I am really baffled by how much Id missed the mark on this. Aside from the blatant copying of Fallout and Borderlands, the game doesn't really do much to peak any interest in the post-apocalyptic-FPS-barren-wasteland-desert-survival games. Like, Doom and Quake, Rage just continues to throw enemies at you as you trek through the same areas over and over (and sometimes backwards). Yes other games make you return to the same areas (Borderlands) but Rage's linear single hallway design makes it tiresome. The racing feels so out of place and the in-game economy is very broken. Yes it's pretty when you're looking at stuff far away, but when you're close it's really gross.

No wonder Carmack left Id.

shoulda just been called BROWN

ever looked at Fallout 3 and thought “ehhhh this could be more monotonous”? well Tim Willits did and so Id Software made this: a PS3-era unnecessarily-open-world shooter at Absolute Maximum Brownness. Just the brownest thing going.

I couldn’t handle more than a few hours of looking at it.

As is obligatory for any open-world game, Rage has sidequests for the player to undertake for optional rewards, with the most common being an infusion of cash. For the promise of $200, players will hop in their car, drive to a hideout, fight bandit buggies along the way, recover an item, and race back to the quest giver while being attacked by even more bandits. After cashing out, players need to take stock of their condition, paying for buggy repairs and armament replenishments, along with crafting and buying ammo to replace what had been used. If players weren’t particularly careful with their driving and selection of rare ammo, they may not profit much at all, even after spending so much time getting the job done.

In the first town, there’s a minigame called Tombstones, where the player takes control of a holographic sheriff surrounded by four attacking mutants. The player rolls four dice, each having a roughly one-in-three chance to kill one of the advancing enemies. If any of them reach the sheriff by the end of the third turn, the game is over. Players can place bets at the start of each game, receiving 10:1 returns on a round-one victory, 4:1 on round two, 1:1 on round three, and 0:1 for a loss. To spare you a lecture on Bayes’ Theorem, this calculates out to an expected return of 0.12, 0.984, 0.348, and 0.0 for each turn respectively. These cumulate to 1.452, meaning that the player has a 45.2% advantage over the house, and an average gain of forty-five cents on every dollar they wager. Notably, this doesn’t require the player to risk their buggy, waste ammo, use resources, or even spend much time. As long as the player has enough cash on hand to withstand strings of bad luck, even someone avoiding save-scumming can be expected to accrue cash in a reliable way. So, as tiny as it may seem, this minigame singlehandedly negates the motivation to do the majority of the sidequests in the entire game.

That’s the Rage experience, having different parts of the game collide in ways that make it seem like the development teams weren’t on speaking terms. It has cute minigames to flesh out the world, and that’s great, but the returns weren’t thoroughly considered and ended up negatively impacting the other content. The open-world formula would feel incomplete without sidequests that let players jump into the core combat, but wrapping them in long driving sections defeats the purpose almost entirely. The cars work decently well, but there’s nowhere interesting to drive them, it just keeps going on and on like this; the entire game was crafted by assembling a ton of random ideas that sounded good without considering how each piece fit with the next. It just ends up just being thoroughly boring, not committing to any of its ideas past the point of basic functionality. At least its technology formed the basis for subsequent id Tech games like The Evil Within, but on its own, it’s just a scattered pile of scrap parts.