Rage is the first full-fledged project from id Software in the last seven years, surviving changes in producers, publishers and even the main development platform. The events of the game begin on August 23, 2029, when the asteroid Apophis crashes into the Earth and the international Ark program starts. The best sons and daughters of humanity in special capsules are immersed in cryogenic sleep in order to create new world on the ruins of an old civilization. People who are not trapped in deep-lying capsules are forced to accept inevitable death. As a result of an asteroid collision, 80 percent of the Earth's population is killed, and the survivors face a harsh life in the wasteland under the supervision of radiation. Main character Rage, by chance, wakes up 106 years after the disaster, where the world has turned into a desert, and disparate factions, mutants and soldiers are fighting for a place in the sun. Miraculously saved from the clutches of mutants by former military man Den Hagar, the nameless character arrives in the nearest settlement, where he tries to prove his usefulness to the new society. To begin with, the player is offered simple tasks, such as clearing a mutant lair or destroying a bandit checkpoint on the way to big city. Over time, the tasks become more difficult, but they all also come down to clearing a specified location, collecting artifacts, or pressing an important button.

A little variety is provided by additional quests (they can be obtained at a bar or on a notice board in the city), in which you must protect an object by shooting enemies with a sniper rifle, destroy a group of bandits, or deliver a package. In addition, the player must take part in mandatory races, reality shows on survival against mutants and fun mini-games. Among which you can find a desert analogue Magic the Gathering, poking a knife around the fingers and a sad mixture of Guitar Hero and Jimbo Says.

Rage is a very conservative game. The levels, although they represent an intricate labyrinth of doors and corridors, are absolutely linear. Objects do not obey the laws of physics, only confirming their noble origin with the sounds of gunshots, and textures and inscriptions shyly creep apart at the slightest approach. The mechanics of collecting items can also be called strange. Some types of enemies, like mutants, simply melt into thin air, others remain lying, but you will have to receive weapons as trophies for completing tasks or buy them with cash in stores. It is simply impossible to pick up a cannon dropped by the enemy - it, like the smile of a Cheshire cat, will simply disappear into thin air. Ammo and special items are scattered throughout the nooks and crannies of the levels, but sometimes they are found on the corpses of enemies who did not have time to disappear. The game technology supports a limited number of bodies per location, so sometimes during an exciting shootout you have to clear out dead opponents before they finally disappear with important trophies.

The weapons in the game can hardly be called standard. There is a pistol, a Kalashnikov assault rifle, a rocket launcher, a silent crossbow, a sniper rifle, a light machine gun, a shotgun, a nano-boomerang, grenades, a radio-controlled car with explosives, an automatic turret, a combat robot spider and a plasma gun with a BFG in one bottle. At the same time, almost all weapons can be improved by purchasing additional stabilizers or sniper scopes. Or use for special shooting. For example, a shotgun fires pellets, high-caliber explosive shells, and plasma charges. The crossbow offers paralyzing arrows (you can control an infected enemy until they explode from the pressure), regular arrows, and explosive arrows. You find some ammunition locally, buy others in stores, and create others yourself using recipes and scattered components. For example, to produce explosive shells you will need cartridges and dynamite. And for the boomerang there are blades, wire and pieces of fabric. In theory, the variety of weapons should allow for unique tactics. It must be great to infect a guard, take over his body and explode him in a crowd of unsuspecting fellows. Or drive a radio-controlled car into a crowd of mutants and start a bloodbath. Not to mention ambushes with turrets or spider robots. But this is only in theory. In reality, once you get the Shotgun Explosive Shells recipe, it will become your main weapon, with minor support from boomerangs throughout the game. One shot with an explosive shell tears a mutant into pieces, an armored enemy dies with the second shot, the mini-boss will require five charges. The same applies to robots, turrets and other forces of the indomitable enemy on the normal difficulty of the game.

Health in the game is restored automatically, but you can fix your wounded body with a set of bandages or other medicines; if this does not help, then in the event of clinical death you will always have a second chance thanks to the automatic revival system built into the body. To get 100% health you will have to take part in an exciting QTE game against the clock. However, the defibrillator built into the body requires charging, so at the beginning of the game your body is unlikely to withstand two deaths in a row.

