About.com Rating



Vehicle-Based Gameplay

Shooting is only half of the gameplay here, though. Racing armed biggies around the wasteland is also a big part of the game. Well, it isn't a big part unless you want it to be. You only actually are forced to run a couple of races for the story, and everything else is optional. The vehicles control really quite well, and arming them with machine guns, rocket launchers, shields, and automatic turrets (kinda like options in Gradius ...) makes the vehicle combat pretty fun.

You can also upgrade the engine, turbo boost, suspension, tires, and armor to truly customize your vehicles and make them handle any way you want. The races basically play like Mario Kart or Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, which is pretty cool.

Plenty of Content

All in all, with the story missions, side missions you get from NPCs, side missions you can take at a "Job Board" in the towns, races, minigames (there is a full-on collectible card game buried in here) - there is a lot to do. I beat the story at around the 9-hour mark, but that was with only doing a handful of side quests and extra stuff. If you want to do everything in RAGE, 15+ hours is probably the minimum length it'll take. id has also promised DLC and potential new features coming down the road, so it is certainly not lacking for content.

RAGE is on 3 Discs

To clear up any questions you might have with the game being on 3 discs on Xbox 360. If you only want to play the campaign, you only need to install the first two discs, which takes up about 15GB.

All three discs installed takes up about 22GB. I switched to disc 2 at about the 6-hour mark in the story. When you get to disc 2, if you want to go back to the first part of the game and finish up missions you need to swap discs. If you plan ahead accordingly, you shouldn't need to swap discs more than once or twice. The third disc contains all of the multiplayer features.

Multiplayer

Multiplayer isn't the major draw here, but it is also clear it definitely wasn't just a side project for id. The vehicle combat and racing is the main focus of the multiplayer, with normal races, death match, and other unique modes such as collecting meteorite pieces and returning them to specific points to "score" making up most of the offerings. The controls are solid, as I mentioned above, and the vehicle multiplayer is really quite fun.

There is also a FPS co-op mode called Wasteland Legends that you can play either online or splitscreen, or even by yourself if you want. This mode fills in some of the backstory on the characters you meet during the campaign. Basically, it is just more of the same gameplay from the campaign where you kill everything you see and go from "A" to "B" and doesn't really make you care about any of the characters. But you do get to play through it with a friend, which is always nice. Also nice is that there is a little twist to the gameplay here - it is score-based similar to Bulletstorm, so killing enemies with style and in different ways earns you more points. Points are tallied for your team and scores are posted to a leaderboard so you can compete with other players for high scores on each level.

Graphics

Visually, RAGE is a nice looking game for the most part. The characters and enemy designs are nicely detailed and look good overall. The game also has some of the absolute best looking skyboxes of any game around. The environments are sort of inconsistent - outdoor areas have bland textures and are kind of boring since they are so big, but indoor areas look significantly nicer since they are much smaller linear levels. You do see some texture pop in, especially if you turn around quickly, but it isn't too bad. The game maintains a rock solid 60FPS framerate, which helps the gameplay feel so smooth and fast.

Sound

The sound is only really okay. The voice acting is so-so with the aforementioned robotic delivery from NPCs. The sound effects are good, though you'll tire of hearing the same growls repeated over and over from mutants.

Bottom Line

Ultimately, RAGE is a pretty solid game that FPS fans will enjoy. At first it seems like a Borderlands (but with much better gameplay) or Fallout 3 (but with much worse quests)-type of game, but it really stands on its own. The story and missions aren't particularly good, but the core shooting and racing gameplay is really, really well done and fun overall. There is a ton to do in the campaign, along with surprisingly good multiplayer options, which makes RAGE a good value overall and worth a purchase for FPS fans.



Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.