Review after finishing on NM (PC-Version)

Post » Sat May 12, 2012 3:02 pm

This is just my 'short' review of the game, I will try to keep it spoiler free.

My system is an AMD system with a crossfire setup, but after getting the AMD beta driver I have experienced none of the problems others have described with missing textures and such in the game so that worked for me. I tried different config files to tweak the gfx but none really seemed to make any kind of difference worth mentioning.

I bought the game a few days ago, launch date was 7'th October in my part of the world and I was looking forward to this since it seemed that a lot of things were very excting and there was a lot of promise of the previews that had been shown.

Now after installing the frankly quite monstrously sized game (3 dvd's, must be a first) I was greeted by a menu with the same as 0 gfx options and my first thought was, oh god please don't let ID fall into the direct from console port trap :-( I am aware that consoles are a big market and a lot of money is to be made there but still. Us pc users love to tinker and tweak the graphics to be exactly how we want them to be 30 or 60 fps, who cares as longs as it looks insanely good. So just lets us have all those buttons and gizmos so we can do everything we want, thank you (I still lack a lot of tweak settings even after the patch that gives us some of them, but some are better than none)

Now the graphics are in my book not 'that' awesome, they arent bad but not as stellar as some said they would be. A thing that really annoyed me texture wise was the difference in the quality of the textures around. Take the texture on a telephone or on the pc's placed in various locations around the 'world' they are absolutely hideous and then other places the textures look almost perfect in everyway. However I have no complaints on the game speed itself, everything was fluent and worked fine, my graphic cards hardly got hot at all which tells me that the game doesn't really push my box over the edge and that ID have set a lot of settings conservatively.

Sound/music : Music was stellar, very fitting themes and combat music. Sounds were ok most of the time, however I did find it slightly odd that when I hit a mattress with my gloves it made a sound like I was hitting iron, same thing with wooden boxes. I liked the bandits that sounded very tribal (jackals). Weapon sounds were as they should be.

Gameplay : very easy, and the character is to overpowered(wingstick is insanely overpowered). I played the game at the hardest level and I managed to get through with out to much hassle. Took me about 18 hours but thats because I like to do 'almost' everything and examine spots and places were I haven't been. I was slightly amazed at how easy it was for me to get more than enough money, and more than enough ammo and it didn't feel like a challenge eventhough it was at Nightmare.
I like the crafting, well done. Especially that I can craft my own ammo and other nice things.
I like the idea with car races and I found the rocket rally to be the most fun of them all.
AI was a disappointment, to easy to trick them and they had no noticably teamwork. not to mention the idiots in the cars in the wastelands, you might as well have left those out of the game, no challenge what so ever. It's not until almost at the end there is actully one of those that can hurt your car bad.
The end of the game was a WAS THIS IT !! moment very very disappointed in that.
There is little to no replayability as if you have done all the quests there is nothing new to do.

Overall : The above may give you the impression that I didnt like the game, but I did. I liked it and I enjoyed playing it. It just has the feeling over it that it isn't 100% finished. I wanted to do more, to try more to roam free and I can't. It's frustrating when you have a game with huge promise and it actually could deliver all of it with say 4 months more develpment time to polish and perfect it. When the game was over It, I just felt like..ok after making 70% of the game they got bored with it scrapped all plans for making it longer, tossed in some ending and shipped it.

Scores (1-10, 10 being the best)
Graphics : 8 (you can do much better ID)
Sounds/music : 9
Gameplay : 8 (what drags it down is that it is to easy even on hardest mode and low replayability value)
overall : 8

Final words : I really wish Rage had been more than it was. A full freeroam game that would knock my socks off. As it stands it wasn't and it didn't, it wasn't even close. There is a lot of potential, sadly it wasn't fully realized. This is for the pc and average game that is fun while it lasts
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Roanne Bardsley
 
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