Why I Hated... Rage

I rent alot of games, some good, some bad. When I rent a game I can't bring myself to finish I'll let you guys know why. Learn from my mistakes!

I played Rage for an hour. That was enough. From the moment the game starts it stinks of unoriginality, it looks almost identical to Borderlands (if Borderlands was permanently way too dark) and starts you off in a vault, waking you up after a an apocalyptic event has wiped out most of the population, leaving the survivors to scavenge and fight off bandits... sound familiar, Fallout fans?

It's a first person shooter, so you would expect, with the entire game Look, they're in cover...revolving around the firing of guns, that they would have made shooting people feel good. Wrong. The starting pistol you get feels like it has the power of a water pistol, and feels about as effective as clicking your fingers at the enemies. There's basically no kickback on your shots, and no feedback at all on your shots either, so firing at bad guys just doesn't have any weight to it.

And those bad guys, holy shit. You expect games nowadays to have atleast some kind of AI. It's not asking too much to have enemies act vaguely intelligently in this day and age, but Rage thinks it knows better. Rage thinks people with guns either stand still and shoot you, or try and huddle nearby something vaguely resembling cover, 99% of the time leaving their head, arms and torso hanging out in such a way that I was almost led to believe they were undertaking in some kind of spontaneous mass suicide but without telling me I was supposed to be the one providing the death. My suspisions were further confirmed by almost every bad guy in the game. When enemies aren't being the world's worst hiders, they're spring straight at you, without a care in the world. Baddies will see you, shout at you, then run at you as you shoot them in the face, torso and penis (what? They're not stopping me, I might aswell aim for the penis!), even the guys with guns more often than not leg it at you with reckless abandon. I think my mass suicide theory is spot on.

Good strategy lads, just run at meThe characterisation is some of the worst I've ever been forced to look at. Your character doesn't speak for some reason, and nobody you talk to seems to notice. John Goodman is the first talking character you see in the game and for some reason seems to think you're capable of killing an entire camp of bandits just minutes after he has to save your life from TWO of them, stating that because you're from this vault thing you're better at shooting bandits... for some reason. I've never been so utterly detached from anything anybody has said so quickly in a game.

The game's graphics are nice, I guess, but the art style is so standard: dusty wasteland, destroyed places people used to live, shanty towns with survivors living in. Even the world's most gorgeous desolate wasteland is still a shithole.

You pick up stuff from the environment to sell and then you use thatJust stand there lads, that's great. Great job. money to buy ammo, or bandages or stuff. why a shop would want to buy an empty bottle after the apocalypse is beyond me, but hey, it's a game, why bother trying to make anything in it make logical sense when you can just make it look a bit prettier than other games. It's an excellent idea, I mean who cares if the gameplay is so incredibly bad it makes me want to burn the disc, so long as those shadows are realistic! Why make the main character a character at all? Just make him a mute with no personality or unique features, then make absolutely sure the dust kicks off your tyres just right when you're driving around to make up for it.

Rage, ironically, made me so damn angry. It wasn't hard, not even a little, it was just such a... nothing. Unoriginal, boring and a game that exists for no reason, other than to invoke memories of Borderlands and Fallout and get some sales off that nostalgia. Rage can fuck off. On the one hand I'm glad I rented it because I save £40, but on the other hand I kinda wish I'd bought it, so I could do whatever I wanted with those 3 shitty discs: Throw them at a wall; wipe my bum with them; grind them up and sell them to a drug addict, stick disc fragments into Halloween sweets... all these are better uses of the game than sticking it in your Xbox and even getting a single achievement from it. A waste of discs.