Lets RAGE!

I'm not talking about swimming with the dolphins or whatever. Im talking about ID and Bethesda's new shooter. Bethesda is well known for its amazing games such as fallout and fallout new vegas as well as Oblivion and the upcoming Skyrim. Id is of course known for Doom. Their formula for a game was simple, combine Ids shooter with Bethesda's massive worlds. The result is giant explorable world with lots of guns and plenty of bloody corpses.

One of the great prospects of the game was the ability to make items. They range from bandages to explosive RC cars. Honestly I'm disappointed in the crafting system. You never discover recipe's on your own from using the system and most of the time have to fork over cash to learn the recipes that are really useful. Not that getting money in the game is hard, it just seems like they could of made the system more rewarding by letting you "unlock" crafted items.

The weapon selection in the game is the standard array: fist, pistol, shotgun, assault riffle, sniper rifle, rocket launcher, smg, and a crossbow. The game goes back to the roots of first person shooter, you can carry all your guns on you at the same time. It seems like the industry ditched that idea years ago for a more "realistic" approach to games. The thing that makes all of the weapons so fun is all the different ammunition available to you. Regular shotgun ammo is great, but exploding shotgun ammo is better. Crossbow bolts are great for stealth, bolts that let you controll the mind of your victim before making them explode into red mist are better. The ammo really makes the game fun. Dynamite crossbow bolts are my personal favorite. Regardless of how much armor the target has they take tons of damage from it.

Ai in shooters is something that is usually lacking. Deus Ex: Human Revolution had amazing AI. This game does in a different way. Most shooters you cant flank your enemies. They always seem to know where you are, That is not the case in Rage. If you shoot at them from one place and they duck behind cover, you can quickly move to a new spot and watch them still fire at the last spot they thought you were at. Reposition yourself and get clear shots where they have no cover available. The enemies aren't stupid however. They will use grenades and covering fire to allow their allies to close the gap to you. If you manage to kill enough they will run and alert another batch of baddies. When you flank them or are ambushed the enemies will climb over, under on or jump around tables chair pipes or any other object in their way to get to you. In a game with so many weapons you'd think that the idea of melee enemies would not work well. Id makes it work REALLY well.  Melee units jump, roll, tumble climb, and are just plain freaking fast and do massive damage. Mutants are the most sporadic moving targets in the game. Able to run on walls climb on pipes hanging from the ceiling and are clever enough to know if your aiming your shot gun at their legs to jump in a doorway and hold on so your shot hits nothing but the concrete below them.

Racing....I hate racing games. But I LOVE racing games that allow me to destroy my competition. Your range of vehicles is limited and your upgrades are plenty. The only way to get upgrade currency however is to race. Or to go into the vast wasteland and slaughter other bandit vehicles and collect a reward in town. Targeting your enemies in a vehicle is automatic, just wait til you see a red hexagon on them and fire away. You can also upgrade your wheels with spikes or your grill to do massive damage when ramming.The mini-gun and rockets are easy to come by and easy to go through though so beware not to run out of ammo while fighting four or five other cars at once.

Story is almost always lacking in shooters. Not too much different here. Its not a post nuclear war landscape. Its a post giant meteor landscape. Include your evil military regime and resistance faction and tada you have a cookie cutter story line. Oh wait, whats that, they are doing genetic experiments, oh wait its an Id game, no surprise there. In all honesty though, story lines like that are what I have come to expect from almost all shooter. Its the way they tell it that makes them good or not. Rage does a good job of making your character an intricate part of the story, I wont continue cause I don't want to spoil any surprises however.

Overall rage is a good buy. It has competitive racing multi-player, shooter co-op and a nice amount of time to beat the game, especially if you try to beat it 100%. It is the product of two amazing game companies, and wont surprise me to see if dlc is available with new stuff for it in the near future.

