RAGE 2 is an enjoyable game that I’ll almost immediately forget.
The fights are great! The weapons are brilliant. But the rest is so dull that it might as well
not exist. If I had to summarize: you’re dropped in
a world kind of like the one in Red Faction Guerilla, but instead of places you have to
destroy there are places full of people you have to destroy.
Before I moan about everything that’s wrong in the game, it’s worth saying again: shooting
people is REALLY FUN in this game! It’s been the sole motivator for me to slowly grind
away at what this game has to offer, and I still like the idea of shooting up a bandit
camp and watching their pathetic corpses tumble off the sides of cliffs. It’s easy to get
nice footage of this game which I’ll be plastering most of this video with. Sure,
it’s a rip-off of Doom 2016, right down to the charge-thingies that dead bodies drop.
But they steal the right elements. The shotgun is a work of art. You have a revolver that
sets people (and anybody stood nearby) on fire! Some of the more exotic weapons- all
of which I only discovered in the last few hours of playing the game- are actually amazing.
Check out this gun! You shoot what I assume are magnets at enemies, and then right-click
where you want it to launch them. A few of them will launch them through the air. Enough
of them will spaghettify them into a satisfying red sludge.
But aside from the shooting, there’s not a lot else that’s worth doing. There’s
a storyline you can follow, but I suggest you don’t. Because I did, I completed the
game, and THEN I found all of the stuff that would have made it more enjoyable.
By the time I finished the main campaign, I only had about half the weapons I could
have had. I didn’t have all the fast-travel points on the map unlocked- which really could
have made my time with this game less tedious. The only unlocks really worth getting are
the ones that help you to find stuff- and who wants to do that after every gunfight?
Oh and also some of the most fun special abilities eluded me until the last few hours of gameplay,
like being able to throw a temporary shield, or being able to… run. I could have done
with a lot sooner! And once you’re done the storyline, there’s
not a lot else to do. RAGE 2’s world is bland. It’s repetitive. I’ve probably
put 20 hours into this game now and have done pretty much all there is to do, but I’m
left thinking… is this it? The game is an open world, but there was no
point in that because it only serves to bore you as you look for the next place to slaughter.
You have vehicles, all of which feel the same, and for a barren wasteland, there’s a surprising
amount of stuff that gets between you and where you want to go.
Also, I don’t trust the waypoint thing at all. Sometimes it disappears, other times
it can’t be seen until it’s too late to follow it and other times it has send me in
completely the wrong direction! Navigating the world feels harder than it needs to. I
feel less like Mad Max, and more like… BAD Max.
Sigh You can forget about NPCs, random events and
stuff like that. I mean, they’re there… but they’re not worth getting out of your
car to interact with. With less work they could have made more of
a game. The world should have been a quarter of the size, or at least to have more fast-travel
spots to choose from. The main story could have been used to encourage you to unlock
all of the fast-travel spots, special abilities and weapons. But no! And for a game about
finding stuff, it doesn’t make it easy. You have to find crates and TABLETS dotted
about huge bases and tunnel systems, but until you unlock the abilities to hunt them down,
you’ll end up half-finishing everywhere you visit, meaning you’ll have to drive
across the wasteland to complete them later on. If you can be bothered. I still haven’t
found one of the towns… mostly cos it’s situated in the middle of a boring jungle
with not a lot to do there. Is RAGE 2 a bad game? No, it’s simply generic.
All of it feels like it’s been borrowed from somewhere else. Sometimes it does things
better… but most of the time it completely misses the point and ends up boring you. Like
those crates and data pads everywhere. What were they thinking.
And perhaps this is a bit mean of me, but I feel they were trying too hard to be edgy.
Zany characters, weird contraptions, macho sounding main character who wants to end the
bad guys once and for all… it feels to me like a teenager’s rendition of Mad Max.
I could just as easily argue that it gives the game character and tries to spice up the
cutscenes. But I’m not in that frame of mind, so no.
And boy is it buggy! Wherever I am, I know I don’t have to try hard to break the world.
Especially the indoor areas, I’ve accidentally climbed into the tesseract a few times. Or
I’ve bugged out and been flung across or through the map. Or I’ve respawned INSIDE
A BASE while still in my car. The end boss crashed multiple times, too- I very nearly
didn’t even finish the campaign! Occasionally, I don’t know why I die.