Cars, which were positioned as one of the main elements of the game, are used in two cases: for fast travel between locations on the map and in competition mode. Competitions are divided by class vehicles into several repeating steps. These are standard time trials where you can use nitrous oxide to speed up, circuit races with rockets where you can destroy enemies and capture bases. Last mode presented in various versions. The bases can be arranged sequentially or randomly. The player who has crossed the vertical beam of light is considered to have captured the base. Capturing one base activates another, giving the captor five bonus points. Three points are awarded for destroying an enemy. The game ends at 50 points. Players can use rockets, machine guns, mines, automatic turrets, defense and health packs. Some of these components are purchased separately. Parts are given to all participants from the start of the game. In this mode, tactics are really needed, since all the vehicles are trying to capture points, waiting for the appearance new base or luring the enemy into a trap. As for the other modes, there is no challenge in them. Minimal driving skills and nitrous oxide will guarantee you victory in almost all races the first time.

Winning competitions gives you racing certificates, which you can use to buy upgrades for your car. Rockets, health, shields, guns and mines can be purchased for regular money. Moreover, each class of car has its own set of improvements. At your disposal: an ATV, a buggy, an improved car and an armored car. All of them can be used to move around a wide area. In case of damage, you can always call a free tow truck and move to one of several garages in the village or city. In addition to moving from point to point, you can take part in mini-tasks: jumping to destroy military droids or shooting rampant auto villains for money.

Separately, it is worth mentioning the repeatability of Rage. Even side quests will offer you instead unique levels return to completed locations, in which you will encounter the same set of enemies. Unique bosses, although encountered a couple of times during the game, do not cause delight, invitingly sparkling with vulnerable points for destruction. But the animation of enemies and NPCs is beyond praise - these are the most realistic opponents in terms of movement and animation that I have seen recently. But even their uniqueness cannot brighten up the limited freedom of the narrative between two cities with undisclosed factions and motivations of street gangs, military or resistance. Not to mention the female characters who ask for a long-term virtual romance, but prefer the scripted loneliness of the local bar. Rage, of course, really wants to be like Fallout, but it clearly lacks the depth of history and the integrity of the atmosphere of its mentor. Although, of course, in terms of fan service, Id Software tried 100 percent. In the game you will find limited figures from Vault Tech, a Space Marine from DOOM on the hood of the car and a BFG in the final damage of the game.

Rage is a hybrid project that suffers from the standard id Software problems that have become disgraceful seven years after DOOM. Blurry inscriptions, lack of physics, disappearing objects, repeating locations and the general linearity of the narrative with a merged end on one side of the scale and fun racing with a variety of modes, good multiplayer, a unique approach to weapons, and excellent character animation on the other: send Rage into the realm of those games , which is usually rented or bought on sale for $20 during the dull off-season.

Version tested for Xbox 360

Whatever you name the boat, that’s how it will run on your computers.

First mission

At first, Rage simply crashed immediately after the start. It was, I must say, not very fun, after all, on my hard drive there was seemingly ready-made code for the latest shooter from the great and terrible id Software. A post-apocalyptic action movie from the FPS trendsetters that we've been waiting for at least five years, promising amazing gameplay and graphics, as well as a unique atmosphere and style, has been successfully activated on Steam, but does not want to progress beyond the first black loading screen. It doesn't even show introductory videos. Bastard.

The bastion of goodness and justice named after the AMD website (yes, I am the “lucky” owner of a Radeon) made me happy - new Catalyst drivers have just been released, it’s time to download! And then I started having really serious problems. After the update, my unfortunate computer was able to run Rage, but instead fell victim to an unknown bug, thanks to which the PC began to heat up to 100 degrees Celsius even during idle time. I think there is no need to explain to anyone what the consequences of such tricks are. Rolling back the drivers didn't help.

A wave of panic forced me to restore the factory settings on the gradually burning laptop (just in case, ha-ha, fireman, I’ll make a reservation: a powerful-gaming-other, for Rage this should have been enough). A rash, stupid move, but how soberly could I then judge what was happening? Of course, everything was lost, including working documents, woo-hoo.

By the time I more or less reinstalled everything, sent the game along with its developers to the forest and resigned myself to my fate, another new driver from AMD arrived. I still couldn’t think straight, and the temptation was too great. 100 degrees, hot all around, reset everything a second time.

And yes, soon updated drivers were released for the third time. But I was already ready for this! Hell, I’ll install all the necessary software in a new way in such a situation, the men are fighting to the last coals of their laptops! And I was rewarded for my faith - the drivers stopped working, while the computer worked more or less standard mode, and the game started. Like this:

It was already obvious to me that this was the final test on the path to insight and enlightenment, and the main thing was to show at least a little patience and wait for the patch. The patch came out, textures continued to load in the same way. I had to go to the nasty evil Internet for help. They were found right next to the distributor of the ill-fated client of a non-working FPS, on the Steam Community forums, a place where losers like me gather to cry and look for solutions from more intelligent users. And, most importantly, they are often found!

