

You can upgrade your rather clumsily moving high tech car but the only reason to do so is to have easier time destroying convoys. And destroying convoys merely rewards you with more car upgrade parts. Avalanche thus included a poorer version of Mad Max's car combat that exists only for itself and has nothing to do with the rest of the game.

Upgrades are the game's thing even outside the car. There are so many different upgrade trees in Rage 2. It's almost as if you upgrade stuff for the sake of upgrading. Not to get more powerful enough for something else; just to upgrade. Even the game's bare bones story wants you to upgrade before progressing after you've unlocked each of three project trees although I never experienced such arbitrary limits as I had been clearing every location I came across in my usual playstyle. I was already beyond the necessary thresholds by the time I did all but one of the project-unlocking quests.

I would suggest doing the three unlock quests right after you get out of the intro unlike I did. That way you can start building up your power and make things easier with every kind of upgrade points you gather right away. After that it might be worth prioritizing all the arks to have every weapon and power available sooner. The arks are located at the light pillars that show up when you hold down nanotrite power activation key.

I cleared most of the weapon arks relatively late and maybe that's why didn't really find use for the additional guns. The assault rifle and shotgun did the job for me most of the time. All the different nanotrite powers I did utilize though. Well except for Barrier which I didn't find that useful. Why sit behind a cover when you can run around the battlefield using slides, ledge grabs, double jumps, and Slams.

Rage 2 has few different enemy factions that together provide a surprisingly good variety on what you get to shoot at. A good story and characters you could actually care about would have made all the killing have more meaning though. Marketing for the game gave the impression there would be a lot of Borderlands type silliness but it shows very little in the actual product. Characters do like to talk awfully lot though. Unfortunately they don't really have anything of importance to say.

There are some issues with keyboard and mouse controls, which is not unexpected in an Avalanche title. Once again someone tried to convert controller scheme 1:1 to keyboard, disregarding common conventions and what is sensible. Or at least gave up at some point. The one big problem is that four of the feltrite powers are activated by first holding the general power activation key -- control by default -- and then some other key. That is a bit too much considering all the other stuff your WASD-hand needs to do.

Luckily the four powers in question also have instant activation keys (unbound by default) on PC. I bound them to the function keys and switched the power key from control to alt. That made things playable. Rage 2 suffers from the hold-down-button plague in general as well but I still find it perplexing why they made gathering feltrite off of stuff a huge chore. You have to hold down the button separately for every crystal. It's such a waste of time for very small reward.

Rage 2 uses a lot of magenta and cyan, even in its chromatic aberration filter, I belive. I turned it off before playing, though -- the game seemed to have enough screen distortion effects already from what I had seen. Even though Rage 2's setting is alike to Mad Max and the engine version probably close to it too, I didn't find it as pretty. Maybe it's the palette. I wouldn't put it past Avalanche to make a newer game look worse though. (See the water in Just Cause 3 and 4, for instance.)

I played Rage 2 on the game pass and probably won't buy the game unless it gets a really deep discount later on. The full game getting such a deal might be unlikely as someone (Bethesda as the publisher probably) decided to try the old fake currency monetization method. You can't even buy the game's expansions directly but need Rage 2 Coins first. As usual you can't purchase the exact amount and buying more currency at once gives you more "value", encouraging you to spend more. I thought at least single player games were past this kind of shit but I guess not.