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RAGE Preview.....want it now!!!
by Guest Mon 18 Apr 2011 - 17:07
Despite our previous story about its multiplayer modes, RAGE is a single player game, through and through. But beyond the fact that it looked a lot like Borderlands with a more realistic art style (post-apocalyptic desert setting, buggies, lots of guns), we didn’t know a lot about how it would really play. Now we do, and sheer variety of things to do surprised us.
It started with a guided tour through two new areas we hadn’t seen before. One was Subway Town, the second major urban center in the game. While Wellspring was more a dusty, western-themed village, Subway Town seems far more urban – and more dangerous. Still, folks were friendly. A bartender and hooker both offered us side missions, and a rough-looking busker actually offered up a rhythm-action minigame for us to play.
We also met several new characters important to our personal quest in Subway Town, including Redstone, the town’s hard-nosed mayor, and a whole A-team-style crew of freedom fighters living in a high-tech bunker hidden beneath a mechanic’s shop. At this point in the game, you’ll be doing jobs as Redstone’s hired muscle, in order to turn things in favor of the rebels.
Now that we’d taken in the scenery, it was time to get into the action. Our demoer was sent to break a leading freedom fighter out of prison. This gave us our first look at The Authority, the real menace in the world of RAGE. Up until now, we’d just seen mutants and wasteland thugs – formidable enough to carve you into pieces, but typically not terribly tactical or well equipped. The Authority, on the other hand, are both.
Almost immediately after our arrival at the prison, a triangular UFO shows up and hovers above the battleground – turns out, it’s not a UFO at all, but an Authority drop ship, and several soldiers with red combat armor, heavy ordinance and jump jets burst from its belly. These guys are geared up and trained well. They’ll deploy personal energy shields, use recharging stations to refill their energy meters, and actually pay attention to cover and tactics. There are also automated turrets in this prison. We hate automated turrets.
Luckily, you’ve got a little something for them as wel: EMP grenades for the turrets, a deployable spider bot that will skitter up ahead of you and gun down anything it can, and pulse ammo, which electro-fries the Authority’s armor. Still, when they have the ability to drop more troops in anytime there’s a gap in the ceiling, there’s no such thing as a safe place.
Nearing the end of the level, our demoer reaches the cell blocks and flips the switch that opens all the doors – surprise! The cells were all full of raging mutants, who come charging out of the blocks in full “tear flesh from bone” mode. After a few tense moments of mutant massacre, a voice calls out to us. Turns out, there’s one cell still closed, courtesy of a special energy field. That’s our VIP.
We get down to him and shut down the field moments before the authority air-drops more troops in. So it’s another shootout, but now there’s a wing man, who can hack open doors while the player covers him, and so on.
At this point, our demoer shows off a special ammo type called a Mind Snare. Basically, it strikes the enemy and gives you control over their body, so you can send them shambling like a zombie toward their comrades – where they then self-destruct. We can’t imagine those are going to be cheap or common, but you can’t dispute their effectiveness.
Just a few seconds later, we plant a bomb on a door to blast it open and are then separated from our partner by a falling elevator. This is the end of the hands off demo, but just the beginning of our time with RAGE – it’s time for the hands on portion of the day.
We start off with what has to be one of the first missions in the game. We pull into Wellspring, a dry, dusty collection of shacks, where the first person we meet teaches us to throw a wingstick. You’re going to love the wingstick – it’s basically a three-bladed boomerang that smart-targets whatever you huck it toward at and slices through anything fleshy it hits. They’re not sturdy, so you constantly need to construct new ones, but trust us – you will LOVE the wingstick.
This is actually a good place to mention the whole construction/engineering angle in RAGE. Throughout the game, you’ll constantly be picking up pieces of high-tech junk – a battery pack here, a circuit board there. And you can combine these into a whole range of gadgets. Wingsticks are one, the spider-bot from the prison level was another. And when we’re sent to a trashed-out dam to locate some buggy parts, we discover the lock grinder, a device that literally saws through locked doors, is yet another. The dam itself is a claustrophobic trek through lots of tight corridors and cluttered spaces, kept interesting by the relentless attacks of squad after squad of British-accented thugs with painted faces.
The next level (in the demo – we’re not following the game’s story; we’re skipping around) showed off a new constructible item: a remote control toy buggy packed with dynamite. The environment this time was some sort of high-tech facility occupied by the Authority, who took great offense at our efforts to shoot them all in the face with electrified crossbow bolts or special machine gun ammo designed specifically to penetrate their armor. This facility also housed entire rooms full of explosives, which we would dispose of by driving the little explosive RC cars through the vent work. We were glad to have played these two levels in succession, because it showed off how changing the setting, goals and enemy type could give the action a nicely varied feel even though we were essentially still first-person blasting.