On the advice of a genius from the forums, having tinkered with the settings of Catalyst Control Center (lucky Nvidia users do not know this hellish program for configuring the parameters of Radeon video cards, but we are working with it), I was able to get the game to display textures more or less properly.

So I passed the first and, perhaps, the most difficult mission versions of Rage for personal computers. And if you really want to play the latest project from id, be prepared to go through the same thing in case of bad luck.

A beautiful ruined world

The first task is simply terrible, but immediately after completing it, the gamer is finally released into beautiful world destroyed megacities, life pulsating on the ruins of civilization and endless races through the deserts. The old id games hit the bull's eye with their crazy technology and revolutionary gameplay ideas; Rage wins not with its muscles, but with its design. The Americans have painted and modeled the best picture of the world after the end of the world to date. The latest parts of Fallout lacked gloss and scale, Borderlands, in fact, was not at all about post-apocalypse, and in general it also offered a more modest view of the panorama, but our new product is simply beautiful in its grandeur. Nowadays you won’t find more atmospheric landscapes here.

Alas, the open world of the game is nothing more than a beautiful mirage (the polygonal wastelands are not even seamless, as one might expect). No matter how hard id tries to keep up with the times and make sandboxes out of their shooters, in the end they still end up with either corridor showdowns or arena skirmishes. De facto, there is nothing wrong with this, because local level pipes are painted and furnished no worse than the rest of the world, and classic FPS are just classic FPS, so that the formula used in them with various variations works everywhere. But what we expected from Rage was something a little different...

But what can you do, you need to get out of the Ark (such an economy class Vault) and pick up a gun. Local residents greet another miraculously escaped guest from the past in a rather amusing manner. Having saved the protagonist, who has just emerged from his cryogenic capsule, from an attack by mutants, the middle-aged man who runs the settlement that has grown up at a gas station immediately sends him to kill people. This is just what the hero was preparing for all his time in the Ark, yeah.

The very first visit to the bandit scalps finally dotted all the right points: Rage is about graphics and atmosphere, and not at all about hurricane firefights. The trash-filled corridors are just as beautiful as the open wasteland, plus there are beautifully animated enemies jumping back and forth. The models of the adversaries are moving and it’s really just a sight for sore eyes - the various videos and demonstrations didn’t lie to us. Sometimes, however, three-dimensional actors clearly overact - have you ever watched deliberately cardboard wrestling? - and after some boring wound in the arm they begin to organize a whole “Swan Lake”.

Unfortunately, the adversaries approach combat as such with much less imagination and zeal. Foot enemies can be roughly divided into two categories - those that are trying to turn the hero’s head off in close combat and those that are in no hurry. Only a couple of particularly evil mutants do not fall under this classification; they combine hand-to-hand and ranged combat skills in a unique way for the Rage wastelands. For the remaining 99% of enemies, the recipe is always the same: we cook berserkers with a shotgun, all the rest to taste.

If you still have to dodge and dance from crazy horses all the way through and particularly fat mutants, then the guys who got themselves guns are kind of boring, regardless of the difficulty level set. But at least you can destroy your adversaries to your heart’s content. Rage is a glimmer of light in the dark kingdom “We don’t give out more than two guns”: not only can you carry with you all the found/purchased guns, grenades and other wingsticks at once (the wingsticks are not mine, the translators did their best), but also with each You can play with the barrel in a special way. Most available barrels accept at least two different types of cartridges, some of which also have various interesting properties. I think that even before the game came out, you had a chance to see a crossbow that shoots electric arrows (electric arrows are not mine either) and very funny poisonous hypno-arrows. I hasten to report: everything works as it should, shoots and looks exactly as shown, and this is undoubtedly great.

Take away the machines from the bots! Computer dummies with auto-targeting and automatic weapons are an inevitable evil in the case of realistic settings, but not at all necessary in fantasy games. The combination of machine guns in the hands of bots and a health regeneration system turns any single-player shooter into a monotonous, boring shooting gallery, where the only serious enemy is the soldiers/monsters/robots that don’t get in the way, but the timer “leans out and takes cover.” This is not multiplayer, where any accidents are possible, stupid mistakes, crazy hits, unexpected maneuvers and frontal attacks by desperate network berserkers, here we know all possible moves in advance, and the nature of computer opponents with automation leaves the gamer no choice in the approach to destroying the adversaries. No, stealth does not solve the problem at all, unless we are talking about . Poke a headshot without a timer or poke a headshot with a timer - the variety is small.

