9/19/2023 0 Comments Rage 2 vehiclesThe only reason I distinguish between Basic and Armoured bandits is that the Armoured ones take two shotgun blasts to kill. There’s a bandit with a rocket launcher, but she also dies if you shoot her with a shotgun. Sure, there’s a bandit with a bat that whacks grenades at you, but he dies if you shoot him with a shotgun. Most of the time it’s a small clump of buildings that must be cleared of bandits, which come in Basic and Armoured flavours but which otherwise lack any variety in how the player deals with them. In their place are the set of standard open world “activities” that, in Rage 2, mostly consist of getting out of your car and shooting things. True, it’s been built from the ground-up to be open world this time instead of the weird halfway house of the first game, but that just means it’s lost the vast majority of its scripted missions. Despite an eight-year gap and the primary development responsibilities being handed over to Just Cause developers Avalanche, Rage 2 has ended up being almost exactly the same goddamn game, replete with almost exactly the same mistakes. Nearly all of this was true of the first Rage. The other is that if you cut out the driving and the question mark locations from the equation, Rage 2 is about two hours long. It does have a moderately satisfying combat loop, with most of the ingenuity the original Rage displayed around weapons being transferred to a set of magic powers that make individual fights against stock mooks flow quite nicely, and this is probably one of only two reasons I made it to the end of the game. Its plot is virtually non-existent, it barely has any scripted missions, and most of the content is just your standard open-world fare of clearing enemies out of the little question mark symbols that pop up on the map every three-hundred metres or so. It features a car that you can drive around said open world, but the vehicular combat is pointless and the driving physics are just out-and-out terrible. Rage 2 is set in a bland, samey open world that has all the depth of a puddle. And now, having played it all the way through, I have to wonder why on earth Bethesda bothered to resurrect the IP: it is exactly the game you would picture when considering what a sequel to Rage would look like. The high point of the game was some distinctly above-average weapon variety that went very much against the prevailing trends of the time, and which livened up the otherwise subpar combat considerably - however, given that both Wolfenstein and Doom 2016 took that high point and leveraged it into a pair of excellent reboots it has to be said that Rage, on the whole, was not a concept or a franchise that was particularly crying out for a sequel. I remember that the driving was dull, and that there were no sidequests to speak of, and that using John Carmack’s last major contribution to id Software’s engine - megatextures - in a game with such uninspired visual design largely resulted in it having some very pretty rocks and not much else. When I think back on my time with the original Rage I can’t remember all that much. Unfortunately this makes Rage 2 doubly disappointing, as it’s turned out to have fallen some considerable way short of even that rather dubious target. My answer to them was that I just wanted to blast things with a shotgun for a few hours, as that’s a genre that’s been somewhat underserved this year (so far), but the real reason is that I really, really wanted to open the review with a “You can’t spell average without Rage” joke. Some of my friends have asked me why I even bought Rage 2, since I didn’t exactly enjoy the original and the sequel wasn’t looking like anything special from the previews.
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