Sometimes, props have a party. It’s aggressively optimized!
A lot of the world is destructible… but some of it is not.
Sometimes- huh waitasec, this isn’t Rage 2…
Oh yeah, and this has to be my favourite bug so far.
So apart from that, what’s there to do in this game? It feels like they made 4 types
of place and copy-pasted them 20 of times across the world map. I don’t have a problem
with that- provided they give you a good excuse to play the game! The bandit camps do. They
chuck dozens of low-level enemies at you and you’re free to beat them however you want,
flicking between the special abilities and imaginative weapons this game has to offer.
Sadly, all of the other kinds of places are BORING. Either about blowing up barrels, or
having repetitive and drawn-out battles against the same types of bosses over and over again.
Or about fighting enemies with so much armour it feels like a chore to bring them down-
especially when there are others shooting at you. I didn’t like it- I ended up hiding
in cover, or lurking just outside the base so that they couldn’t corner me. Not exactly
a fun way to play a game like this. I played RAGE 1 when it came out. I felt the
cars were boring, but that the shooting was great and that there should have been a lot
more of it. And while RAGE 2 tries to fix these things, the same things apply. I love
the wingstick, but it gets frustrating when it breaks and it takes a bit too long to lock
onto targets for my liking. Let me multitask, instead of having to choose between wingsticking
and shooting! To be honest with you, I’m rubbish at getting
‘comfortable’ with new games. Maybe it’s because I’m comparing myself to the pros
I see online. Maybe it’s because of today’s ‘vast sandbox’ culture, and how there
are so many unlock trees that I can’t be bothered with any of them. With RAGE 2 I feel
the unlocks should be all condensed down into a single large skill tree, with a single universal
currency required to unlock it. There are so many different items you need to collect
I don’t even bother checking to see what they are, I just run about the place picking
up items with gay abandon like an angry hoover in a hurry, and then I generally have enough
items to be able to unlock stuff when I want to.
I’ve BEATEN Rage 2. I’ve done the storyline, I can easily beat any enemy I encounter. But
despite all this, I still don’t ‘get’ RAGE 2. It feels like there should have been
something else to it. I can’t put my finger on it… but if I had to say, it would be
for there to be even more enemies to kill. Cos that’s the best bit of it. At least
if the storyline had been longer I could have ended my time with it on a high, rather than
for my interest to gradually fizzle out as I explore an increasingly empty wasteland
in search of things to do. Luckily the game has a roadmap of updates
and additions- of which it’s already gotten a few. I can only imagine how bland the world
was BEFORE these things. This video sounds like I really hate the game, doesn’t it.
I don’t like anything about the game apart from the gunplay… which I absolutely LOVE!
And I only think gets better the more you master the game. My favourite bits aren’t
even the challenging parts any more. I just love killing people. Simple as that. I enjoyed
booting it up to get footage for this video today. I just wish I had had this much fun
from the very beginning, and now that I’m enjoying it, had something extra to shoot
for. Or at. Whatever. I guess that’s what expansions are for, as well as the in-built
cheats and harder difficulty modes. As much as I can vouch for this game’s shooting,
I think it’s safe to say that RAGE 2 is the game that nobody asked for. It’s trying
to combine satisfying combat with grindy sandbox gameplay, hopping on the same bandwagon as
Assassins Creed, Ghost Recon and Far Cry. But RAGE 2 doesn’t feel as epic as those
games, and I’d be surprised if many people spent as much time in it as I have done.
My advice to you is to wait until it’s on sale, then to make a bee-line for all of the
arcs in the game. Use an online guide to find them if you have to. These will unlock the
weapons and special abilities. The world will then become your toy and you can enjoy experimenting
with different combinations for the rest of the time you bother spending on it.
I know Rage 2 is only published by Bethesda. But I’ve got to ask them: why this game,
Bethesda? Doom already does the shooting bit well! And as for the grindy sandbox bit…
I think they’re forgetting they already have a series for that. One that has found
its niche, and that people really like. One that deserves a sequel. One that Odgrub would
like to visit! Bethesda… you know what to do.