Rage 2

 

Having played and finished the first Rage game, I had Rage 2 on my radar for awhile but never got it until I saw it was on sale for like $10 so figured good enough time to pick it up. Didn't know anything about it going into it except that its sequel to first game, even though I wasn't the biggest fan of the first game.

Unlike first game, this game has a lot of differences and has taken a lot of liberties in the 'formula'
The first Rage, was kind of semi-open world but still mostly linear, you cant really go too far off the beaten path, there are towns and NPC's but its not like the typical true open world you think of like GTA or Elder scrolls. However, In Rage 2 they took the route go to completely cookie cutter, generic, copy paste open world. Just like Far Cry's , Assassin's Creed, Skyrim, modern GTA, it takes the easy route and does this bland sort of open world with tons of side 'activities' to do, chock full of all sorts of different upgrades and things to unlock.

The game was initially incredibly confusing, frustrating, and stupid. Its got one of the worst interfaces and menus I've ever seen. None of it is intuitive or makes any sense or operates how you think it should. For the first half of the game I was basically confused as to how to even do the main fucking missions.

For starters, you open the map menu, and youve got so many fucking icons you can't make sense of anything. Which one is the main objective? You see these orange markers that say 'Objective' , ok those must be the main missions right? Well first of all, you cant even select one at a time. You literaly cant even select to track one mission at a time! its extremely confusing. You go to the mission log, then theres even more confusing clusterfuck menus with all sorts of different 'allies' with their own 'level' and missions, so you want to just pick one, but you cant. You cant just show 1 orange icon on the map and track it, it always shows you every avalible mission, and when you select 'Track mission' on one of them, it only gives you a waypoint and puts arrows on the road (which looks terrible and too arcade) and when you 'arrive' at the desintination, it gets rid of the tracking - making you go to the menu again and track it again.

To make things worse, theres a compass on top of the screen which is supposed to help you track things, but theres so many god damn icons on it it makes your head spin trying to utilize it for anything. Like I said previously, you cant just select one thing to foucs on, so on the compass it will always show you dozens of all sorts of random bullshit like side objectives, locations, NPC's, everything - so good luck trying to consistently use it to track the main objective.

To make things EVEN worse, not ALL of the orange 'objectives' on the map are actually a part of the main story!!! I only found this out about halfway through the game, where I selected one of these 'objectives' and found myself in some Sand worm place where I'm fighting an insanely hard boss dying over and over, only to find out I'm doing some random DLC that youre basically not supposed to do until after beating the game? What? So fucking stupid. Theres no way to know without googling what the main missions are, and by the way - theres only 8.

Thats only one of the complaints of the interface, all the other menus and interfaces are absolute mind boggling trash too. The game literally has like 20 skill trees, you got all sorts of skill trees per 'ally' and 'ally level' which are these NPC's that have activites attached to them on the map, and you go around doing things like clearing out generic copy paste bandit camps, fixing blocked roads, or destroying these stationary huge Sentry turret things that have insane amounts of health and kill you in like 2 hits and I kept running into these stupid side missions at the beginning part of the game feeling really bewildered cause my guns did next to zero damage to these things and they kept killing me. Figured to just ignore the damn things for the rest of the play through until it forced me, by the halfway point of the game it stops you from being able to progress the main story until you go around and complete these copy pasted side objective things until you get all your allies at 'level 5' Its just a really terrible system the game would be way better without any of this shit or atleast dont make it optional.

And the side content really isn't optional. You know why?
Cause the first half of the game is incredibly hard.
Theres like 6 difficulties, I picked difficulty 3/6 'Hard" i think it was.
But yeah, its only hard if you dont grind for upgrades.
In the first half of the game, your guns do no damage, you die super easy, and its really hard to regain health.

Theres a bunch of different types of upgrades. You have 'nanorites' which is for upgrading skill trees, you have 'Felrite' i think it was, which is this blue gemstone juice that drops out of enemies and find it in chests in the world, which is like upgrade juice you use to upgrade generic damage on your guns and stuff, theres like 5 other types of upgrades that you can get for other shit like adding weapon mods, or going to this really poorly explained and random Doctor in one of the cities that you can use to upgrade your health or damage permanently. Way too convuluted and stupid upgrade systems, matched with a really shit UI. Took me until half the game to make any sense of it.

