I played this about 6 months ago and I've been meaning to post this for a long time, having notes I wrote about it on my desk for months. Seems like a small deal, but this game was so bad imo, it was scary how backwards some of the game elements were. This negative view is due mainly to Rage's lack of believability and immersion enhancing elements, so if your the type of play who plays games for the points/challenge/competition/achievements, etc, you could probably ignore this.

Because im pretty much 3D-only these days, i played Rage awhile after it was released. However, since i respected so much what i was seeing in the screenshots and short preview clips, i decided to by buy the game at release at full price....woops. Just an FYI...

Anyways, loaded up the game and was first pretty excited by the graphics. Once outside, I was greeted with an epic view of the type of graphics i had hoped to see in a game for the longest time. Riven [the game] its beautiful static graphics meets real time rendering, minus that odd look of nothing moving. I had a grin from ear to ear. That was the end of any smiling right there, to put it mildly. Enter the crudest, shallowest, immersion breaking game elements i've seen in a long time. Two deformed humanoids attack and are unrealistically blown aside [with unexplained momentum] by bullets as if boulders hit them. A car then comes down the road using horrible scripting and your savior begins the game's onslaught of sparce, unrealistic, non-believable, unimmersive dialogue. Get in the car, and the car starts moving along an invisible series of scripted lines jerking you instantly to the left and right while the engine sound effect is right out of 1982. Get to the destination and the first mission, which is delivered within what must have been the first two sentences of dialogue i think: Murder every last sole in a hideout belonging to the folks i just murdered, heres a gun, enjoy... That is the start of a whole series of utterly unrealistic human choices, dialogue and actions, amidst a beautiful, hyper-realistic looking world [though one that is as still as a picture on the wall].

Wellspring feels empty. I remember the preview video showing the guy with the weird hat and thinking, this is going to be like traveling to another world!....but no, hes got like 2 lines of dialogue, geared toward letting you know his function, done, thats it! With most games i enjoy, im usually immersed enough that the scanning robots that are looking for you would be something i would avoid, even if i thought they might not do anything, it wouldn't matter, in another game i would be immersed in the world. In Rage, i knew....hell, i would have jumped at the chance to bet all my possession that they were just for looks. They didn't do anything! I couldn't care less and at that point in the game, i just wanted to get through it, hoping there might be an ounce of something interesting further in the game. The world just felt so empty, the NPC's virtually pointless and despite the average age of gamers supposedly being 32, this game seemed design to satisfy only children for who even the lowest bars are still new and shinny.

A huge source of frustration was the reversed mouse controls for panning when in vehicles. I've been playing PC games since Doom [well thats ironic for many reasons isn't it...] and i've never encountered such a self-centered, one size must fit all [and who gives a rats if it doesn't] frustrating design decision. I basically had to get it centered and just leave it. I felt i really missed out not being able to look at the sights of the game while driving, because thats all this game had, sights. Gameplay you say? Well, that brings me to the next paragraph doesn't it...

I've played all Dooms, all Ghost Recons, all Rainbow Six/Rouge Spear,Urban Operations, etc, Tribes, all Unreals and Tournaments, Thiefs, Half-lifes, Metro 2033, Mass Effects, Battlefield 2, 2142, 3, Bad Company 2, Call of Duty (stopped at Modern Warfare, thank you). What in Rage offers anything new or interesting combat-wise that an older gamers hasn't done a million time already.

Story wise, its laughable, seriously. At what point did the story make ANY case for the "Authority" group to be "bad guys"?????? And yet i mass murder 100's of them. Still don't know why... The "story" is sooooooo incredibly non-existent, so mind bogglingly absent that halfway through the game, just before you take a one way ticket to the second land area two NPCs say this: "The Ark drives [were seeking and murdering 100 for] are key to the puzzle"...my response is WHAT PUZZLE!?! The other says "Do you understand how important this is?"....my response is NOPE! Perhaps the dialogue is so pointless and "Hi, im Jim, this is my problem, go do this to help me" oriented that i missed it while not paying attention?

The texturing was pretty nice aas long as you stand back from everything and don't stare too long, but something horrible occurred. The devs locked out the highest level of texturing for a given level of memory they said it wouldn't work without. They were wrong, it worked fine via an .ini edit explained on some lonely corner of the internet. This sounds vague because its been so long and i can't be bothered look it up, but it was just another indication imo of how little the devs cared about the game and about the time you spent earning the money you pulled out of your wallet and handed to them. The awesome pre-release media somehow hid the the fact that in the game the blandness of the textures was clear as day. The awesome city views in-game turned out to be just ok, zoom in and wow, hello low resolution office building and thank you for breaking my immersion!

To top it all off, the developers of the worst game experience i've ever had, are the only developers EVER, to LOCK ME INTO THE CREDITS. Unbelievable!! There are so many games that make me sigh with memories that i wish i could go play again for the first time and this pile of... is the only one that choose to lock me into watching the credits.

Theres lots, lots, LOTS, LOTS more where this came from, I've got a page of notes i took to prove it, mainly concerning lack of immersion and believability, but i think anyone who reads this will get the gist, so i think im done.

Bottom line, this game could have been amazing, captivating experience of a wasteland environment. It reminds me of Prometheus, they had the audience on a another planet, we were there, experiencing it for ourselves, fully immersed, but then we were fed script elements taken from "Planet of the Busty lisbians".

Devs [and future game designers], heres an example of interesting, believable, compelling dialogue i hope to see in your next game.

From Mass Effect: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfKCbNSfqxw

Please guys, hire some good writers/authors for your next game, some of them create worlds for the brain.......err......man.

Heres some amazing [believable, immersion enhancing, VR] facial animation tech to go along with that great writing (L.a. Noire):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8bL0z-vMHw&feature=related