Rage 2
A longer review than anyone cares to read about an old and mediocre game:
This was a fun distraction from the pain in my sinuses. It does fast paced combat very well, and there's a lot of it. There's also a lot it doesn't do well, though. This game has the single most disappointing end game weapon I've used in long while. The hyper cannon SUCKS! Let me explain why...
This game strongly encourages, and rewards, fast, close combat. Your special abilities are mostly short range. Enemies drop health pickups that disappear after a short time, and they drop more health the bigger your kill streak. There are a whole bunch of upgrades to enhance rushing in and killing fast. Weapon accuracy at long ranges isn't great, but you'll still get your health whittled down trying to shot enemies at range. Overall, you're trained early on that the best way to get combat done is rush in and kill fast.
Then comes the hyper cannon, which is a shitty railgun. Most of the weapons in the game are technically optional, but usually the hyper cannon will come last. It's kept in a vault in an area rated 10/10 for combat difficulty. I was expecting something that could one-shot most common enemies. It can't. Not even with a charged up headshot catching enemies off guard. Because it's blocked by armor and most enemies have helmets. One shot from an upgraded hyper cannon can fully strip off that armor, but you know what else can? The
shotgun. The third weapon you get in the game can kill enemies in the same amount of shots as the last (out of like 9 or 10). You have to be closer to kill with the shotgun, but then you're also close enough to use your special abilities, and pick up the health bursting out of your fallen enemies like they're pinatas. The hyper cannon is a weak weapon that doesn't fit the play style that has been heavily incentivized for most of the game.
Pros:
- The shotgun is satisfying and powerful.
- Special abilities are flashy and effective.
- Combat is fun, and just keeps ramping up. Until you're juggling a whole bunch of abilities on cooldown, swapping between weapons, dashing around leaving chaos in your wake.
- The game runs well and feels responsive on my machine, even when only getting FPS in the high 30s. (Seriously, I was getting like ~45 fps in the initial rocky desert area, and thought I was going to be screwed when I hit the jungle area. Nope, every area in the game runs pretty much the same. Steady and fluid... until it crashes, which is only enough to be a minor annoyance.)
- The game looks pretty damn good. I especially liked that the greenery wasn't just grass, bushes, and trees. There's giant aspargus/bamboo looking stuff in the wetlands, melon-cactuses in the desert, and strange looking flowers in the wilds. Someone put more creativity into the plants in this game than went into most every other cookie-cutter design choice.
Screenshots, on medium-ish settings:
Mediocre bits:
- Car driving and combat is fine.
- The map design is okay. Very few areas felt really well designed, but also very little felt broken or obtuse.
- The powerful shotgun overshadowed weapons with more interesting mechanics. I used the grav dart launcher and sidewinder pistol because they were fun, but they were often significantly less effective than the shotgun. The grav dart launcher, especially took a lot more effort to make useful than it shoudl have. It's fun to make enemies go flying, but not really efficient.
Cons:
- The world and lore are extremely boring. Most of the characters are completely 1-dimensional and uninteresting.
- Almost all of the enemies are either humanoid, vehicle, or robot turret. There's giant mutant genetic experiments, and all sorts of near magical high tech, but the only thing you fight with more than two legs is a few, rare dogs. 95% of what you fight is just a standard size humanoid (100% in the DLC). Even the large sized enemies are mostly just large humanoids. There is one (1) giant sandworm, and that fight is completely optional, isn't very good, and rewards you with a crappy vehicle you won't want to drive.
- The writing is terrible, but the game encourages you to find and collect datapads.
- The UI is functional, but is full of tiny annoyances. Almost every entry in your logs is constantly lit up with (!) even for completed quests. Go read the datapad entry that you could have read when you picked it up. Read it, please! (Also, it might just be my system, but every time I brought up a menu, even the weapon select menu, the whole thing froze up for a second or two. Even moving between tabs in the menu would often freeze for a moment.)
- The game constantly pops up about the locations you're passing by, even when you've completed the area and found everything on the checklist. This means getting constantly told DESTROY THE AUTHORITY SENTRY! as you're driving around, despite already having destroyed them. So you never know if the pop-up is warning you that you're about to get fired upon, or if it's just telling you that you've already done the thing.
- Authority Sentries suuuuuuuuck. Giant, immobile bullet sponges that spam attacks and are often located in areas that don't really highlight the game mechanics that could make fighting them enjoyable. They're more obnoxious than difficult, and I mostly lamented the ammo I was dumping into defeating them quickly.
- Why is a boomerang ("wingstick" in game lore) being pushed as the iconic weapon? This thing sucks. You're limited in carry capacity for them. They can't kill armored enemies in one shot (and usually break trying to do so, negating the boomerang function). Are useless against crowds (so why are they as limited as grenades?) They take far too much investment to upgrade, and when you do they're still a slow, risky weapon to use. I would have fixed all this by making your wingstick one of your special abilities, on cooldown after use. One unbreakable "nanotrite" powered wingstick that hits hard and always returns, but you can't spam. Cool, flashly, and powerful enough that you won't be left thinknig "why didn't I just blast this guy with my shotgun?"
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