But once you start to figure out how all the stupid menus work, all the terminology for all the different upgrades  - The game becomes trivial! you start killing everything super fast, enemies drop those blue crystals which also give you health, so you start to regain tons of health just by killing enemies, you stop running out of ammo. The difficulty curve is absolutely fucked. Why are modern games like this? The beginning of the game is 10x harder than the middle/end. Very stupid game design. By the end of the game I was half asleep just holding the shoot button blasting everything without giving a single fuck, defeating the last boss 1st try, infinite health basically. But the first quarter/half of the game I was dying almost every checkpoint, getting stuck on the first boss, the Cybermech thing died like 50 times in a row to that thing, no ammo in the arena, killed me in 2 hits, did zero damage. Really fucking dumb difficulty curve.  The main things that made the difference was fully upgrading the health tree, fully upgrading the assault rifle, and going to the Doctor and getting the generic 5% damage bonus a bunch of times. After that ,the game became piss easy.

Theres like atleast 20 different skill trees.
You have skill trees for each of the 'allies' with all sorts of useless shit I didn't care about, like entire skill trees for each of these superhero abilities. You can hold Ctrl and press various keys like F,E,V whatever and you do shit like 'Slam ground and enemies fly in the air' or like 'Create a vortex' and shit, butBut these abilities just seemed like gimmicky filler and I never used any , or wanted to, I just wanted to play a shooter not some like superhero bullshit.
Theres a 'overdrive' mechanic where when you kill enough enemies , or something, it lets you press a button and go into overdrive mode where you do more damage and get more health or something? It was kinda fun but not something I really cared much about, more like just extra bonus thing here and there. So you have individual skill trees for each of these abilities, and then individual skill trees for each of the allies, stuff like combat abilities, sprinting faster, more health, that stuff is useful obviously. But then you have entire trees for stuff like making searching areas easier like giving you trackers for Chests , which is basically mandatory in my view. For example whenever you go into an area and hold Ctrl 'Focus' it gives you a list of stuff you can get in the area, How many chests, data pads, stuff like that - And initially you just have to comb through the area for like half an hour like trying to find a needle in a haystack. That was terrible, I did that a few times and was really not having fun. But once you get the ability for tracking these chests, it gives you a little Signal icon on top of your screen letting you know how far away you are from a object of interest, and you can hold the Focus button to see through walls and track it super easy. Once I found that out, and got the upgrade, it became sort of fun looking for these chests, and is super rewarding allowing you to do many of these upgrades easily.

Once I figured out the upgrades, it was almost fun to go around collecting these chests and trying to find upgrade materials to make my stuff better, but after upgrading a few things, I quickly got to a point where nothing else seemed appealing and I was already strong enough so I kinda stopped caring. Whats the point of the open world after that? I already have the upgrades I want, why would I go around the rest of the open world when its just the same copy pasted bandit camp over and over, theres nothing to see or do, nothing stands out. But for a minute there I was kinda having fun looking for upgrades.
 

More about the graphics and open world...its not a appealing game to look at, to say the least. The actual world is very bland and generic, just a giant ruined wasteland, but for some reason its smeared with random colors of Pink and purple all over the place, in typical modern game fasion. I dont know why this 'look' is so trendy, Far cry new dawn did it, and a few others. It just looks stupid, unnatural, and terrible. Its way too 'gamey' and makes me feel stupid for playing such childish games, Yeah it just looks childish, really. The art design, character design, and writing is just awful. Its got the whole "lol so randumb" Borderlands shit going on, and I'm just not a fan. Constant cringe writing and characters, most of the characters in the game are women , fine whatever, but they make them so insufferable and stupid, they all look like lesbians, and have wacky dumbass humour, its insufferable. One specific noteworthy is the 'mutant bash' gameshow place , theres some weird BDSM cringe shit going on and the host is this lesbian looking woman with a goofy ass haircut talking like Shakespere or something its just so stupid, theres so much crap like that its like just stop. Do something else please. All the characters look fucking dumb, when you walk around the few major 'towns' they're wearing goofy clothing and giant helmets it just looks dumb. Very unimmersive, I don't want to be a part of this world, just want to get it over with its so unappealing.

Theres a few major towns but theyre all extremely forgettable, generic, and uninteresting. I didn't do anything in any of them, nothing stands out, I barely even realized there were multiple towns it just seems like the same shit copy pasted a few times.

Fast travel mechanic is terrible and doesnt make sense either, I was trying to figure out how to fast travel for the first few hours of the game but couldnt. You can only fast travel to major towns, whne youre not in combat. But theres only 3 major towns and theyre pretty far away from various objectives so you spend a lot of time just mindlessly driving around the gameworld, falling asleep, doing nothing.

The story is completely trivial and generic, its just like "Evil cyborg guy wants to erase humanity and take over with his race instead" - K. Never gave a shit about anything in the game or any of the characters. None of the characters stand out, I cant remember a single one, and by the end of this game some character named 'Lily' comes to save you, I had no clue who she was.