Resisting resistance

The fellow owner of the gas station is a practical man, and as soon as the player completes all his tasks, he sends the miracle out of the Ark to hell, so long as the Government doesn’t get to the bottom of it. As you might guess, the government of the local residents is bad, cruel, evil, and so on. The evil essence of the government is expressed in such facts as: the presence of the Government in the government, strict and cruel control over the unknown threat to the Government and all other people from the Ark, and the state military program to turn mutants into controlled weapons. Bad, bad Government. How can Government be good when it strictly corresponds to the concept of “government”? And don’t look at the fact that in the local prison there is only the main rebel (who has been completely on state rations for very understandable reasons) and five mutants.

It is quite obvious that the Government’s minions will eventually have to be shot simply because they are hunting for the main character, but why everyone in Rage doesn’t like the authorities, I still don’t understand. Okay, in one city a casino was closed, someone might not like it, well, they experiment on mutants instead of shooting them in the head like every (dis)orderly inhabitant of the wasteland does, plus such cool armor as soldiers have, no one has (and all because in the world of the game almost all the belongings of the dead, such as personal weapons or the same armor, evaporate and fly off into the distance along with the souls of the owners), and the guys from the Arks have a lot of problems, but to bristle just like that?

And there will be a lot of races, because shooting is only half the game. For not the most obvious reasons, id made a big bet on a variety of desert races. Almost immediately upon leaving the Ark, our sufferer is presented with an ATV so that he can reach the bandits patiently awaiting their fate, then at intervals of several hours the game will give you first a buggy, then a car called “Kuprino”. On the second and third, you can already arrange showdowns on the roads.

In addition to the showdowns on wheels a la Twisted Metal directly related to driving through foreign territory, with the help of cars you can earn extra money by express mail delivery to different parts of the desert world, plus become famous (but not get rich) at various city competitions. In spirit, such rides are close, oddly enough, to classic Rock’n’Roll Racing, with the exception of a couple of points. Well, allowance for the fact that RnRR is a 16-bit game, and Rage will be a little more modern. But the essence of these two arcade races with rockets is the same - in one way or another we break through to first place on the track, then with all our might we keep it in order to earn a rating and advance our career.

It's good that Rage's racing story is self-contained. The reward in city competitions is non-convertible points, for which it is impossible to buy anything except car parts that are needed to make it easier to drive, to make it easier to complete road tasks, to make it easier to drive. That is, if car competitions in FPS are not for you, then you can skip them without any problems, and dilute the monotonous shooting with, say, a game of Heroes of Might and Magic 6 or whatever.

If we talk about some pure gameplay, then Rage is far from a revelation, but just a good passable shooter. What makes it a real hit is its impeccable visual design. The beauty, scale and (not realism, but) truthfulness of the game world holds together and firmly holds not the most dynamic shootouts, not the most exciting races, not the most interesting story and a thousand insignificant little things together, making the single product be more than just the sum of its components. This beauty and harmony can easily drag a gamer away for long, long hours.

Just to get through the first mission.

Release date: October 4, 2011 Publisher: Bethesda Softworks Developer: id Software Genres: Action / Adventure / Co-op Platforms: PC / PS3 / Xbox 360 In: 383rd place Editor's rating: 62 %

Is it worth playing? (based on reader ratings)

How do you like the game? + 1 (all positive)

RAGE: Anarchy Edition
The id Sofware studio has always delighted its loyal followers with games that could draw us into their world, so that an hour passed seemed like a minute, and this company, unlike many of its competitors, still relies not on the number of projects, but on their quality. And today before us lies the fruit of their efforts, which matured in the bowels of the company for five long years, and, most importantly, was published by the well-known company Bethesda - a post-apocalyptic first-person shooter with elements of racing and role playing game"RAGE: Anarchy Edition".

Gameplay
At first glance, it might seem that RAGE is a cross between the wastelands of Fallout and Borderlands and Burnout-style racing with buggies, and this first glance, unfortunately, will be the last. Indeed, here you won’t see any new gaming solutions, crazy nonlinearity that will take you weeks of time (for direct passage storyline it will take you about 10 hours), but I am sure that after installing this game and uninstalling it, your cursor will not rise. But what is so attractive?

Wasteland
A true fan of post-apocalyptic worlds will feel at home in RAGE, here you will find small surviving settlements that need our heroic help (sometimes reduced to banal work as a hired killer) and self-assembly of weapons from scrap materials that we so loved from the Fallout line: take the recipe, take it a couple of cans and build yourself an “ubercannon”.

