Rage is iD Software’s first game since Doom 3 was released back in 2005. The first time that Rage was ever shown was in 2007 as a tech demo, which places the development cycle for Rage at about 5 years (1 year to complete the stuff for the tech demo and get everything ready to show, then 4 years since 2007 until it was officially released). With the amount of time that it took to develop, many people had expectations on what Ragewas actually going to be. Some thought that it would be a full racer with not much first person shooting, while others thought the exact opposite. Well, Rage finally came out on Tuesday, and I can say that it is a very fun game to play.
Comparisons will inevitably be drawn to Fallout 3 and Borderlands, and while these may seem apt, they are mostly wrong. Sure, in all of these games you control a character in a post apocalyptic setting who fires guns at menacing-looking enemies, but I find that the depth that Rage has is quite different from the others. Most of this depth comes from the fact that unlike the other two games, the main customization aspect is with the buggies. In fact, there is absolutely no skill tree to plug points into your character. In addition to this, you are also assigned a generic looking guy whom you play as throughout the entire game. While your character does get armor early in the game, it is apparent that iD focused on the gunplay and driving, because once you put on the armor, you will be very hard pressed to find other pieces of armor. After about 4 hours of play, I was still wearing the same armor that I had received within the first hour, because that was the only option. Instead of finding armor, the loot that you will be picking up in the aptly named Wasteland will either be ammo, parts to build various mechanisms that will help you in your quests, or garbage that can be sold at the store. Occasionally, you will find weapons, but finding weapons is a muc rarer occurrence than in a game like Borderlands.