Next, we tried a vehicular level, a straightforward buggy race – well, as straightforward as a race can be with rocket boosting and power-ups and missiles. It actually played faster and more arcade-like than we anticipated (and to be honest, I lost … twice. Don’t get caught looking at the scenery). Good stuff.
The final level we got to try swapped the mood again, in a cool way. Sent to “Dead City” in search of lost research data, we found ourselves in a sickly drab, predomonantly gray urban ruin that wouldn’t have felt out of place in a horror game. Sure enough, we hadn’t taken three steps before mutants began leaping out of the ruins and charging toward us. Mutants are the anti-tactical group in RAGE. Whereas the Authority are organized and team-based, and even the various gangs are smart enough to use cover, mutants would rather straight toward you, preferably screaming like a banshee. Not a terribly creative or sophisticated strategy, but one that nonetheless scares the bejeezus out of us much of the time.
This is doubly true when one of the larger mutants shows up. He stands at least ten feet tall, and lest you think he’s slow and lumbering and you can just keep your distance, he’s got range. In place of one arm he has a long, slimy tentacle that can stretch out from almost any distance and slap you, leaving your vision clouded by goo. It’s like one of those jelly hand things kids play with, but with added blunt force trauma.
Luckily, we take a quick look in our loadout, and – how convenient – we seem to be carrying a rocket launcher. Swapping weapons in RAGE is a breeze, we have to say – you hold one shoulder button and then use the right stick to choose one of four weapons and the left stick to choose from up to four kinds of ammo, then release the button and there you go. It’s a great on-the-fly system, and we love that we didn’t have to take our thumbs off the sticks to use it.
A few rockets to the teeth, and even Mr. Stretchy-arm takes a dirt nap. This brought us to the end of our time with RAGE, but as you can see from the embedded video, there’s a lot more to this level.
The more we play of RAGE, the more differences we notice not just between this and Borderlands, but between this and other shooters in general. We knew it was gorgeous. But we’re becoming more and more convinced that the beauty isn’t only skin deep.
It started with a guided tour through two new areas we hadn’t seen before. One was Subway Town, the second major urban center in the game. While Wellspring was more a dusty, western-themed village, Subway Town seems far more urban – and more dangerous. Still, folks were friendly. A bartender and hooker both offered us side missions, and a rough-looking busker actually offered up a rhythm-action minigame for us to play.
We also met several new characters important to our personal quest in Subway Town, including Redstone, the town’s hard-nosed mayor, and a whole A-team-style crew of freedom fighters living in a high-tech bunker hidden beneath a mechanic’s shop. At this point in the game, you’ll be doing jobs as Redstone’s hired muscle, in order to turn things in favor of the rebels.
Now that we’d taken in the scenery, it was time to get into the action. Our demoer was sent to break a leading freedom fighter out of prison. This gave us our first look at The Authority, the real menace in the world of RAGE. Up until now, we’d just seen mutants and wasteland thugs – formidable enough to carve you into pieces, but typically not terribly tactical or well equipped. The Authority, on the other hand, are both.
Almost immediately after our arrival at the prison, a triangular UFO shows up and hovers above the battleground – turns out, it’s not a UFO at all, but an Authority drop ship, and several soldiers with red combat armor, heavy ordinance and jump jets burst from its belly. These guys are geared up and trained well. They’ll deploy personal energy shields, use recharging stations to refill their energy meters, and actually pay attention to cover and tactics. There are also automated turrets in this prison. We hate automated turrets.
Luckily, you’ve got a little something for them as wel: EMP grenades for the turrets, a deployable spider bot that will skitter up ahead of you and gun down anything it can, and pulse ammo, which electro-fries the Authority’s armor. Still, when they have the ability to drop more troops in anytime there’s a gap in the ceiling, there’s no such thing as a safe place.
Nearing the end of the level, our demoer reaches the cell blocks and flips the switch that opens all the doors – surprise! The cells were all full of raging mutants, who come charging out of the blocks in full “tear flesh from bone” mode. After a few tense moments of mutant massacre, a voice calls out to us. Turns out, there’s one cell still closed, courtesy of a special energy field. That’s our VIP.
We get down to him and shut down the field moments before the authority air-drops more troops in. So it’s another shootout, but now there’s a wing man, who can hack open doors while the player covers him, and so on.
