Like New 1: RAGE (2011)

Welcome to my new series, Like New. I've chosen 52 games in my Steam library that I have never played, and I plan to play one a week for the entire year.  The goal is to get at least one hour in each game, although some will get more. I'm also playing them in release order, so the oldest games will be first. I don't plan to finish any of them unless they're eminently finishable, but who knows! Maybe I'll get really attached to a game and feel incomplete unless I see credits roll.

This week's game is RAGE, the id Software post-apocalyptic first person shooter from 2011.

Approximately 2008-2012 was a bleak time in gaming, for me at least. It was becoming apparent that the Wii was a bit of a dud, the Xbox 360 was aimed squarely at young men who thought that colors were gay, and I just personally didn't have a lot of time to play games.

It also felt like we were in the middle of the "Brown and Dusty" years. Fallout 3 (a game I nearly loathe) came out in 2008, Gears of War (a game I loved but really cemented the Brown and Dusty trend) was 2 years before that, and...yeah, everything was nasty. This was around the time I'd developed my habit of entering every new environment and saying "Wow, this place sucks" out loud as a reminder that, wow, every place I go to in video games recently sucks ass. 

So I never played RAGE! I had an Xbox 360 so I could have, but it didn't appeal to me at all. It's brown! It's dusty! And honestly I hadn't really played DOOM yet so I didn't even have any respect for Id. It's probably a good thing I didn't play it, because I would have hated it so much.

RAGE is...well, it's every game from 2011. It has a little bit of everything: shooting screaming bandits, punching screaming bandits, picking junk up off the ground, driving vehicles, picking ammo up off the ground, doing fetch quests, selling the junk you found to buy ammo, scavenging from corpses...you know, all the things that a good life is made of. And it's brown. And dusty.

The plot is "what if an asteroid hit the earth and then ~120 years later you popped out of hibernation with super powers and everything sucked ass." Bandits roam the wastelands, good people are sequestered to barely functioning colonies assembled from junk, mutants chew on faces in every dark corner, and all the beer bottles are empty. It's up to you, John Everyman (with nanobots that will make you heal almost instantly after every injury), to save the people from themselves. Primarily by gunning them down by the dozen.

It is, unfortunately, quite similar to Fallout plots, both in tone, style, and attitude. Unfortunately, the quality of the writing is abysmal in the section I played. Yes, even worse than Fallout 3, which at least had the occasional interesting NPC or witty turn of phrase. Beyond the intro, almost every piece of dialogue just serves to point you in a direction and tell you what to do. These people have all the personality of a to-do list, and it's really boring.

The map (at least what I saw of it) is what you'd expect: piles of junk in an uninviting wasteland nearly bereft of plantlife and any any color you might find in nature that isn't Dirt.

Aside: If a massive asteroid hit the earth, the dust in the atmosphere would last ~15 years according to modern simulations. Given the additional one hundred years that pass between impact and the player waking up, it's quite unrealistic that everything would be a desert and that most plant life would remain dead. If anything, the ruins of cities would be overrun with plant life, and animal life would likely also bounce back very quickly with less human interference to worry about. And don't get me started on "somehow humans never reach a point of having a proper civilization again despite 100+ years of living in the post apocalypse." This shit drives me crazy.

Anyway, the map. It's weirdly small and linear. It seems to want to be an "open world" game with a nonlinear, interesting map. Unfortunately, what it really was in the first hour is a single, short road with 2 settlements and a bandit camp. I even accidentally blew up my ATV (don't ask) and it barely affected my ability to get across the "open world" map. It doesn't help that there are no random encounters, good or bad, and it's just...a walking tax? I don't know! I don't know why it exists at all!! Just give me a list of levels!!!

The dungeon-style levels are better, even if they are just a series of shooting galleries. They've got interesting cover setups, good enemy placement, and some cool set pieces. Nothing special, but they get the job done. They're still ugly as hell though, and again are mostly made of junk and dirt.

The gameplay is mostly what you'd expect: find guns, shoot people, repeat. However, this is broken up by the aforementioned junk collecting, corpse looting, and (surprise!) crafting. To be honest, all of this feels inserted after-the-fact. New guns are tied to mission rewards, and there are no other equippable items, so looting is really just picking up ammo and the junk needed to craft items. It's both incredibly necessary and deeply disheartening.

Crafting itself also feels tacked on, since (so far at least) crafting a "key" to a lock is almost identical to just finding the key on the ground, except the key is in pieces on the ground instead. And the other items you can craft feel unnecessary: bandages are sort of useful but your auto heal is so fast that assigning bandages to your single item slot feels like a waste; wingsticks are boomerangs, I guess, except you don't always get to keep them when you hit enemies or walls; adrenaline increases maximum health for a whole minute, but again the auto heal is so powerful it's easier to just play it as a cover shooter.

Later recipes seem slightly more interesting (bots and drones and ammo), but again it feels added retroactively. It's as if someone told the developers "Look, it's too easy if they can just pick up a murder drone. How about we split it into three pieces and distribute it throughout the map so they have to assemble it themselves?" And that person was so important that they had to do it even though the game was going to release in 3 months.

Hey guess what happened to id Software ~2 years before this game came out? That's right, Bethesda (the developers of Fallout 3) bought them and brought them in-house. Hmmmmmmm.....!!!

But this really does feel like a watered down version of Fallout 3, which itself was already a watered down version of STALKER. Perhaps this is an invented narrative, but Fallout's impact on this game feels incredibly high. It's easy to imagine a world where this game had a much higher focus on the shooting, the story, the maps, etc. But instead it was kind of forced into this mold of "misanthropic garbage collecting murder machine" that just about every game in existence was in that era. 

So are there any highlights? A couple.

For one the enemies feel smart. To be clear, they aren't, but their combat barks do a lot of heavy lifting at convincing me otherwise. They shout my position out (and not just "over there!" but "to the right!"), announce their own movements, give commands, and generally seem to coordinate their attacks verbally. That's cool! 

Also, their animations are fantastic. This was the era where games had to be designed for CRT and HD TVs simultaneously, and I feel like this impacts the animations. They're very big and exaggerated, while also being detailed and smooth. And the way they go from canned animation to ragdoll as part of their death throes is just perfect. I even had a dude with a big machete do a little parkour kick off of a wall in a way that felt dynamic and not planned. It's really neat.

But overall, at least based on the first hour, I think this game is pretty frickin bad. I was so happy to see my game time tick over an hour, and it was hard not to quit in the middle of the boss fight I was in out of spite. It's just. So. Boring. 

One Interesting Thing

For every game I want to find at least one interesting thing about it. Take a look at the lady in this screenshot, giving particular attention to her prosthetic hand:

Computer, enhance....

Pretty cool, huh? It clearly serves some special functions, none of which are "look like a human hand," which is nice. If anything, it looks like something that a sci-fi surgical robot might have, and along with the outfit and the health kit she's holding in her right hand, it's clear she's some kind of healer in her community.

This reminded me of an article I read a long time ago (and now cannot find) where the gist was "prosthetics are often made to help disabled people 'blend in' and aren't actually useful tools." I remember the writer saying that often, wearing no prosthetic at all was more functional than any prosthetic could be. This lady reminded me of that article, in that her prosthetic clearly serves a very specific function that's important to her personally. Here's a comparable article instead if you want a deeper perspective on the issue. 

Alright, that's it! I'm uninstalling this game. Next week, we'll play Hell Yeah, a 2012 action platformer by, uh, Arkedo? Huh?