Of the 8 main missions, baiscally none of them are memorable. They barely even feel like main missions. You talk to some NPC, they tell you to drive to a location, you get there, go inside and kill enemies or talk to another NPC, drive back and talk to original NPC, and you do that a few times, then the quest is over. You do that 8 times, fight a few bosses, with the same boss fight copy pasted 3 or 4 times (cyber mech thing) , fight the last boss - then the game is over and you can freeroam and do more sidemissions if you want. Really forgettable main missions.

The vehicles are just sorta there. Just to get from point A to point B. There is a main vehicle, which you can upgrade, but I never got a single upgrade for it cause I never cared or wanted to focus on vehicles. Theres not much to say about it, theres a huge menu for vehicles, you can spawn them anytime you want, but I mostly just used whatever vehicle for the whole game just to drive from one objective to the next. Halfway through the game I randomly unlocked a helipcoptor thing and that vastly speeded up how fast I could get around the world, this thing controlled really weird like it automatically scaled mountains and stuff but kinda just felt glitchy and stupid. The actual driving controls feels alright, theres a turbo button which is kinda fun to use, but overall its just meh. I dont wanna play a driving vehicle combat game, so whatever.

Alright so, its got a terrible interface, a stupid generic open world with cliche side missions like typical Ubisoft bandit camp bullshit, its got convuluted upgrade systems and skilltrees, the difficulty curve is very stupid, the world is boring and nothing stands out, the story sucks and characters forgettable, the graphics and artstyle is lame and unimmersive.


Is anything even good about this game? Well thankfully the actual combat is pretty damn fun. Thats mostly in part due to the enemies reactions, when you shoot enemies theres a very satisfying physics engine where they react intensely and get ragdolled, stand back up, have a lot of fluid motion when you shoot them. They also say a lot of shit, and have constant streams of dialogue, where its fun to engage in combat. Or maybe the Assault rifle and Shotgun were just fun to use. There are apparently all sorts of guns you can get, like Rocket launcher, classic BFG, Laser gun, Dart gun thing, but I never found them. You find these 'Arks' randomly in the world, that unlock guns or upgrades, I found a bunch of them, BUt I guess I just never found the ones for the RPG and a few other guns.
But mostly for the entire game I used the Assault rifle and Shotgun. Mostly the assault rifle.
The guns dont look great, they're covered in sci-fi shit and I prefer more realistic guns, but the sound effects are impactful, and when you shoot enemies it of course gives you hit markers, but when you kill the enemy it gives a skull icon and makes a crunchy noise to where it feels pretty damn satisfying to do combat. Theres a few sorts of different enemies, you have normal punk guys, then you have guys wearing plates of armor you can shoot off piece by piece, then theres mutants, then cyborg type guys. Variety is alright.

That's mainly what saved this game from being terrible. Just the viseral feeling of fluid and smooth combat, sprinting around, jumping around, hip firing assault rifle at enemies, seeing the skull icon when you kill them, seeing the blue health/gems fall out from them, hearing the crunches and impactful sounds, its an ID software game so it feels like one of the newer Doom games in the actual combat. Its obviously a highly expensive game to develop, a lot of money has went into it, you can tell in the controls and the combat. But yeah, virtually everything else sucks. Like I keep saying with these games, if the open world was just deleted and it was a more typical mission to mission campaign, with these controls and more grounded weaponry, it would be a better experience. But I guess at that point I'm just talking about the modern Doom games. I don't know where Rage has a place, then. It feels like Fallout mixed with modern Far cry mixed with Skyrim mixed with Borderlands, but all in the worst ways, and none of it works to its favor. Its like theyre not doing out of passion to develop an actual good game, but more like that formula is just whats trendy and popular nowadays and thats what would sell better? well they were wrong cause apparently most people think this game sucks too, its not just me.

Oh yeah, its also a really buggy frustrating game too. Multiple times I'd have objectives just not show up or tell me where to go, and I'd have to watch on youtube exactly where I was suppose to go, or sometimes it would say the objective is Above me when really it was below me?? just really buggy and nonsense parts at times. Caused quite a bit of frustration.

I dunno, its not a terrible game where It was painful to get through, well maybe the first quarter I was getting really pissed off and annoyed, cause of the stupid difficutly in the beginning. But once I got past that it was almsot enjoyable, the combat mostly, but yeah I dont know all the other things about the game is just trash, characters and dialogue and the artstyle just so stupid makes me feel dumb for even playing the game in the first place. I was thinking about giving this a 6 but now I'm starting to think its more like a 5. Did I mention the box art? Yeah, just look at the box art. Thats all you have to know. What the fuck were they thinking? Very meh game overall.

5/10