Rage 2 review

I started playing this game right after finishing 2016's Doom, which was a fast and responsive first person shooter. In comparison Rage 2 felt sluggish; after some fiddling with the settings the controls felt better, but still not as good as Doom.

Of course that's a pretty high bar to set, but it's still worth mentioning, in part because the first Rage was one of my favourite FPS games on the XBox360 precisely because it felt so good to play. The controls were fast and response, it ran smoothly at a high frame rate while boasting sharp and detailed graphics. Despite this, unlike so many games that put a lot of work into "looking good", your enemies were always very easy to see. The way the enemies moved and reacted to you, and to getting shot, was also excellent and gave your weapons a real sense of impact. The weapons themselves were satisfying, with a bit of added creativity that mainly manifested through modifications and special ammo (like electrical crossbow bolts that could be fired into water and damage any enemies standing in it).

Unfortunately a bit of that was lost in the sequel. Rage 2 may have been trying to be bigger and better than it's predecessor, but for my money it only succeded at the first part. You know how in most games the first level is introducing a lot of lore and gameplay mechanics? Well, in this game, that seemed to go on for a VERY long time. I remember playing for quite a while and thinking something like "when is the game going to stop holding my hand and just start for real?".

Despite all this setup I didn't really feel invested the story; I didn't actually care about any of the characters or anything. At the same time none of the gameplay mechanics really stood out from any other first person shooter; it felt like they were trying to make the game different but couldn't really think of an interesting or unique way to do that, so they just implemented as many different mechanics as they could think of. But none of the mecahnics were new, and the game wasn't really built around them, not to the extent that they felt particularly important or gave the game its own identity.

That's not to say they were bad. Some of the unlockable upgrades are nice and can add a bit of variety to the gameplay. Personally I did suffer a bit because I went too long before unlocking an upgrade that made it easier to find loot; I spent a lot of time exploring areas trying to find all the storage crates, had I unlocked the upgrade sooner it would have saved me a lot of time and some frustration. It's... kind of weird that one small upgrade changed things so much for me. It's just one of the problems you can run into with character upgrade systems I guess; the wrong upgrades can make a game too hard or tedious, the right ones can potentially make it too easy.

The world map was quite large, with some varied environments, some of which looked quite good, and you had plenty of reason to explore it in search of upgrades and new weapons, though it's mainly just full of enemy outposts and loot caches. You have access to plenty of vehicles, including eventually some flying ones, which are very useful in some areas of the map. Vehicle combat is also a thing, it's not exactly my thing, but I have no complaints.


But perhaps all of that content came at a cost; as mentioned the controls are not as precise and responsive as some shooters, so the core gameplay loop just wasn't as satisfying to me. The enemies still react well to being shot, staggering and falling and sometimes firing at you from the floor, but their AI felt a little less impressive and they are often harder to see, blending in to the environments more - something that bothers me a lot in games.

While there was a variety of weapons, they ended up being more limited in practice: 90% of the time I was just using the assault rifle or the shotgun, and when I was low on ammo I would mainly just use the pistol. Those three worked well enough and were satisfying to use, but other than the Shotgun's "slug" firing mode (which I loved), they were pretty basic.

The rest of the weapons were pretty crap. OK, the rocket launcher was actually pretty good, but had very limited ammunition. Sure, you could buy ammo, but why bother when you could take out pretty much any enemy, including the final boss, with the assault rifle? The plasma cannon was just a more gimmicky and finnicky assault rifle, with higher damage but lower range, slower projectile speed, lower accuracy, lower ammo availability, and the cooldown mechanic is more awkward than a simple reload.

The sniper rifle was pretty bad; I found it hard to tell if I was actually hitting with it, and I got better results with the assault rifle even at longer ranges. The revolver was terrible; shooting someone then having to press another button to detonate the ammo just made it slow and awkward to use compared to any weapon where you just shoot until they go down. Somehow I found it less satisfying than the Magnum in Resistance, which used the same basic mechanic.

Similarly the grav dart gun just didn't work out. It was a good idea, but in practice shooting at an enemy then having to aim and shoot somewhere else to yank them around, or shooting at something else then aiming and shooting at the enemy just didn't feel good; it's annoying to look away from an enemy who is shooting at you to line up some vectors and hope that everything works out the way you want it to (which is far from guaranteed; you need enough darts in the target to apply enough force for it to go far enough, and you have to hope nothing gets in the way etc). Much easier to just shoot them with the assault rifle.

It didn't help that there was so much more ammo for the three basic weapons than for the exotic stuff. I would sell half or more of my assault rifle, shotgun, and pistol ammo, then head to an enemy outpost and by the time I was done killing them all, my ammo was pretty much full up again - sometimes there would even be ammo left lying around that I didn't have room for - and I'd have to go back to town to sell a chunk of it. Meanwhile I would have picked up a few rounds for one or two of the other weapons, but not enough to actually be worth trying to use them.

In the rare occasion that I was low on ammo for all three primary weapons, I would tolerate using one of the others for a while, until I had exhausted my ammo for it and picked up enough "primary" ammo to switch back to my real weapons, then I would forget about that weapon for a few hours as I slowly accumulated ammo for it again. It was... a rather strange game of resource management I suppose.


Overall I'm giving it a 7/10. Rage 2 does a lot of things quite well, rather than a few things very well. It doesn't do anything particularly new, but it will keep you entertained for a good while. It's obvious they put a lot of work into it, the game is quite polished and does allow for more variety in it's gameplay loop than some shooters. And it does have what might be the best shotgun in a first person shooter ever, so that's something.