RAGE

Available On: Xbox 360, PS3, and PC
Played it on: Xbox 360
Played it for: 7 hours

RATING: 5.5/10

This game is terrible.

The thing is, this game has a lot of promise, and then just stops delivering. It can't commit to being the kind of game that it wants to be, so it just ends up being a complete mess. In short, it's not very enjoyable.

Here's where the game has potential. The graphics shoot for a gritty realism, sort of like an updated Fallout 3. This creates an actually real sense of post-apocalyptic desperation, and it made me pretty happy to get in that kind of mode again. Fallout 3 is my favorite game of all time (especially true, considering I've put about 250 hours into it), and the first thought that ran through my head was "So this is a good approximation of what Fallout 4 will look like." It makes the player feel like they need to get to safety in a town, or at least find someone else so that the wasteland isn't such a lonely place. This has infinite potential that can be used in a myriad of ways, and it's complimented by the second good element of RAGE, the upgrades that can be used on weapons. To use a specific example, the revolver pistol can be upgraded by purchasing broken binoculars, and using the working part as a makeshift scope. On top of that, the voice acting is pretty good, and the actors incorporate desperation, fear, confidence, and other various emotions in the right places and times, and this compliments the graphics by, again, creating a realistic apocalyptic feel. Things like these could have really helped RAGE to be an exceptionally good game. Unfortunately, though, everything else about it ruins the experience.

The controls feel very sloppy and not very well tuned. It's very easy to look past things and miss shots because the controller made the camera move too far over. This can be fixed by lowering the look speed, but then the camera becomes too slow when not aiming. This ruins the overall game feel, or at least on console. The one way that comes to mind about fixing the problem is a keyboard and mouse, which, come to think of it, would have been a better idea. Regardless, the game would still be bad even on a high end PC.

The guns are sloppy. RAGE tries to create a much more fast paced action game than Fallout 3, and initially the game feels almost like Call of Duty with the quicker pace, as there are bandits everywhere, no targeting systems or anything like that, and limited, regenerating health. But the guns do virtually no damage to the bandits, meaning a lot of wasted time and ammo. The fast pace is stunted by trying to make it more like an RPG where the character begins with a weak pistol, and it ends up feeling like the player is just shooting a paintball gun at his opponents. In fact, hitting someone with the butt of a rifle is sometimes more effective than  shooting them in the head, and this is a serious problem, and one of the game's greatest shortcomings. It can't decide if it wants to be an RPG or not, and gets lost somewhere in the middle, failing miserably. But it doesn't stop there.

The character animations look like something straight out of "Jimmy Neutron," with absolutely no realism to match the graphics in the world. The character models are badly designed, the animations are all far too quick and over-exaggerated, and it makes every NPC look very out of place. It looks like something out of an E family game, not an M rated RPG-esque shooter. This destroys all the effort the voice actors put in to make the game sound and feel great, and the player leaves confused and dissatisfied. And to top this all off, there's even another glaring element in RAGE that lowers its score even more.

The plot is... well, nonexistent. There is a semi-well put together idea of a person (the player) freed from a vault that was supposed to protect people from the apocalypse, and now, seeing all his fellow recruits are dead, the person must fight to survive, but then the game just stops giving any direction. Quests are all mono-directional, they have no concrete goals besides money, and they have no relevance besides the fact that killing bandits gets an odd item or two. But otherwise, there is no ultimate goal, no bad guy to take down, nobody to rescue, just bandits and settlers. The game feels pointless.

Don't play this game, please. It's not worth the time or money. It has an identity crisis where the world looks realistic, but the characters look like they're straight out of a child's cartoon, it wants to be a shooter, but it feels like the player's shooting a paintball gun, it wants to have fear and desperation, but there's no plot to get even the remotest fears out, and the console version's controls are poorly optimized. This game is a formless mess, and it's not worth even the slightest amount of time. Long story short, don't try to make Call of Fallout, because it's not worth it.