I think it's about time for me to face the music. It has almost been 3 weeks since the game was released and I've been trying to convince myself to really like it. As an Id fan boy I hoped it would return them to their former glory. Releasing the editor at launch [said Tim Willits in an interview] made me fantasize about creating content for the game and seeing what an community of designers would produce. I registered domains, setup a site and took a week off from work so I could immediately jump in.

However, the PC release was a disaster. I don't care if it were drivers or the game itself. The fact is you can't release something in that state and expect positive feedback. Unfortunately, we're slowly becoming the Q&A for the games we preorder or buy on day one. Also, no editor.

It took 5 days, a patch, and tons of reading on forums to get the game to run properly and when it did, I wasn't impressed. Tsakali said it best about why it got so much criticism. I think it’s great that people like Eraser enjoy it immensely, but I’m not, for a couple of very simple reasons.

The game offers you beautiful scenery, but there is nothing to explore. Everything is blocked, clipped of or has invisible walls surrounding it. The game is extremely linear and completely static. Nothing moves. Everything is super glued and made of indestructible material. There is no open world and you basically got two town maps, some indoor maps and some outdoor maps. No exploring. Which doesn’t matter, but the game pretends to be an open world and everything above just immediately kills any kind of immersion you have. The very blurry textures on all the assets doesn’t help either.

All the other ‘gimmicks’ are really shallow. The quest system feel clumsy and is at times downright awkward. The driving would have been fun, but I’m constantly backtracking the same routes of the same outdoor map, with the same respawning enemies at the exact same points. It’s cool in the beginning, but after a couple of times it gets annoying and you just drive through it as fast as you can to avoid it. The racing was fun for a bit, but without any real reward or a variety of tracks and limited upgrade options for you cars, there really is no reason to keep doing it.

Combat is great though and the variety of different ammo types gives you a lot of ways to kill your opponents. There are some impressive maps and even though every map conveniently ends at a closed door where you started the map in the first place, it still gives you the feeling of a real place. It’s been a while since I had the freedom to kill like I really wanted to. I miss that in games. I especially liked Dead City, that was drop dead gorgeous and some of the music they used in action sequences really pumps you up.

But these small bright lights can’t hide the fact that this is a very dumbed down and mediocre game at best. I see a lot of people complaining about the [lack of] story. All I got was that I survived in an arc, the authority is bad [since everybody is making a effort in saying so] and I’m an errand boy for all kinds of people including the resistance.

The verdict is that mega texture does look great but isn’t that useful if nothing in the world can move [asset wise] and everything up close is blurry as [censored] while still taking up 22 GB of space. Regarding the game, Id should have stayed where there good at [competitive shooters] but after Doom 3 [which was also a letdown] this is another step down the latter.

I’m not a hater, I’m not a PC fan boy, I just need to stop deluding myself and accept that this game disappoints and if the editor isn’t released very soon, they can shove it. The lack of any official communication about all the things that are going on is downright disrespectful.

Damm right i totally agree with you....Im even thinking sod the dlc i might aswell try and sell it and get as much for it as i can before the price drops more....the anarchy edition in the uk has already dropped down to 29.99 and that pisses me off 2 weeks earler i paid 39.99!!

The main experience of the game was great but to be fair i think donkey kong had more of a story to it

I know exactly what you mean about trying to convince yourself it's a good game.

There's a great game in here somewhere, just waiting to be uncovered. There were some things I really liked. The way the combat offered you choices for one thing, that I really liked. For example, the shield armed guards could be taken out by careful sniper shots, shooting them with a pulse shotgun round, chucking an EMP grenade at them then shooting them with a machine gun, throwing a frag grenade at them then shooting their exposed back while they ran away or even shooting the soldier behind them with a mind control dart. Maybe there are yet more options I didn't even think of, it seemed like you got to pick your preferred personal style of combat. The graphics were nice, but graphics in a game really don't sell it to me.

It's just the attention to detail wasn't there. There's a point in the dead city where you're trapped in a small apartment and mutants start coming in through the walls, ceiling and floor. That was a fun little close combat arena, but when it was over the game chose the laziest possible way to let you out. The door simply fell off its hinges for no apparent reason. All I could think was, if Valve had made this game you just know their solution to the problem would have been something clever. Perhaps a larger, more dangerous mutant would have broken down the door to let you out once you'd defeated it. Maybe Valve have just spoiled me by the attention they lavish on their games, but I don't think that it's too much to expect in a full price title.

The less said about the various mini games used to pad out the action in this game, the better. And I'm including the driving and races in that category. There's also the laziness in reusing the levels. Running each level twice doesn't get any more interesting just because one time you're going backwards. That's just cheap. The wasted garage and dead city levels also set up the expectation that there'll be more conventional boss fights to go through. The rest of the game feels like they just ran out of time to implement what was planned.

The frankly ridiculous number of technical problems I had, and still have, would have needed an almost perfect game for me to come away with a good impression. As it was, mediocre game play combined with constant crashes leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. Worse since I can see the game this could have been. Id will have to do something spectacular to ever see a cent of my money ever again.

I have not much more to say that haven't already been said in this thread and i agree to 100%, i can just say that i am totally disappointed in the game and will not buy any DLC what so ever...i will hide it in a dark corner and just forget all about it.

