4cr Preview – Rage

I’ll be honest, I went into the presentation for Rage with few expectations. I like id as a developer – I nursed a minor Quake addiction for a couple of years – but their past few releases have been kind of iffy. I also had developed this mental image of Rage just being some post-apocalyptic racing game, and racing games just aren’t my thing.

Turns out that I should have paid closer attention to the title. No, it is not a racing game (though there is a fair amount of driving), and no, this game will not be “iffy” in any way. Rage has jumped near the top of my ever-growing pile of games to check out.

id’s first new IP in over a decade is a post-apocalyptic shooter. With an asteroid about to hit the Earth, a coalition of governments buries pods of people around the globe. Your character was one of those people, and years later, you emerge into a twisted, hostile world or desert wastelands and crumbling cities. The other survivors distrust you, with your strange clothing and relative naivety, and you need to earn their trust with your actions.

Yeah, I realize that sounds exactly like the premise of the Fallout series, but in action, it is just slightly different enough to not seem derivative. While both franchises are set in similar worlds, Rage takes way more from the The Road Warrior. You take on more of a nomadic status, moving from location to location and constantly upgrading your rusty old buggy. In many ways, it also reminded me of an earth-bound version of Firefly. It is the futuristic wild west – a lawless land of bars and guns along with the occasional hologram.

Rage is fundamentally still a first-person shooter. There is significantly more story than in most of id’s past games – and you’ll take on quests (ok, “jobs”) from the residents of the scattered pockets of civilization – but the game is fundamentally linear. You’re going from point A to point B. Still, the developers have promised all sorts of rewards for those that drift off the beaten path and explore the wide-open maps a little bit.

As you would expect from id, Rage is visually stunning. The graphics are clean, crisp, and insanely detailed. Rather than procedurally generating each map, their artists and modelers were instructed to design each area to “tell a story.” Sure, that is mostly a clever bit of PR fluff, but all of the areas that I got to take a look at were visually interesting. From the crumbling remains of a city to a decrepit subway system, each area offered a number of details to drink in. Characters were the same – every person to appear had a high level of detail in their design. These are things like belts, pouches, patches on their clothing, and above all – their facial expressions. Rage has some of the most emotive characters that I’ve seen in a game. The developers have promised that the entire game will run at 60 frames per second. I have no idea if that was true, but Rage did run smoothly the entire time, with no tearing or slowdown.

The gameplay seemed pretty satisfying, with a variety of different guns, grenades, and throwing knives. You’ll also gain access to a number of different ammo types. After taking on a job in the subway, we were given electrically-charged bolts, which could be fired into water for greater effect. You’ll also collect schematics throughout the world, which can be used to build a number of gadgets. You might put together a radio-controlled car with a bomb attached, or a spider-like turret robot that follows you around.

Also of note is the AI. Characters have knowledge of their environment and will use it to great effect. In most games, the computer-controlled characters can duck behind cover. In Rage, they will bob and weave around a room, jumping off of walls and swinging on pipes.

Each town has a number of minigames that you can play to earn more money. One relatively simple one involves a set of holograms. A sheriff stands in the center, surrounded on all four side by mutants. You’ll place a bet, then roll the dice until the sheriff either survives all four or dies. If he wins, you’ll make a good buck.

After seeing Rage in action, I can’t wait to play the final game. It continues to uphold id’s reputation for graphically stunning games, and the setting and gameplay seem more than interesting enough to stand out of the crowd. The game will launch sometime next year for the PS3, Xbox 360, PC, and Mac, with a rumored Linux port to follow.