Rage 2 (for PC)
Rage 2 (for PC)
Credit: pcmag
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PROS
Excellent FPS combat. Massive list of
abilities to utilize and upgrade. Some beautiful environments.
·
CONS
Lifeless open-world environment. Weak story
that's padded with busywork. Some performance issues in testing.
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BOTTOM LINE
Rage 2 is a fantastic action game, if judged
purely on your ability to blow away post-apocalyptic punks. However, its
mediocre story and gameplay padding dulls the experience a bit.
The neon-soaked
post-apocalypse is upon us. Rage 2, the first-person, open-world shooter by
Avalanche Studios and Id Software, is a PC game that
delivers over-the-top action, killer car combat, and neat retro 1980s-style
flair. That said, the game suffers from a barren open world, tedious mission
structures, a simplistic story, and a forgettable cast of characters. While
gameplay is certainly king when it comes to video games, Rage 2 could have been
so much more compelling with an interesting story and a tighter open world.
At the beginning of the
game, you pick either a male or female protagonist before proceeding to loot
power armor off of a dead ranger. There's an overarching plot about an angry
general who hopes to take over the post-apocalyptic world with an army of
cyber-enhanced soldiers, but the story doesn't dwell much on these details. All
you need to know is that the general destroyed your town and you're out for
revenge. You set off to find three leader NPCs across the wasteland, and perform
tasks for them that eventually lead you to the big bad at the end. These tasks
include car races, arena battles, exploration, and slaughtering bandits.
Rage 2 features a game
world that I can only describe as stretched thin. The world is bigger than the
one in the original game, and coming across some of the weapon and ability
caches is rewarding. However, like Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain$19.99 at Humble Bundle, there are far too many stretches of
nothingness between objective markers. You will occasionally come across a gang
war on the road between point A and B, but this doesn't happen often. There's
too much downtime in between tasks. Perhaps a smaller, tighter world could have
alleviated this issue.
Credit: pcmag
Much like 2016's Doom $29.99 at Humble Bundle,
Rage 2's gunplay is all about running around environments as you pick off
targets. Outmaneuvering enemies and plastering them onto walls is delightful,
and the action only gets better as you progress. Character movement is silky
smooth and speedy, and when you upgrade a few key skills, the game feels just
as tight and responsive as Doom.
Enemies do a decent job of keeping up with
you, be it through clever obstacle traversal or slick jukes. Everyone is armed
to the teeth, and all too often enemies fight one another as eagerly as they
fight you, leading to some absolutely hectic encounters where rival gangs wage
war and shoot at anything in sight. If you're feeling particularly
bloodthirsty, dive in and have a blast. Alternatively, you can watch from the sidelines
as the gang members shoot each other to pieces, and then pick off the winner.
Driving lacks some of the gunplay's energy,
but it still introduces plenty of entertaining action. You
spend a major chunk of the game driving to various map markers, hopping out to
handle the task at hand, and then climbing back in to get to your next
objective. Your ride is equipped with some ridiculously powerful weaponry,
offering solid offensive options should you opt to stay in the car during a
firefight. The map is littered with skirmishes around every bend of the road,
so you never need to go far to find some angry punk-haired thugs to run over or
shoot to pieces.
Rage 2 has a handful of convoy encounters
,as well, that require you to pick off sentry vehicles to clear the way for an
assault on the convoy lead. These encounters, which feel like boss battles,
reward you with potent upgrade materials, so they are well worth tackling as
you drive to your next destination.
Credit: pcmag
Skills and Enemies
Rage 2 offers a veritable catalog of customization and
upgrade options, including your cyber suit, guns, and starter car. Vehicular
upgrades add new weapon types, including rockets, cannons, and mortars, as well
as a reinforced chassis for better defense. You can also receive an attack bonus
when shooting unaware enemies, reduce damage taken while sprinting, and lessen
fall damage. These are relatively straightforward upgrades, though
they are abundant and become more expansive as you gain favor with the game's
key NPCs.
Your core firearms are found in specific locations, and
each gun has a simple upgrade path that can be improved with a fictional
mineral. This feltrite is found all over the game world and can be
earned as a reward in missions. Each level you put into a gun strengthens
it and boost its damage, recoil, fire rate, and other attributes. If you happen
across a weapon mod kit, be it from a vendor or out in the world, you can also
modify your gun with bonus perks as you level it up. Your basic pistol packs a
decent punch at level 1, but at level 5 it's a beastly hand cannon that can be
fitted with additional features, such as a faster reload time or armor-piercing
rounds.
Cybernetic abilities, much like weapons, are found in
hidden vaults across the wasteland. These are also improved with
feltrite, and have greatened effects when their level is increased. The
basic Dash skill, for instance, grants you a momentary defense and evasion
boost at level 2, and a major defense and evasion boost at level 3. These
abilities can also be modified to grant additional perks, if you acquire a
booster item from a shop or chest.
The perks vary depending on the cybernetic ability, but
some perks are extremely potent. For instance, the Dash skill, when increased
to level 2, can also be modified with a strike perk that lets you string a
melee attack at the end of successful dodge. There are various abilities that
can be chained consecutively to create some powerful and often times hilarious
combinations. The Grav-Jump boosts your jump ability and can be combined with
Slam to increase the attack's damage. The various upgrades and perks make
pretty much every ability and weapon in the game viable if you're willing to
experiment, which further feeds into Rage 2's wonderful combat system.
