"Rage 2" Review - Dropped one hit like "Doom," pure gold, then got the f*** off the commode

Available for: Playstation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows
Reviewed for: Playstation 4

[In case for some reason you didn't understand the subtitle, here you go, knock yourself out!]

Rage 2 is an exercise in either unbridled hubris or unmatched stupidity. There's simply no other explanation for why this game fails and succeeds in the exact same ways that the original Rage failed and succeeded, but somehow to an even worse and better (respectively) degree! For most of my playtime, I was willing to forgive some of Rage 2's shortcomings simply because of how right the game gets it when it does get it right! But having finished it now, and given how now I feel cheated out of my money, I just can't let it slide. This is a really weird experience for me. I mean, I actually loved the vast majority of my time with this game, and yet the negatives are so intrusive that I legitimately feel like I should get my money back. Welcome back to the broken leg review saga. Yep. Leg is still busted, so once again, the saga continues. Let's just cut right to the chase so I don't make this any more confusing than it has to be. 

Rage 2 takes place a couple of years after the "events" of 2011's Rage. You play as either a bland protagonist or a bland protagonist who wouldn't have had the right to vote until the passing of the 19th amendment. You're given two minutes of exposition which says "hey, here's the woman I grew up with, and here's my surrogate mother figure....boy am I fond of them!" before "The Authority" (the evil new world government from the first game and winner of the worst name for a villain award 2011) shows up and attacks your settlement. Then, the Authority's leader, General Cross, barges in and announces that he plans to destroy the beauty of the wasteland in order to build a parking lot. In response, your character, Walker, asks what will become of the many beautiful endangered animal species that live among the wastes that General Cross intends to bulldoze order for to build a parking lot. To this, General Cross twirls his mustache and laughs, declaring that the lives of a couple animals and a couple trees are nothing compared to the value of money and parking lots. From there, Walker embarks on an epic journey to defeat General Cross and save the wasteland from being bulldozed and turned into a parking lot by incessantly posting about it on Facebook and pretending to literally sob about it before forgetting about the cause entirely the next time a new fad cause came around for him to pretend to be emotionally affected by. 

Dear reader, if even one word of the past couple of sentences were true, the story would've been much better than what we actually got. No, General Cross does barge in, but all he does is kill off your surrogate mother character who you (the player) knew for literally a couple of seconds before announcing that he will conquer the wasteland and replace humanity with his new technology-driven race. But given how horribly designed he is, he might as well have the kind of Saturday morning cartoon villain motivations that the kinds of people who make children's movies with animals as the protagonists believe CEOs have. He's just your bog standard scarred and bald Eastern European-looking head on top of a comically large robotic body ripped straight from a poor man's G.I. Joe toy line. But I digress. After surviving the encounter with Cross, Walker finds a hologram from his surrogate mother with instructions on how to defeat the Authority. Then he does it. 

Folks, this is simply the worst story I've ever experienced in a game. That includes f***ing Brink. I've literally never played a game with a worse story than this one. The fact that it manages to be worse than the story found in the original Rage is just shocking to me. I don't normally care about the story with Id Software properties given how good the gameplay typically is, but this was offensively bad! Without saying anything about plot events (even though LITERALLY NOTHING EVEN REMOTELY HAPPENS AT ANY POINT IN THIS GODD*** F***ING GAME), let me break down how this game is structured:

-Tutorial Level

-Three fetch quests you do, one for each of the 3 resistance leader characters

-Open world busywork for maybe around 3-4 hours

-Three fetch quests for the resistance leaders again

-Final mission

That's it. The game amounts to all of 6-7 hours, and most of the time is just getting to the objectives, but we'll touch on that later. That's all you get in terms of specially-developed content. 25% 8 boardroom-designed missions and 75% padding with content that is supposed to be extra!! When I reached what was (unbeknownst to me) the final mission, my thought was: "ah, so this is where we'll find out our plan wasn't as solid as we thought. We'll fail and have to regroup against more desperate odds." I thought that after I finished that mission, the open world would suddenly have a bigger authority presence and travel would be more challenging as a result. But then, out of completely nowhere, without having accomplished anything, the game just f***ing ends! In the smack middle of an actually somewhat action-filled cutscene, the credits just start rolling. An audible "what?" escaped my lips when the lightbulb went off in my head. Not an angry one, but an annoyed, "you have to be joking" one. But then a couple more "what"s came out, each more angry than the last. 