Race
If residents Fallout world After the end of the world, they retained their love for fizzy drinks, and did not care about at least any means of transportation, then the inhabitants of the RAGE world reserved racing as entertainment. Although the races here are quite casual (you can only get last place if you forget which way to go), they give you large number pleasant "goodies": earn money, decorate and upgrade your iron horse and go into the wasteland to shoot enemies from the onboard machine gun.
Environment
Perhaps the AI ​​of the enemies will disappoint you a little, they often get stuck in the passages, in each other, try to outsmart you by hiding somewhere, and end up exposing themselves to bullets, but how good they are! There are many types of enemies in the game, and each will behave and react to your actions differently, for example the same clan of Ghosts, who behave like real ninjas, attacking from where you least expect.

Arsenal
In addition to the standard shotgun and machine gun for shooters, RAGE heroes will have at their disposal a variety of unique weapons, such as a crossbow or turret, clearing the battlefield of any sources of life in a matter of seconds.

Mini games
The main highlight of the game for me is not the racing, but the mini-games that are scattered literally everywhere. Card games, dice games, logic games and even the death of your hero itself is a mini-game, after coping with which you will go to another world, frying and taking your offenders with you.

Network mode
Presented in two modes: races, which will get boring for you even in a single company, and scenario mode (co-op), which, on the contrary, is very exciting to play with a small group of friends.

Easter eggs
Don’t think that I mentioned the developer’s company at the beginning of the review simply as a tribute, it was in the games of this company that one could always find the largest number of secret objects, rooms and references to various video games, and RAGE is no exception. Figures of "vault-boy" from Fallout, a marine from Doom, monsters from Quake, various symbols of games from id Software, a secret room a reference to Wolfenstein 3D, secret location, an exact copy of the first Doom level, posters with images of RAGE 2 and Quake 5 and much more are scattered around the world, search and be nostalgic.

Graphic and sound design
Perhaps fans of high-tech and high realism in games will not be very inspired and will only yawn languidly, but for the average user there is absolutely nothing to complain about here. The graphics are excellent, the world is fully detailed, every pebble, and the empty bottle is literally in the right quantity and on in the right places, creating an indescribable feeling of the reality of the picture, the characters are drawn with love and even years after the first playthrough, you can easily remember who this or that NPC is and what task he gave out. There are also no complaints about the native voice acting; the characters’ voices always fit their image, and the musical accompaniment comes in exactly when needed. The same with various sound effects, be it the murmur of an engine or the sound of a crossbow shot, everything is exactly as it should be.

Technical problems
Owners of the PC version are already accustomed to encountering a number of serious problems: crashes to the desktop, problems with drivers, mandatory manual configuration of game files for normal operation. All this, of course, is patched up with patches, and there are already noticeably fewer problems with the game than at the start of the project, but, unfortunately, it’s still not cake. Therefore, I advise you to save more often, otherwise RAGE (rage) will become not only a name for you, but also the first association when you see this game.

Addition
The first addition to the game is Anarchy Edition, purchasing which you will receive:
Two special weapons: double-barreled shotgun and fury brass knuckles;
Elite armor that gives a bonus to protection;
New buggy replacing the standard one;
Kit additional missions"The Wasterland Sewers".

Conclusion
RAGE is certainly not the masterpiece that everyone was waiting for, but it is an excellent shooter that will not let you get bored. Despite the fact that the game has many gameplay and technical flaws, what we see is a remarkably well-developed world, many characters with their own interesting history, and an endless wasteland open for exploration. I’m sure that the sequel will be really amazing, so don’t miss the opportunity to play through the first part of the saga right now.

Back at the last E3, when the demo version of Rage showed nostalgic sound effects from Doom and Quake, id Software felt somehow sorry: they clearly miss the tremendous success of their main projects, but do not know how to make new games evoked the same emotions as the old ones. Probably the best decision would be to carefully study all those shooters that Doom 3 lost to in 2004 (Half-Life 2, The Chronicles of Riddick, Painkiller, Far Cry), put on a separate list everything cool that was there, and try to collect from it own game on new technology.

However, instead of the expected work on bugs, the result was an uneven hybrid of old and new trends. Of course, the players were least concerned about the part of Rage that was about cars, third-party quests and greedy traders - there is already Borderlands for that. The first thing I was interested in was whether it was fun to shoot. We answer: yes, it’s fun. Deep down, Rage really is good shooter, but the pleasure during the game must be squeezed out drop by drop, at the cost of superhuman efforts, wading through the thorns of a crooked and useless sandbox. And not only.

