To whom it may concern.

I'm your run of the mill pc gamer, sporting a decent rig,
Nvidia 450gts
8 gigs of ram
i3 dual core at 3.07 ghz
win 7 64 bit
with 2 19" lcd's

Now I know its not that fancy and a lot of its components are older but this rig is still capable of running Crysis 2 completely maxed out at a steady 60 fps.

So lets take a look at Rage now.
Originally I never intended to buy Rage it being the child of Bethesda (a company that has never released a good shooter) and id Software (a company that has yet to produce anything worth a damn since the original Doom and quake). Rage was a purchase only because of the incentive I was given to do so. I wont go into details on how but by buying Rage I secured a collectors edition of Skyrim.

So here we go, we are humanity's last bastion of hope and securely tucked away underground with our fellow humans in the Arcs (fallout vaults?) to safely emerge years after the earth is devastated by an astral body collision...fair enough.

I emerge from my...tomb, erm I mean Ark (everyone else appears to have died from old age) to the sights of what appears to be a dilapidated water treatment plant and a beautiful...painted sky...so lets look around. AHHH WTF!? Was my first response to the poor loading of the textures, gpu transcode? wtf is that? (saves and exits game, comes to forums, heads to nvidia, downloads latest beta drivers, installs, reboots, starts Rage, enables gpu transcode option, Huzah! texture load problem gone.) OK so...painted sky aside this looks rather nice. I continue on to be ambushed by the locals and saved by some other local and told to hop in his car and go for a ride, ok mysterious dude who just saved my life says my apparently mute from cryo sleep ?????? of a character.

So all that im assuming was the hook for this game. The part that was supposed to draw me in and make me go "Oh awesome! I cant wait to see more." But it wasnt as soon as my character got in that buggy without so much as a "How do you do?" I knew this was going to be yet another game with a main character that has no motivation to do anything what so ever. And that choice while there, serves no real purpose to the game other then to let me the player make one.

Well since I saved your ??? you can do me a favor! Go kill a bunch of bandits for me! Now this was the only quest I found reasonable, yes he saved me so sure ill repay the favor. From there on out Rage was one big disappointment after another. I was continuously handed odd jobs from random people to do things out in this "groundbreaking" games "open world" side quests were rehashes of the main story quests that took place in the exact same places as the main story quests. The open world was hardly open and severely limited by my silent protagonists inability to lift his foot one inch higher to get on that rock or platform. And whats my drive to do all this ????? Why am I silently obeying all these random peoples requests? None of them have even told me whats happened in the past 100 years except that some faceless organization called the "authority" (woo boy) is jarateing people off. And I'm thrust into the Red Faction/Half Life 2/INSERT GAME NAME HERE "resistance" because my character is too god damned stupid and uncaring about any of this to say HEY! WTF IS GOING ON HERE!?

At least in games that ive been comparing Rage too ive been given a reason to do ???? for the npc's like Borderlands. In Borderlands were on planet Pandora cause were looking for the "vault" so lets get friendly with the locals and see what we can find out about it. Rage sets you out into the game world without any really clear reason or motivation to do anything. And all the way up to the craptastic ending nothing was clear from who you were to why you were doing anything at all.

Racing upgradable death machines? Not usually my cup of tea as I dont generally like racing games even if they do give me guns and other things to play with during the race. Tho in Rage I did enjoy the racing it wasnt required except for one or two races to progress the story which I liked but for sake of seeing all I could in the game I completed all 5 race groups with gold medals across the board. Leaving me saddened there wernt more. The races themselves proved little challenge except for 1 or 2 of the rocket rally's where you chased the light around for points, and once i figured out that they didnt appear randomly those were also no challenge. But all in all the racing was fun.

Easter eggs, yes id software your an old company been around for a long time, yes you made Doom the game that Heralded in a new age of gaming for us all, good for you we thanked you then for that so dont shove more of your "greatness" down our throats please. This is Rage not Doom or Quake we bought Rage to play Rage so why continuously show us stuff from other games? Those who took time to explore and look around know what im talking about. The only real Easter egg I found of any merit was the enforcer that told me to "Pick up that can." And thats when it hit me. IM PLAYING id SOFTWARE'S VERSION OF HALF LIFE! Except everything is sub par, sure the graphics are pretty but this is one big collage of games! Its like im playing Doom 3/Half Life 2/Borderlands/Killzone/maybe a bit of Dead Space (dead city area had oozing wall nastyness and such with yet again no explanation as to why or what was going on there for the most part) So there it is a hodge podge mix of some of the greatest games (imo) to make...this...

Weapons! Usually a fun topic for me, in Rage tho not so much. At the end of the game I had an assortment of death tools pistol, shotgun, better shotgun, crossbow?, machine gun, better machine gun, sniper refile, rocket launcher, minigun/bfg? all of which I somehow stored up my ???. Yet I ask you for what reason do I even have all these? That first quest reward shotgun I got is the only gun I used the whole game up until the end. With enemy movement being so erratic I found myself wasting a lot of ammo for the pistol and machine guns and discovered that if you just wait for them to run at you (which they always did eventually) you could just give em the good ol one two and a biscuit as I like to call it (2 blasts from the shotty and a slap to the face) killed everything. Now I did experiment and play with all the other weapons using the sniper rifle only where needed, but by the end of the game I was toting full primary ammo for all guns and loads of the secondary ammo. Even when it came to enemies in cover the shotty prevailed with its pop rockets alt ammo, and sentries and turrets were taken out in 2 blasts from its pulse alt ammo even the combine I mean authority enforcers in their electronic battle suits suffered from 1 shot kills to the face with the pulse rounds or at least a nasty stun allowing for a follow up blast to finish them off.

Then at what turned out to be the end of the game I was handed the end all of guns. The pulse minigun/bfg which conveniently had ammo for sale at the local shop. After purchasing max rounds for its primary and secondary I proceeded to the hellghast base of operations (im not correcting myself this time) once inside I merrily walked in and mowed down anything and everything that moved occasionally stopping to reload and then continue my massacre. Now this is where I was starting to have fun, I felt like the game was building up to something epic and that soon the game was going to open up and show me its true nature and unleash the hordes or mutants that would overrun the towns and give meaning to giving me the option to go back to that first rundown ????hole city and allow me to make use of my stockpile of ammo and 30+ sentries and turrets. (seriously I had that many) That once I uploaded this data into the satellite and activated the other arks that that nasty boss ive been preparing for would finally show itself (not like that ???????? boss fight in the dead city...that was just sad) or that this mysterious general guy would come out to make me rue the day I stepped foot outside my ark, and id have to make a mad dash run to escape the collapsing city 17. Now all these thoughts were in my head as I was madly pulse gunning down wave after wave of the same yet different mutants ive seen throughout the entire game, and as the the last second ran down and my minigun was cooling off as the camera cut away to watch the transmitter pulse signalling my success I thought to myself now heres where the game really begins! The data was uploaded the arcs were emerging from underground the mid game cinematic was pumping me up! Then...que the end game credits....WHAT THE ???? IS THIS BULLSHT!? That was it all done you beat Rage and thats how I feel about it "Rage" the name says it all.


Regretfully

Zekail