At this point, our demoer shows off a special ammo type called a Mind Snare. Basically, it strikes the enemy and gives you control over their body, so you can send them shambling like a zombie toward their comrades – where they then self-destruct. We can’t imagine those are going to be cheap or common, but you can’t dispute their effectiveness.
Just a few seconds later, we plant a bomb on a door to blast it open and are then separated from our partner by a falling elevator. This is the end of the hands off demo, but just the beginning of our time with RAGE – it’s time for the hands on portion of the day.
We start off with what has to be one of the first missions in the game. We pull into Wellspring, a dry, dusty collection of shacks, where the first person we meet teaches us to throw a wingstick. You’re going to love the wingstick – it’s basically a three-bladed boomerang that smart-targets whatever you huck it toward at and slices through anything fleshy it hits. They’re not sturdy, so you constantly need to construct new ones, but trust us – you will LOVE the wingstick.
This is actually a good place to mention the whole construction/engineering angle in RAGE. Throughout the game, you’ll constantly be picking up pieces of high-tech junk – a battery pack here, a circuit board there. And you can combine these into a whole range of gadgets. Wingsticks are one, the spider-bot from the prison level was another. And when we’re sent to a trashed-out dam to locate some buggy parts, we discover the lock grinder, a device that literally saws through locked doors, is yet another. The dam itself is a claustrophobic trek through lots of tight corridors and cluttered spaces, kept interesting by the relentless attacks of squad after squad of British-accented thugs with painted faces.
The next level (in the demo – we’re not following the game’s story; we’re skipping around) showed off a new constructible item: a remote control toy buggy packed with dynamite. The environment this time was some sort of high-tech facility occupied by the Authority, who took great offense at our efforts to shoot them all in the face with electrified crossbow bolts or special machine gun ammo designed specifically to penetrate their armor. This facility also housed entire rooms full of explosives, which we would dispose of by driving the little explosive RC cars through the vent work. We were glad to have played these two levels in succession, because it showed off how changing the setting, goals and enemy type could give the action a nicely varied feel even though we were essentially still first-person blasting.
Next, we tried a vehicular level, a straightforward buggy race – well, as straightforward as a race can be with rocket boosting and power-ups and missiles. It actually played faster and more arcade-like than we anticipated (and to be honest, I lost … twice. Don’t get caught looking at the scenery). Good stuff.
The final level we got to try swapped the mood again, in a cool way. Sent to “Dead City” in search of lost research data, we found ourselves in a sickly drab, predomonantly gray urban ruin that wouldn’t have felt out of place in a horror game. Sure enough, we hadn’t taken three steps before mutants began leaping out of the ruins and charging toward us. Mutants are the anti-tactical group in RAGE. Whereas the Authority are organized and team-based, and even the various gangs are smart enough to use cover, mutants would rather straight toward you, preferably screaming like a banshee. Not a terribly creative or sophisticated strategy, but one that nonetheless scares the bejeezus out of us much of the time.
This is doubly true when one of the larger mutants shows up. He stands at least ten feet tall, and lest you think he’s slow and lumbering and you can just keep your distance, he’s got range. In place of one arm he has a long, slimy tentacle that can stretch out from almost any distance and slap you, leaving your vision clouded by goo. It’s like one of those jelly hand things kids play with, but with added blunt force trauma.
Luckily, we take a quick look in our loadout, and – how convenient – we seem to be carrying a rocket launcher. Swapping weapons in RAGE is a breeze, we have to say – you hold one shoulder button and then use the right stick to choose one of four weapons and the left stick to choose from up to four kinds of ammo, then release the button and there you go. It’s a great on-the-fly system, and we love that we didn’t have to take our thumbs off the sticks to use it.
A few rockets to the teeth, and even Mr. Stretchy-arm takes a dirt nap. This brought us to the end of our time with RAGE, but as you can see from the embedded video, there’s a lot more to this level.
The more we play of RAGE, the more differences we notice not just between this and Borderlands, but between this and other shooters in general. We knew it was gorgeous. But we’re becoming more and more convinced that the beauty isn’t only skin deep.
Guest- Guest
Re: RAGE Preview.....want it now!!!
by Duke Mon 18 Apr 2011 - 19:24
I guess that the dominance of COD (and to a lesser extent Battlefield) have caused other game developers to be more creative in their approach to FPS. Really tempted to try Brink and this looks good as well.
I just hope that they can sell enough units to keep the ball rolling
I just hope that they can sell enough units to keep the ball rolling
Duke- Fifth Wall Vet
- Posts : 897
Join date : 2010-07-21
Location : Westcountry......la la la
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