Commissioners in dusty helmets

Rage immediately establishes itself as a challenging, uncompromising game created by PC veterans. After a long introductory video, introductory scenes, a short tour of the surrounding area and all the accompanying chatter, you are given a pistol, an ATV and your first assignment - to clear out the bandit base. Of course, out of curiosity, we turned in the wrong direction from where the sign suggested - and within a second we ended up with three rockets in our ass. Had to replay from the very beginning: checkpoints in Rage occur once every three hundred years, after some important plot events. And if you forget about the saves, you will have to replay at least the last hour of the game. This also applies to console versions, but there is no magic quick save button on either the Xbox 360 or PS3.

Rage looks great. The picture, as expected, is most beautiful on PC, but there are many more problems with this version.

Rage is complex not only in essence, but also in form. Open world, racing, collecting items according to blueprints, a plump inventory - it’s as if you launched an RPG, even though there is no role-playing system. Just like Crysis 2, the game comes across as an overloaded shooter that simply has no place in the industry today. In the context of endless and meaningless military action games, id Software could act as such genre messiahs, who spent the last decade and a half in a terrible binge, but still remember what real rock and roll is. The difference is that in Crysis 2 all the redundant elements are combined into some kind of structure, albeit shaky and heavy, but in Rage they exist independently of each other. Therefore, in fact, they are not needed at all.

For example, the authors understand the term “sandbox” extremely simply - it is when there is a lot of sand around. You can't complete tasks in different ways. You can’t look out over the horizon and make your own way. And on the way to the plot beacon on the map, you can’t give up on everything, turn into an open field and go in search of adventure. Kilometers of wasteland sit idle throughout the game: having identified three or four important points, the designers simply lay narrow paths between them, along which you move in half-broken buggies.

Evil Rock

With a shooter, not everything is obvious at first. Firstly, the main action in Rage takes place in isolated levels - and in 90% of cases these are some kind of cramped, dark and smelly catacombs. Secondly, over the past seven years, id Software has not learned any new game design moves. Therefore, the developers do not hesitate, for example, to return you to the same locations several times or lock you in a room, knocking down enemies one at a time. Finally, the main problem is the script, about which you just want to say “tear it off and throw it away.” There are no tasks more original than “go and pull the switch” in Rage. I don’t even want to focus on the fact that all the pistols, rifles, shotguns, axes, sickles and clubs that fall from enemies dissolve in the air in a second (you can’t pick up anything), after that I don’t even want to focus attention.

Don't count on any troubles during the journey from the city to the mission; usually there are two constantly respawning enemy buggies scurrying aimlessly on the road.

It only becomes more interesting as new content arrives. Thus, alternative cartridges are found for all weapons, which shock or tear into pieces. Even an unconvincing pistol at first becomes cool once you load it with large-caliber shells. And in a crossbow, say, you can fill darts that put the victim under your control: you can immediately blow the poor guy’s brains out, but it’s better to first bring him to a bunch of comrades in order to send them to the next world too.

In addition to weapons, there are also many other deadly gadgets (some of which can be collected in the inventory from materials scattered throughout the levels). For example, radio-controlled car bombs or throwing blades that boomerang back to you if they don’t dig into someone’s stomach.

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to take the saw away from the painted punk, but after Dead Island I really want to.

The number of galloping foolish aborigines, against whom shot in the groin area works regularly, becomes less and less over time, and they are replaced by really smart and dangerous opponents- government special forces or, say, the Russians controlling the city’s energy supply (“Don’t fuck with the bratva!”). At this moment, all the old shooter instincts and reflexes come into play at once, and even small levels take on some kind of higher meaning: difficult, cramped, you need to try different weapons, save ammo and save at every turn. Well, when, having forgotten to replenish your ammunition reserves first, you go up against a slimy big guy with a tentacle with your bare hands, run around for ten minutes, miraculously dodging attacks, and end up hitting him in the knee with your fists - you remember the impregnable monsters from the 90s that were fought against days and weeks.

Shake

Unfortunately, Rage is not entirely made up of moments like these. Here they serve more as a bait, cheese in a mousetrap, which the developers dangle in front of your nose in order to drag you into the depths of hell. Most of the time, bored out of your mind, you get from point A to point B, look for the right character (there is no navigation through cities, and it’s not always clear from the quest description what is where), wander aimlessly around the same locations or participate in in a bad parody of MotorStorm(plus rocket launchers on board). If the action becomes deeper and richer over time, everything else goes straight to hell. And even the characters, instead of reporting at least something interesting about the world around them (in which God knows what’s going on in general), coin something in the spirit of “I’m the boss in this city, bastards like you obey me.”

