Sharp blades, silent steps

The Gorgons are an addition to the Scorched Earth materials post: A gang with many secrets. As such, players of mine should keep away, unless they want to wallow in spoilers.

Paths of Hate

Thoughts on Rage

Of course I got Rage as soon as I could - it is a post-apocalyptic shooter (and racing game...with RPG elements, also, there are RPGs involved, and we like those). It's by id Software, and I remember Doom one to three with great fondness. Especially Doom 3, which we tore down during one epic weekend. We pulled down the blinds, stored up on snacks with enough food preservatives to mummify our bodies for centuries, and put the sucker on a large screen, making those imps about two meters tall. Good times.

So I waited for Rage with bated breath as soon as the first screenshots were out. And now I am done with it, and sad to say, it won't earn a place in the pantheon together with Bioshock, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Fallout. This is really a shame as the seed of greatness is surely present. So, what went wrong, when so much went right? Spoilers may occur.

Ooh, shiny

The first visual impression of the game is overwhelming - I do hope that a coffee table book with the concept art and the loading screens is in the works. One of the first levels of the game (and those are levels, even when they are labelled quests) takes place in the ruins of a large hotel occupied by the ghost clan, a occult-minded band of raiders. Their signs and graffitis are everywhere, and they really set the mood and showcase the gang as something special and distinctive. Hunting through that hotel, I thought that this was what I wanted to bring across as a gamemaster describing the more unsavory feral tribes in my campaign world. As the game progresses, you tend to look for the gangs-signs of other clans to see in whose territory you are trespassing. All figures are beautifully animated (this is especially true for your quest givers), and the AI of your opponents is astoundingly good. If you want to see what a GURPS dodge 15 looks like, just have a gander at the mutants in Dead City. They weave and duck, use any kind of obstacles for cover, jump to the ceiling to climb along pipes to get close to you, and they will get close to you... The whole world is depicted with astounding visual detail, up to the point of oversaturation.

Wasteland theme park

But after some hours of playing, I found that the levels and outdoor areas were completely illogical as settings. One of the mainstays of the post-apocalyptic genre is the change of a setting of the past into the post-apocalyptic present: A destroyed city re-settled, a hotel turned into a gang hideout, an oil tanker changed into a floating circus. This means that the internal logic and believability of a setting has to hold water on two levels - as the thing that it was (an oil tanker, a hotel) and the thing it is now (a hideout, a circus). Here, Rage's settings fail completely: Looking at the surroundings it becomes clear that they could never have worked in the past - there is, for instance, an outdoor area much abused during your car fights, which is obviously an interchange and a large collecting basin at the same time. These were not dealbreakers, as the beautiful execution of these settings drew the attention from these flaws, but I always had the feeling that this world was a jumbles even before the catastrophe - and this broke immersion for me.

Also, the world suffers from theme park syndrome - every cliche of the genre has its nice little niche where it waits for your visit. I am not against cliches per se: Used in moderation and with thought they are a powerful tool. But to stay believable, they need some grounding in the story itself - in Rage, they just exist with no backstory.

"Maybe some kind of super-soldier, " she coily said

For me, the main weakness of RAGE is the flatness of the plot itself. You are a survivor from the past, put into suspended animation to awaken after the catastrophic event (this time, it's a meteor strike) and to give humanity a second chance. From the beginning, there is talk of the so-called Authority, which hounds survivors like you. So basically, I smelled a pot-boiler from second one, and this feeling didn't abate, when nearly every other figure pronounced the word "authority" like something that ate kittens and shat court injunctions. Okay, I get it, they are evil. Then, about one third into the game, I ran across a poster in the Dead City level: The Crescent City Transit Authority, promising a better life through its sophisticated metro system. Hm, this could be a hint that the Authority is based on the remnants of the organisation responsible for public transportation. Maybe even a sentient computer, a la Paranoia. Any minute, I'll start finding subway stubs, and I won't sell them, ever.

This looked promising, but basically, I fooled myself. The Authority are basically Nazis in powered armors, and their flag design has Hitler formulating a complaint for trademark violation at this very moment. They are led by some evil general whom we never see, there is a Resistance, which counts among its numbers a Hot Chick, and you will help this Resistance to end the Authority's stranglehold...At some point you are told by the Hot Chick that the mutants have been experimented upon by the Authority, in order to make them stronger, faster, basically, to weaponize them, and, for the lack of a better word, to turn them into super... what did you say girl? I just nodded off there for a second. So, like a midget corpse stuffed into a broken refrigerator, Rage's plot is stale, stinks and is also surprisingly short.

So what? You didn't play this for the story, but for the shootin', and drivin' and the junk collectin', and the gameplay is quite good, isn't it? Although all the levels are basically long corridors, in id-Software's well-known haunted-house tradition. And it looks really great (once the issues with the graphics driver are resolved). All those different bandit tribes, the mayors of the three settlements you frequent, the quirky bartenders and mechanics, they ooze personality, don't they? And yet, the main plot is what makes you take the next mission, and it is tremendously weak, casting a pall over the whole experience. In its details, this is truly a great game. As a whole, it appears a bit shoddy.

3 of 5 hand-built Fat Mamma handcannon shells