The Backlog, Entry 11: Rage

I have bought a lot of video games; what I haven’t done is beat a lot of video games. For whatever reason, I’ve decided to go back and give some of these games another shot: this is the Backlog.

This Week’s Game: Rage

Unintentionally continuing my post-apocalyptic gaming habit from last week, this week I decided to dive into the MEGA TEXTURES of Rage and see if I could remember why I stopped playing it. Right off the bat, I discovered that one thing that I dislike is the loading times. This thing takes forever to load! I will freely admit that I don’t have the greatest computer in the world, especially these days but goodness me. For-Ev-Er.

The second thing I noticed was that the character models looked amazing, and the textures in town look… not good at all. The MEGA TEXTURES looks fine when the texture is like, rocks and dirt, but when you get to buildings, or, say, a computer, it looks really crappy! Again, not the best computer in the world, but I have the settings up pretty high anyway and they are just not impressive at all. Maybe there’s some setting I missed, but anything that isn’t supposed to be a rock looks bad when you get close to it. Additionally (and I’m sure this is more my computer’s fault than anything else), sometimes upon loading in, the game more or less freezes, and crawls at about .05 FPS for a couple minutes before shaking out of it and running smooth again. Again, pretty sure if I had a beefier computer I wouldn’t have that problem, but it is still an annoyance.

Technical issues aside, the game plays pretty solid. I will fully admit that the time I spent with this game last week was mostly spent driving around and shooting rockets and machine guns at other cars, and that part of the game is immensely satisfying. The driving controls are WSAD (at least when you’re playing Mouse/Keyboard) and I was surprised to discover how well they worked. I hadn’t remembered the driving feeling as solid as it did, and it was a pleasant discovery to find that I enjoyed it so much. If this game just consisted of driving around and admiring the landscape, it’d be a pretty satisfying game all by itself. As it is, there is also an FPS in the whole mix, and that’s something of a different story.

The shooting (what little I spent doing it, I am not lying; I did races, time trials, and that side-mission that has you drive mail around to various post boxes for the most of it) was solid enough, which pretty much should be expected from an iD game. If the shooting hadn’t been at least a little bit satisfying I would have been surprised. The enemies are certainly there for you to shoot, but that is about all I really have to say about them. There are mutants, as any good post-apocalyptic wasteland is mandated to have, and there are crazy punk rocker British hooligans and whatnot. It isn’t the most inspired thing in the world, but it gets the job done.

The real treat in this game, as I alluded to before, the character models. I would say that these are some of the best character models of the last generation. My gold standard for facial animation has been Half-Life 2 for a while, but the character models in Rage are a real treat.

Also, John Goodman is in it for some reason! Everyone say hi and remember his hilarious Cyclops character in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

So I rarely plan ahead on these things, but I’m pretty sure next week is gonna be about Borderlands, because Rage and Borderlands are inexorably linked in my mind; also I played Borderlands about a day after I played Rage, and I can say that at the very least, I like the driving in Rage better, although I have definitely played more Borderlands because I have more fun. If there was a co-op mode in Rage, I might enjoy it more, but I’m a co-op kind of guy. Tune in next week, duders!