A crossbow, as a rule, hits the enemy on the spot, but you need to aim for sure.

But in those rare moments when the stars line up in the right order and an interesting shootout nevertheless begins on the screen, you want to capture this moment for history or at least call your friends as witnesses. For five to seven minutes, miracles happen: heads fly, enemies throw grenades at you, crawl from cover to cover, pulling up wounded limbs, flamethrower cylinders explode, and you use your entire available arsenal at once to stay alive. But soon the spell will be broken, and the carriage will turn into a pumpkin: the AI ​​will make a mistake, someone will run into a wall or get stuck in the texture, you will get lost (and this happens all the time) or, God forbid, you will run into some crooked staged episode like a touching mise-en-scène “golem versus bazooka”, where you need to shoot exactly at the designated pixel, otherwise the monster won’t even scratch itself.

Fury to "Rage"

Rage is not all right and clean from a technical point of view - at least not in the PC version of the game. While we are preparing this material for layout, a real storm of discontent is raging on the forums. According to user reviews, it is almost impossible to play the first version of Rage on ATI video cards. NVIDIA boards hold up a little better, but they also show serious problems. The most obvious one is textures loading literally before your eyes. As Bethesda has already stated, you can combat this by lowering the picture resolution and anti-aliasing level, but this does not help everyone.

GAME FORMULA

In one of the pre-release videos, the developers Rage They boasted that the plot plays a very important role in their new project, which allegedly adds additional depth to what is happening on the screen. They promised a world whose fate the player would truly care about, interesting characters, and a fascinating story. The game is out, the covers have been torn off, and it’s time to honestly admit: it was all a pure lie.

A stone to the head

The coherent plot in Rage actually begins and ends with an introductory video. The asteroid Apophis slowly flies through the outer limits of the solar system, punches a huge hole in one of the rings of Saturn, completely demolishes half of the Moon and falls to the Earth accompanied by sad music. There the guest is already waiting - the participants of the special project “Ark” are immersed in hibernation in underground shelters in order to wake up many years later and restore the destroyed civilization. You are one of the volunteers chosen for burial, and after more than a hundred years of waiting, your ark finally wakes up and at the same time wakes you up. All other inhabitants of the shelter died as a result of failure of life support systems, outside the window there was a sun-drenched desert. Welcome to a brave new world.

The soldiers of the local totalitarian government are clad in futuristic armor and well armed. But they still can’t cope with the main character, who has a whole population of nanobots in his blood.

Everything that happens after this only creates the appearance of moving forward. They don’t really explain to you what’s going on around you, they don’t help you get used to the new world, they don’t introduce you to a villain whom you want to destroy immediately and without a trace. NPCs are constantly given different tasks, but each new mission is desperately similar to the previous one, and all of them as a whole are needed only so that you have a formal reason to go to the next basement and pull the metaphorical eye on the metaphorical ass of the next company of mutants. There is no real plot movement in Rage.

It's the same story with the car component of the game, which the developers also advertised with all their might. In reality, cars are needed primarily to move between the few settlements and quest locations. The second is to participate in boring races whose only purpose is to allow you to raise enough money to buy new wheels or decorate your car with skulls.

At times, Rage looks so beautiful that it simply takes your breath away. Then, however, some texture of increased shamefulness inevitably catches your eye, and the magic dissipates.

Riding shotgun

Luckily, that's not all there is to Rage. That's not even the most important thing. Because the main events of the game take place in catacombs and mines, underground lairs and laboratories. In short, the action part. And that's how pure shooter Rage is one of the most fun and rewarding games this year.

When the shutter clicks assault rifle and the first painted bandit who comes at you falls like a heap to the ground, having received a bullet in his left eye, you understand that when it comes to shooters id Software still no equal. The idiots opposing you are trying to sell their lives at a higher price and are constantly maneuvering. More than once or twice you will aim at the enemy's head and pull the trigger, only to see how the enemy takes a sharp step to the side and your bullets go into milk.

The bandits who inhabit the desert are prejudiced towards strangers, especially if the stranger comes from the past and has a rich reward on his head.

