Rage Review

By: Michael Bee - October 9, 2011 - 11:04 p.m.

Rage, the showpiece for id Software’s new idtech 5 engine and megatexture technology, is a solid, engaging shooter, but as everyone knows, the PC version was marred with problems on release. However, I’ve slogged my way through the singleplayer campaign and can safely say the game is good, but it wasn’t without its problems and the technology behind it is rather lacking.

I have to say, I was anxious to play Rage. Like many people, I was disappointed with Doom 3, which was id’s previous game, so my hopes for Rage had nothing to do with a love for id, because frankly I find them to be only so-so developers. With that said, I know they made big strides for gaming in the 90’s, but it has been a long time since they released anything that stood above the crowd. And, frankly, they still haven’t done it. While Rage is an enjoyable, even good in places, shooter, it doesn’t stand out. So if you go into this game expecting anything other than your standard shooter, you will be sorely disappointed.

First things first, when I loaded up Rage for the first time I was blown away, and not in a good way. As any PC gamer, I entered the video options screen ready to crank things up to maximum only to find one of the worst options screens I’ve ever seen. The options, as I’m sure you know by now, included resolution, antialiasing, gamma, and GPU transcode. The end. I was willing to let that slide. I thought to myself, “Well, if the game looks good then there’s no reason to complain.” The bad news, it didn’t look good. Not even close. (id Software has since released a patch adding a few more options to the Video menu, but it is still about as bare bones as option menus get.)

The game looked bad. And I don’t mean the graphics were sub-par, I mean it looked so bad I immediately closed the game and hit the Internet. The textures were so disgustingly blurry I needed to find out what was wrong with my game, because there HAD to be something wrong with it to produce textures so horrendously ugly that it looked like someone literally took shit and smeared it on every surface in the game and then took vaseline and smeared it over my eyes. Oddly enough, the characters in the game looked great, had good details and animations, etc. But they were standing in one of the worst looking game worlds in recent memory.

After a lot of digging, and with the help of several Internet geniuses, I finally had a config file in place that allowed the use of better textures. The result, an ok looking game. Which was fine. At least I could play it without wanting to kill myself and strain my eyes to try to figure out where one piece of the environment ended and where another began.

So, once I got the graphics to a point where they weren’t distracting me from the game, I took off and began playing. Which led to some initial groans as the story begins with ridiculous requests from NPCs and some ho-hum gameplay. It was a bit unnerving that I was rescued from bandits by the first character you meet, Dan Hagar, and then 10 seconds later he requests that I kill people for him as though it was as casual as picking up groceries. Easing the player into the game with some kind of story or character introduction before asking us to kill would have gone a long way here.

But, I’m jumping the gun here. Let me explain a bit of what I’ve gleaned from the story in Rage. A giant asteroid hits the Earth and wipes out the majority of life on the planet. You are an ark survivor, giant capsules that housed humans in deep sleep, who were to awake and rebuild once the planet was inhabitable again. You end p joining a resistance to fight off the bad guys, in this case the Authority, who want to control the human population, just like all dystopian bad guys. The story is bare bones and not very important. Sad really, because it could have at least been interesting in the right hands.

Rage doesn’t feature an open world, but rather an open corridor. There are small, open outdoor sections where you can drive back and forth in between missions, but this really just feels like filler, as do the sections where you’re talking to characters and accepting missions. This part could have been skipped entirely, because there are no real side missions and the only side activities you can participate in are providing sniper cover for shady transactions, races and gambling, which could have been incorporated into the game without having the player kill time needlessly traveling from point to point.

Once you get into the actual missions, the game becomes enjoyable. The shooting is well done and engaging at times, especially against human enemies. I say human enemies because you will spend quite a bit of time early on shooting mutants who run directly at you. The human enemies in the game take cover, throw grenades and use the environment, which makes the shooting much more enjoyable for me. Add in all the options the player is given in combat, such as mind-control arrows, remote control car bombs, a Mad Max-style boomerang, etc., and the combat opens up a lot of possibilities. However, most of the missions take place indoors and showcase the awful textures up close. It is truly jarring to see some of these atrocities. But you forgive it in these sections since the shooting feels right, it feels visceral and the reactions of enemies getting shot are great. It’s good stuff. Unfortunately, the in-between time really highlights the ugly environments. Though once you exit them and enter the outdoor corridor areas, it looks good from afar. Just don’t get too close.

Now, this is where I run into trouble with this review. As much as id Software talked about their new megatexture technology, which basically allows for one giant texture to be used to cover the game world, I have to say I don’t understand what they were thinking. The main benefit from this technology was the ability to have every area of a game be truly unique. It sounds great in theory, but maybe Rage has the wrong environment to showcase it.

The reason the textures are so bad in the game is because they are all part of one giant texture, which had to be compressed to extreme levels to get the size of the game down to nearly 25 gigabytes. So what we end up with are horrible textures. But my problem is that while the game is supposed to allow unique textures to be painted on everything in the game, all I’ve seen in Rage are 1,000 nearly identical cracked and broken stone walls, 1,000 nearly identical rusted metal surfaces, and on and on. Every area of the game looks similar to every other. I could understand using this technology in a game featuring many different planets perhaps, where you could have items that look wildly different, but it seems wasted in this game. Every soda or snack machine in the game is the same, I saw the same tile floor used in many rooms. So, my question is, why was this technology necessary? I’ve seen actual open world games with more variety that did not use megatextures and the textures in those games were also much better looking than what we get in Rage. I’ve also never heard a player complain in all my years of gaming that they thought the textures were too repetitive in any game. So why was this necessary and why did they even think it would be beneficial? Rage’s sky is static, its lighting is static and its shadows are static, presumably because of the way this technology works. Does anyone out there know why this was deemed an acceptable way to make a game? Was it solely to allow higher frames on consoles? If it is, then it is a success. If the goal of this technology was to make a truly unique game world that could not have been created any other way, then it is an utter failure. It is not unique, the areas in the game do not feel fresh or unique and the textures are appalling. So I have to say I don’t see any use for this technology other than allowing a game to run better on consoles.

There are huge trade offs here using megatextures, and quite honestly, I don’t like them. I don’t want to give up dynamic lighting and shadows for compressed and shitty looking textures. That doesn’t sound like the kind of trade off I want in a game. What’s the point of having more texture variety if they all look like shit. There have been rumors that a high-resolution texture pack could be released for Rage in the future, so I am kind of looking forward to seeing that happen (if it does), but aside from that, I don’t see a reason for this technology to exist.

Rage, as a shooter, is a success overall. As a showcase for idtech 5 and megatexturing, it’s a failure. There is a fun game to be played here, but it all feels a bit uneven due to the filler of travelling back and forth between missions. I felt that was an unnecessary part of the game, and it wasn’t enjoyable for me. And yes, that includes the car combat, which was basically like the respawning enemies in Far Cry 2 that you had to fight over and over every time you wanted to get somewhere. It was annoying and not very fun. The races were average and the gambling games were abysmal, but the meat of the game, the shooting, was great. I just wish they had focused more on that part.