Naturally, this robust ability repertoire would be wasted
if there were no good enemies to use them on. Rage 2 has a fairly competent
list of baddies that boast great animations, though they aren't overly
intelligent. Enemies are aggressive and use their movement and offensive
abilities well enough to keep you constantly on the move, but they are nothing
a creative and aggressive player can't handle.
Credit: pcmag
Plot
and Tonal Shifts
Rage 2's story is hardly a selling point,
and this is somewhat detrimental to the overall experience. While a weak plot
isn't necessarily a deal breaker in
most cases, Rage 2 makes the mistake of padding out its story with
tedious grinding. You spend most of the game completing quests for the three
major NPC leaders in the game. As you drive around the map, you'll notice
colored markers signifying what I originally thought at the time were optional objectives
to earn favor with the NPC leaders you work for. It turns out that,
after a certain point in the game, you must complete those marked objectives in
order to further advance the story. If you play
casually and complete as many of these objectives as you can while traveling
around the map, this isn't too big of a deal.
If you rush the story, however, you'll hit a
wall and be forced to undertake
those missions, which is wholly unsatisfying and feels like busywork. This is
very reminiscent of Anthem's $59.99 at Amazon padded
objective quests, and is just
as unwelcome. The only real difference is that Rage 2 is decidedly more fun to
play than Anthem, so the tedium is a bit easier to overlook. Once guns start
blazing, nitpicks and issues tend to fall by the wayside.
I was also somewhat disappointed by the
game's half-hearted campiness and lack of overall personality.
I suspect my own bias is affecting my impressions, but when I first saw Rage 2
and its Mad Max-style world
blended together with 1980s neon gaudiness, I expected absurd action,
characters, style, and humor like what was presented in Far
Cry: Blood Dragon BestPrice at Amazon.
Rage 2's over-the-top action is easily the game's greatest asset, but the style
and humor are a mixed bag. Major NPCs have oddball or campy intros and a few
good lines, but that's about as far as the game goes with it.
Rage 2 isn't particularly long, either. A
straight run through the story mode is about ten to twelve hours at most. The
game allows you to play on after the story is completed, and from that point on
you're free to explore and hunt as you please. If you're aiming to reach 100 percent
completion, you can easily triple the game's length. The side missions quality runs the gamut from passable
to good, but they're also largely dependent on whether you're invested in the
game's story. If you much don't
care about finding missing NPCs, learning more about the lore, or purging the
game world of enemies, then the side quests may not appeal to you.
Visual
Heaven
Racing from a neon stronghold, past a jungle
swampland, to picturesque, rainbow-colored hills certainly makes for varied and
dynamic visuals. Rage 2's overall aesthetic is rock solid, and the generous use
of color, coupled with the interesting environments, and excellent gameplay
feedback elevate the game well beyond the drab, brown look of the original.
Gun
designs are chunky, and they all have great audio design. The
shotgun's air-distorting blast never gets old, and the game is packed with
graphical details that add to the overall package. I loved that the targeting
reticle turns into a red skull and crossbones whenever an enemy is killed. Characters
ragdoll when shot, and the
impact of every blasts is weighty and impressive. Enemies die in explosive
spurts of blood, with chunks of cobbled-together armor and meat alike flying
into the air in a poetic form of carnage.
The audio is good overall. Rage 2 utilizes a
mix of ambient music as you explore the world, blended with some
industrial-sounding percussion and electrical strumming whenever combat kicks
up. There isn't very much worth humming along to, but the audio fits complements the
game's overall aesthetic quite nicely.
The voicework is also fine, though NPCs tend to be rather cartoonish at times.
The main protagonists have some of the flattest delivery and most generic
tough-guy lines in recent memory, and I think silent protagonists would better
served the game.
I encountered a few odd audio bugs during my
time with Rage 2, with some sound effects, musical cues, and voices triggering
much earlier than they should have, or not triggering at all at times. It only
happened on three or so occasions, but that was often enough for me to notice.
Specs
and Performance
To run
Rage 2, your PC must meet the minimum spec requirements: an AMD Ryzen 3 1300X
or Intel Core i5-3570 CPU, and an AMD R9 280 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 graphics
card. You gamingPC also needs at least 8GB of RAM and 50GB of storage.
Performance is something of a mixed bag. I
played at 1080p resolution using my Nvidia
GeForce GTX 970-powered gaming desktop, and saw frame rate dips
below the 60 FPS cap. The frame rate didn't drop significantly, but would dip
to the mid/low 50s during in
my experience. Pop-in is considerable, and seems to happen regardless of how fast quickly or slowly I move throughout environments.
Shadows wouldn't load correctly at times either, which can make some
environments look flat and out of place.
A Mixed Bag
So is Rage 2 worth a buy? If you're looking
for a fantastic shooter, look no further. The game's combat is incredibly fun,
and I cannot praise it enough. However,
if you want a
complete package, with a solid story and a satisfying open world, then Rage 2
falls short. We still recommend Doom, an
Editors' Choice award-winning title, for your shooting needs.
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