The weapons are varied and made just perfectly. You feel every gun, every shot practically reverberates in your body. In addition, the weapon can be loaded with different types of ammunition, so your arsenal will soon include armor-piercing cartridges, homemade rockets and electric crossbow bolts. Some types of cartridges completely transform even those types of weapons that may seem boring at first. The same crossbow, for example, turns into best weapon in the game after you fill it with exploding bolts. The result is a kind of modification of a sniper rifle for shorter distances, but without a hitch it can knock out even an armored enemy with one hit. A free bonus is a short but spectacular hysteria, which is thrown on the other side of the front when they find a stick of dynamite pinned to the left heel with a burning cord.

The mutants don't stand a chance, but they don't care anymore. And then we will come out of hiding.

The crafting system added to the game also turned out to be unexpectedly interesting. Besides the obvious things like bandages and ammo, Rage allows you to collect even cooler things. For example, stationary turrets, which are very helpful in fighting off large waves of enemies. Or even personal cybernetic spiders - they divert enemy fire and themselves allow him to clear his throat with the help of heavy machine guns.

Opinions

Ilya Yanovich, author of “Gambling Mania”

“Why suffer when it’s fun to fight in Bulletstorm or Gears of War 3 without any pain?”

Rage is more interesting as a precedent than as a game. Yes, in those moments when you are not crawling across a deserted field (and also not driving a typewriter, not looking for the right corridor, not wandering around strange towns, not replaying the same episode, forgetting to save, and not completing courier quests), This is a pretty good shooter. But why suffer when Bulletstorm or the same Gears of War 3 are fun to shoot without any torment or experimenting with your own nerves?

It’s just that everyone seemed to understand that after, which, firstly, was seven years ago, and secondly, ideologically repeated, it was impossible to do a big, complex, and most importantly - modern game, in which everything works correctly. And here one thing is not clear: is Rage is id Software’s ticket to tomorrow, a transitional project where they tinkered a little with sandbox and technology as an experiment, gained the necessary experience and are now ready to do everything right; or an ambitious monster, created on the verge of creative and mental strength, with the help of which the authors wanted to prove in one fell swoop that everyone around them is fools, and they are d'Artagnans.

If the first, then everything is fine, you just need to wait another five years. If the latter, then Rage should probably be ignored on principle. In general, it doesn’t matter at all how you feel about this game. It is important how John Carmack himself feels about it.

Denis Davydov, director of the publishing house

“The plot is not measured in kilobytes of text”

The company id Software, in my purely subjective opinion, created one of the most memorable stories in the history of the gaming industry in the first two parts of Doom. Well... maybe not the best, but very, very good. The head of a hare, sticking out forlornly on a stake, went down in history. The idea of ​​Martian monsters, invading from who knows where into the peaceful domains of naively flapping people first with their eyelashes and then with their intestines, formed the basis for many twisted plots of the games that followed, and not only in the action genre. At the same time, Doom did not have a plot in the usual sense of the word. There were a few hints, a couple of pictures, and that was it.

In addition, the Doom atmosphere was ensured by minimalist touches. Cyberdemon is a hero of the folk epic. Devils and soldiers turned into monsters are the talk of the town. History repeated itself in Quake. It was made in such a way that while playing the game you naturally felt as if you were participating in a fascinating story, despite the fact that there was essentially no story at all.

In Doom 3 and Rage, id Software executives felt that the literary basis should be clearly present in game world. And in the case of Rage, they also loudly declared the project as an action movie with a plot. What have you achieved? Negative reviews all over the world. And why?

A whirlwind, perfectly balanced action movie, worked out to the smallest detail - this is the plot. And all the chatter around is tinsel. It's not needed. Original finds in game design, in game situations, perfectly replace long monologues of NPCs. What, say, do you remember better from Bulletstorm? The essence of the plot conflict or a radio-controlled dinosaur and a rolling giant wheel? And what is more important?

The plot of the first two parts of Doom is good for its brevity and expressiveness, achieved including through gaming means. The plot of Doom 3 is tedious and inexpressive, poorly supported by game tools. The plot of Rage is generally a carrot on the side. I suggest you just ignore him and calmly pull the trigger.

Maxim Eremeev, editor of “Gaming”

“Usually this approach is called the offensive word “hackwork”

As you probably already know, Rage did not have the best launch, especially on PC. The first to raise an angry voice were the owners of ATI video cards, on whose computers the game literally choked, so that it was simply painful to watch. Then the rest of the dissatisfied people joined in. Those for whom Rage loaded textures for half a day, who were not allowed to change a single graphic setting except the resolution and anti-aliasing level. Those who had to spend hours delving into thematic forums, activating the console in the game (losing the opportunity to earn achievements), conjuring it, entering unpronounceable commands and parameters. And all - to make Rage look at least decent on not the most shameful hardware, and sometimes - just to launch it.