Other reviews and posts in the near future: Battlefield 3 (I'll be joining a co-workers clan and shooting lots of people), Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, and Ill be working on a page for my Warhammer 40k stuff.

Until next time: Follow. But. Follow only if ye be men of valour, for the entrance to this cave is guarded by a creature so foul, so cruel that no man yet has fought with it and lived. Bones of full fifty men lie strewn about its lair. So, brave knights, if you do doubt your courage or your strength, come no further, for death awaits you all with nasty, big, pointy teeth.

Orks, there are always more orks.

I would be lying horribly if It weren't true. Warhammer 40k: Space Marine came out today for those of us in the United States. Just spent 8 hours hacking and slashing my way through the game, and was decently satisfied with the story. Seeing as I play 40k, and I play space marines, I was interested in seeing how the game brought some of the gear and mechanics of the miniatures game into life. I was impressed for the most part. There is just something awesome about the English accented orks that I love.

 Your character, Captain Titus of the Ultramarines, starts the game off being unorthodox. Diving with a jet pack into a war torn sky evading exploding ships and landing on ones deck to be rid of it. At the begining of the game it reminded me of God of War, which it is but with orks and guns.

Titus strives to establish himself as a bad ass right away in the game. Carving up gretchkin and orks with a knife and mowing down wave after wave of hapless orks with his boltgun. Eventually crippling the ship and riding it down as it crashes upon the forge-world planet.

The game slowly introduces new types of orc, 'ard boyz, Nobz, and even weirdboyz, but they all felt the same. Shoot em enough or hack them to bits enough and they die. It takes far too long in the game to get a new enemy. Which is the welcome but frustrating arrival of the Chaos Space Marines. They are much more brutal and pack serious firepower. I say frustrating because by the time they showed up i was way too absolved in the ork killing tactic of stand in the open and shoot them till they get too close, they chop them to itty bitty bits with a chain sword. That tactic ended in repeat failures for the forces of Chaos.

It probably seems by now that i didn't like the game. On the contrary. I did. I spent the entire time glued to the TV not being able to stop pulling the trigger. The game is so well designed graphically that it was fun just running through the devastated city. I never encountered getting stuck or lost. With all of the objects that are in each area of the game I was expecting to get stuck in a piece of cover or terrain at least once. Enemies did, but I'm ok with that. Saved me bullets.

As far as the seeing stuff from the minis game in this game. I was very satisfied. The game unlocks lots of stuff really quick. This allows you to, in between active fighting areas, rearm and customize Titus. I experimented with classic chainsword and bolt gun, to the insanely fast firing Stormbolter and Power-axe. However, I will say there are a few levels in the game that I had tremendous fun with. You get to use a jump pack, and a power hammer. Rocketing yourself into the air just to ground pound into large packs of enemies, sending them flying. As you recovers start swinging away on the hammer and your rewarded with slow motion carnage of ork bodies and blood everywhere. After these frays even Titus is covered in blood. I was very impressed at the effect.

The weaponry is also very nice. There are a few things that I am disappointed at however. You get to use the sniper rifle and las-cannon which are devastating long range weapons. The plasma gun and Plasma cannons however, we just far to cumbersome to really enjoy using.

If you play Warhammer 40k you will have an understanding of who the space marines are. If you don't the game just kinda lets you find out. There were alot of interesting things that did appear in the game. The Inquisition is in it, as well as mentions of the tyranids, though they never do make an appearance in the game. The Blood Ravens chapter of the space marines make a visit, only to be coldly thanked by Titus. For those people that have forge world minis...don't worry. There is even one fight that takes place on a moving Titan.

All in all it is a fun game. There is no cooperative play yet. But that is going to be a free dlc in October. There is vs multi-player though. Ill be playing that for a few days before i give a review of that. From the little I've played so far they seem to done a decent job at making it feel like your playing the different types of infantry the minis game has.

Until next time I leave you with some advice from the Codex Astartes:  Better to be crippled in body, then crippled in mind.