I agree 100%, the lack of any of Id's employee's reacting to the mass amount of threads criticizing this game is disrespectful, i am highly disappointed that id received some money from me for this game when they spent, what seems like, a lack of time and money on the development of the game..

I've not experienced the PC version but it sounds a shambles and id need to be more involved with their customer feedback.

There have been some good posts here. The gun play is very good but all the half-hearted filler just dilutes the best stuff, which is the on-foot traditional shooting. I think there is a lack of a real game design, and the game was just too over-ambitious.

Totally Concurred!

It's like Duke Nukem-- a half hearted attempt at a game. It's a short, mediocre game that is out of date ( game play) all the other tech issues only add to the disappointment.

Summed up well and honestly here

http://www.hardwareheaven.com/reviews/1279/pg1/rage-pc.html

I agree with everything you said except your saying that Doom 3 was a disappointment. I rather enjoyed Doom 3 and feel they accomplished what they intended with it. The RoE expansion was pretty good too.

However one thing you made a good point on when talking about the many, many tradeoffs of Megatextures, and something I have forgotten to mention in my comments, is a lack of destructible environments. With games commonly having destructible objects now, that is yet another glaring flaw of the very inefficient and heavily limited megatexture concept.

I really hope id has learned that designing an engine solely around making the transferring of conceptual art, the development process in general, and multi platform porting quick, cheap and easy, while heavily deceiving consumers about any benefits on THEIR end, is not a good idea. If they are wise, they'll scrap the megatexture concept, redesign or replace id Tech 5, trust Carmack less (if not let him go), and move on with more typical methods and stop BSing the public.

The majority of all the negatives you mentioned are due to the tradeoffs of megatextures, and there Carmack should shoulder the blame. The launch fiasco is really insignificant by comparison and would have been all but forgotten after that 5 days of frustration were it not for all the megatexture limitations. They are further exacerbated by the unacceptable 21GB of file space the game takes up.

My friend was anticipating this title more than I and has already uninstalled it to make room for a few other games. Yes, I said a FEW other gameS, and they are current releases.

Although I have enjoyed many elements of Rage, and I continue to get as much out of it as I can before I stop playing it, I must agree that there seems to have been a case of "over-ambitious meets deadline." . . I mean I know that they have been working on Rage for a long long time, but it must have crept up and bit em in the [censored]. Woof! . . and then suddenly they had to release it!

This is one of the most balanced reviews I have read...awesome, thanks.

without reading all and only playing 3 hours for now my 2 cents:

pro:
much more variations and hence much less dull than f.ex quake arena

contra:
Steam sigh...
No Linux version

OP and this review are exactly right. I tried to force myself through a second play through. Got to Wellsprings and said [censored] it. I doubt I will play it again and certainly won't buy any dlc assuming there will be any.

Another "agree 100%" with the OP, also, replying to this particular post b/c I liked your link, also agree with that.

No one will hear this message though because too many 12yr olds (no offense, you can't help being ignorant, you're just kids) will continue to fork over money for garbage because they haven't learned any better - too bad consoles are taking over. No one will care that STEAM is required to play this on the PC, while the consoles roam free. No one will care that id has taken another step downhill. Carmack has confessed console numbers are greater, so that is their direction - can you hate Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, they may or may not have had great products, but they were unmatched businessmen who knew how to make money.

Take a look at John Romero, I read recently that he had to "ebay" (wow, sad sad sad) his Ferrari that he had bought back in his id-glory-days, that's the alternative... focus on something that you love and be broke, or make money and be hated.

It's good to know I'm not alone, although I feel bad that you are all disappointed too.

It's been exactly 3 weeks since the release and the lack of communication from Id made me decide to drop any editing ventures. I'm going to play with UDK. I didn't finish the game, going to deinstall it tonight.

I wish you all the best with this game. I might come back after another patch but I won't be lurking here everyday. It feels as if I just wasted 3 weeks of my live. I know that's overkill, but still.

Thanks for all the nice comments regarding the review.

Totally agree, i have only had the game for 1 day, i was unable to get it working from the installation and had to find community workaround to get it to even run.
Then even with that the game is unplayable, texture grabbing and slow updating of the world, along with screen jumps make even the totally empty area's a pain to navigate.
I realize that my machine is at the low end of the system specs, but i don't see what is causing all the fuss with it.
I'm using a Dual core 2.33 with 4g ram and 512 ATI HD4850.
I've played and finished Deus Ex Hr on higher graphics levels than it will even work in Rage with no issues at all.
This game has been bugged from the get go, having read the forums in my attempts to get it to run i can only assume that it was NOT read for release or was designed for high end systems with resources to burn.
I have read how people with 3g+ machines with 1.5g graphics cards are getting reasonable speeds out of it, but I'm not going to upgrade my machine atm just to play this.
For now this game will sit on my shelf until such time as i upgrade my machine again, most likely next year sometime.
And for now lives as an example of not checking out the forums BEFORE buying it.
It seems that too many games these days are not up to scratch at the time of release.

Take note and learn from our mistakes.

DE:HR is pretty narrow on its environments and dated throughout, great game but hardly comparable graphically.

The techinical issues would annoy me too, but that's why I opted to get it on my PS3 (not to mention I could get the console version cheaper than the over inflated regional pricing Beth had on Steam) rather than my PC which is what I ran DE:HR on. I know that isn't an option for everyone but it is a shame where discussion about a game is polluted by posts that don't even mention the game itself (not surprising if you can't run it)...