Car Combat
In the town of Wellspring, the racing part of the game comes to the fore. You can race your patched-together dune buggies around desert tracks to earn money so you can trick your cars out. But you have to watch out because your fellow drivers try to run you off the road or shoot you with mini-guns. The cars are physically accurate when it comes to racing around corners or bouncing after jumps.
The fighting from car to car is entertaining because it is simple. You press the A button on the controller to fire homing missiles, which can take out an enemy car in one shot. The homing missiles are quite useful because you don’t have to aim and drive at the same time. That’s the bane of many car combat games.
The car combat is also fun because you can collect weaponry to adorn your vehicle. You can add shields that protect it from gunfire. You can attach homing missiles or mini-guns to take out enemies from afar. You can add spiked wheels to your vehicle and run the enemies off the road into canyon walls. And you can drop land mines to take out enemies that are chasing you.
At first, I found the driving hard. But then I collected some better wheels that gave me better handling on turns. After that, I was better able to make the sharp turns required in races and combat and I was able to keep up with the enemies and win races. I suppose that makes sense, but I sure was annoyed that I couldn’t drive at the beginning of the game.
Outstanding graphics
In Wellspring, you can accept missions from the Sheriff or the Mayor. They get you to carry supplies to watch towers or go after the Shrouded Clan, which has a penchant for making radio-controlled bomb cars. In each town, you find there are local enemy clans that you have to infiltrate and disrupt.
The graphics of the game are amazing. Even on the aging Xbox 360, there were plenty of moments when I just stopped the action to look at the beautiful artwork. For example, I walked under a leaking water pipe and my vision was briefly blurred by the water dripping down my face. The fire and smoke are very realistic. Ashes, dust, and loose papers float like feathers in the wind. The attention to detail is impressive. If you look at the tires, you can see mud streaks on them.
I think the graphics are so good that the game is a cut above everything else I’ve seen. Up close, everything seems so real. The game uses id Tech 5, the latest game engine of graphics guru John Carmack, one of the founders of id, which is now owned by Bethesda Softworks. The technology brings the characters to life in a way that resembles the outstanding graphics and physically accurate movements in Naughty Dog’s Uncharted 2: Among Thieves game.
Carmack’s id Tech 5 engine uses what the company calls “ MegaTextures,” built from the ground up for each of the powerful game systems: the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and the PC. A MegaTexture is a single image that replaces a bunch of others and thereby reduces the amount of computation needed to create beautiful imagery. The clever thing about this is that it saves id money — it can create its art assets once and use them across multiple platforms.
The game benefits from the MegaTextures because it leaves plenty of computation power for other things. The result is larger levels and better artificial intelligence for the enemies. The enemies are smart enough to attack from different directions and hide when they’re outgunned. They will toss grenades, rush you, poke their heads out to take pot shots and hide behind cover. When they are charging at you, the enemies will also dodge out of the way to evade your flying wingsticks or your shotgun blasts. The enemies can fight in three dimensions, dropping down on you from above. And some are like acrobats, swinging back and forth and dodging bullets until they are ready to knife you.
The result is that you can’t fight this as a “run and gun” game all of the time. You have to sit back, use all of your weapons, and try to be clever. You can toss your own grenades to flush the enemies out or move around them in an effort to outflank them. Or you can send remote-controlled bomb cars around them to blow up an air tank behind them.
Sometimes you have to approach with stealth, using wingsticks or crossbow bolts to take them out. You can assemble weapons from things that you collect. You can create sentry turrets, which shoot at anything that moves, while you attack from a different direction.
In short, you have a full set of tactical and environmental tools to confront any kind of enemy. That’s why the game is such a satisfying shooter.
Slight annoyances
Even though the game is polished, some things annoyed me. You have to save your game constantly or risk having to backtrack a long way every time you die. That’s even more annoying because it takes a long time to load levels on the Xbox 360, as Rage is a huge game that takes up three DVD disks. The game is a larger open world where you can choose which tasks you want to perform. But the world is so large that you can get lost. The visual cues that keep you moving toward your destination — like a dotted line on a mini-map that shows you where to go — aren’t always helpful, particularly when you’re driving in a car at 100 miles per hour. The result is that you’ll waste a lot more time in Rage than you want to, leaving less time for the fun stuff.
While those flaws try my patience, they’re not enough to ruin the party. I rate Rage 88 out of 100. I’m glad this game turned out this way, since id Software made the biggest of bets when it decided to keep polishing this game over a period of years. Fans like me have waited a long time to get their hands on a new id game. id’s last game was Doom 3, published in 2004. As I said before, it was worth the wait.