Look, as we'll go on to discuss, the act of playing this game is great most of the time, so the question may come up: there's still plenty to do after the credits roll, so why is a short campaign such a problem? Well, for comparison, let's look at another game developed by this developer: 2016's Doom, my Game of the Year in its year. The gameplay is pretty similar, but the difference is that the people behind Doom built a f***ing game and built plenty of fun side content surrounding it. If you just played the campaign, you got everything the game wanted you to have (for example, as we'll discuss in a second, all the weapons). However, when the credits rolled, you could go back and replay levels to complete optional challenges to unlock additional optional advantages, you could play around with the map editor, you could enter into multiplayer, there were plenty of options for additional stuff to do once you completed the campaign. In Rage 2, they didn't design a f***ing game, they just made a map, plopped a bunch of your bog-standard open world busywork in it, made some of it plot-mandatory, then said you could complete the rest whenever you wanted. If you just do the campaign, you won't even end up with every BASIC thing the game wants you to have! I went out of my way to revolve my mandatory side-content around finding the many "arks" (which contain things like new weapons and skills), and I completed this game missing approximately (I think) 4 weapons and two abilities. Because of the plot-mandatory content, I got two additional weapons and 2 additional skills, but if I'd gone about it in other ways, I might've come to the final boss somehow with less in my hands! It's piss-poor game design, and it wouldn't be handholding to have all the basics included in the campaign. The smart thing to do would've been to steadily drip-feed the player their weapons and skills over the course of an actually cared-about campaign, then hide some killer additional knick-knacks (such as the alternate weapon modes found in Doom) behind side content. But no, because of the sheer laziness that went into this game's design, if you want the base experience that the developers wanted you to have, you have to go out, find it, and essentially do the devs' jobs for them. Hell, it wouldn't have been great, but if they'd included another bit of open world padding before the final mission so that the player would inevitably stumble across all the weapons and skills, that would've been fine. It would've at least indicated a little bit of competency behind the laziness. I would've been able to say, as my completely arrogant Anthropology professor told me when I dropped his worthless class back in my college days: "I can tell there's a lot of intelligence behind all that rushed work." It's just unbelievable. 

But it isn't just the story and progression of upgrades/new equipment that is poorly done. The entire game as an open world experience is poorly done as well! Every location just feels plopped down at random! There's no sense of history, no rhyme or reason why thing x would be in location y! The map goes from harsh desert to asian style swamplands complete with flipping bamboo to lush jungle at the drop of the hat! There's variety for the sake of variety, and that's not a good thing! Take a game like Fallout 3, for an example of how to do open world game design right. With that game, Bethesda seemingly built the pre-apocalyptic world first, then designed how it would look in the post-apocalypse only after they'd firmly established the sense of place. The town of Megaton was built to surround an old active warhead left over from the war! Bandits held outposts in places like old police stations and schools! In Rage 2, every location is some kind of car garage or half-buried neighborhood (the same one copy-pasted every time, I might add), but there's no sense of actual history to any of it! Even the settlements aren't exciting to visit because there's no story behind them, no interesting characters to interact with, and no real reason to stop to visit other than to gain a fast travel point and maybe buy health infusions. This just screams "we wanted an open world so we made an open world," but they forgot that the operative word in that game genre is "world!" But even if the world were well-designed and had all the history in the universe behind it, it just wouldn't be any fun to explore or get around in thanks to how terribly the cars perform in this game. I mean, seriously, did anybody play test the flipping cars around cliffs? The best car in the game (the one you start out with, because again, these developers are incompetent and can't program progression correctly) turns terribly, so if you ever have a turn, you will overshoot it by a mile absolutely ever time, and if you're by a cliffside? You'd better just mentally prepare yourself to die and have to drive a little of the way again. Eventually you can kinda get used to it, but that's just it: you shouldn't have to "get used" to driving to avoid dying every time you approach a cliff! You should have to "get used" to driving to be able to pull off stunts or really get the most out of it! But not just to survive! And when I say you get used to it, that's because, as I alluded to earlier, most of your time isn't going to be spent shooting things or anything like that. No, most of your time is going to be spent driving to points on your map...through this boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, boring, BORING, pointless open world. That's the bulk of gameplay, folks, just that! And that's a shame, because when the game springs into the gameplay it advertises itself on, it's fabulous!...to some degree!

In the introduction I mentioned that I legitimately did enjoy a lot of my time with Rage 2, but given my attitude thus far, you could be forgiven for thinking that was a joke. But it's true. The actual combat in this game is so good that one might actually miss all the many things wrong with the game if they weren't paying attention. The gameplay borrows heavily from Doom, with an emphasis on player aggression and sheer balls-to-the-wall chaos rather than carefully placing shots and taking cover. Doom, being my 2016 Game of the Year, is obviously a gameplay model I'm quite fond of, and the formula here differs just enough to keep it from being a ripoff, but not enough to lose the excitement. When you kill an enemy, that enemy drops small healing crystals that disappear after a few seconds, so similarly to Doom, you're encouraged to actively engage in combat and confront your enemies from up close, and your reward for doing so is the ability to regain some health, allowing you to keep fighting. Feedback from the guns feels great, and every headshot lands a satisfying extra bit of feedback. Furthermore, your skills (once you obtain them) make the already breakneck pace of the combat feel even better! I tell you, there's nothing quite like the feeling of seeing a group of enemies and pressing a combination of buttons to leap into the middle and slam into the ground, sending the crowd flying in every which direction. Or if that's not enough, there's nothing quite like just sending a solid cone of enemies flying with a single punch! Combat in Rage 2 is top notch!....once it gives you the upgrades you need to make it top notch. Yes, as we discussed before, this game isn't good with its presentation of new guns and skills, so for at least the first hour or two of the game, combat just kind of feels bog standard. I was lucky in that I happened to go off road and stumble across a vault with a nifty skill in it pretty much right out of the open world gate, but if you don't have that kind of experience, the game is going to take its sweet time making its combat worthwhile. The fact that Doom managed to feel good in its tutorial level when all you had is a pistol but Rage 2 feels bog standard even outside the tutorial when you have a pistol, an assault rifle, and a dash move says a lot about the way the two games were developed. 

What's more, the open world isn't only poorly designed from a lore and intrigue standpoint, it's also poorly-designed for the combat we have. Combat arenas in Doom were intricately designed to have plenty of hideaways and secrets, so you'd constantly be moving through little nooks and crannies, taking out demons as you went along. In Rage 2, it's just these plopped down bog standard bandit camps with the occasional bit of verticality in the design. But as I said before, these levels just aren't built for Doom-style combat, so as a result, several encounters kind of feel cheap until you run through them 10 or so times. It's the kind of thing you wouldn't really notice until you stopped to think about it...but I have, so there you go. 

Gameplay is further burdened down with a frankly obscene amount of upgrading options. There are upgrades to weapons, to vehicles, to skills, to stats, there are perks that you can start upgrading when you upgrade and upgradable thing to a certain degree, it's just freaking obscene! There are four in-game currencies that you purchase upgrades with, and it all just feels like fat. None of these upgrades have much tangible impact, and trying to keep up with them is just a headache. I only purchased a couple of upgrades in my play time, and I didn't feel like they were needed. 

Right, so just about everything in this game is flawed, and even the highlight of the game has its caveats to keep it from being too good. So, how is Rage 2 from a technical standpoint? Well...good, but flawed enough to keep it from being great. I should say that the technical aspects that have to do with actual gameplay are strong, so there's that. The framerate is consistently crisp, the textures never have to take time to render, I never experienced any glitches or hard/soft crashes, etc. It's not exactly a pretty game, but all of the visuals are at least high quality. Where the game begins to technically suffer is in small quality-of-life things. For instance, it takes a couple of seconds to move from one tab of the UI to the next, and if you switch through them all at once, chances are good the game won't register all of your flips, so you'll end up on a tab a couple of tabs away from the one you wanted. That would be annoying but not necessarily a constant problem if the GPS would f***ing update when you got a new objective in the mission you've been taking part in! But no, if you're playing a mission and get a new objective across the map (which will happen every time you get a new objective), you'll have to open up the pause menu and flip over to the "log" tab (unless you want to slowly scan the map for the objective icon) to track that individual objective. This get annoying really fast, and when you compound it with the slow tab transitions, it starts to become more and more pervasive. Then there are little quirks like the fact that enemies will often end up trapped behind blocks of concrete aiming their guns at nothing, but those are more amusing than game-affecting, except in that you end up having to track these bozos down to clear their respective bandit camps.

Folks, I think I've complained more about Rage 2 than I did about Anthem, but I'm not sure. The fact of the matter is that while Rage 2 is one of the most incompetently-designed games I've played in a long time, it's far from a terrible game. It took the horrible ending to make me think about what I'd just finished playing, but before that, I was prepared to give this game a score somewhere in the mid 8s. No, Rage 2 isn't a bad game, and as I said, there are moments of sheer, unbridled joy to be found. But the fact of the matter is that it puts up the illusion of being a good game. As a result, when the curtain comes down and the wizard is just some guy in a suit, it feels like more of a betrayal. Rage 2 is game that feels barely-designed in everything from its character progression to its open world to its plot, and yet, in the midst of this developmental anarchy, there's the odd moment where you capture the same tooth-grinding whimsy you likely captured in Doom. I feel like I've said my piece in a sufficient number of ways at this point, and I'll likely begin repeating myself if this continues. In conclusion, I'll say this: I don't regret playing Rage 2, but I kind of do.

Let us review:

Worst story ever - 1.0

Boring open world/level design - 1.0

Poor progression in every way - 1.0

Awful driving - 0.5

Tech issues - 0.5

Busywork as padding - 0.3

The final score for Rage 2 is...

5.7/10 - Barely Above Average

Better luck next time, Id Software, better luck next time