Rage 2

I think that this game's score is somewhere between 6 and 7. Epic gave the base game for free years ago and I decided to try it out. I played the DLC a long time after, downloading it with torrent, but the DLC is completely skippable and you won't miss anything important. This game is okay. It has its fun part and good moments, but ultimately, it's not great. I didn't bother completing every single achievement or cleaning up all the areas. You also don't have to have to buy all the upgrades because you don't need every skill to complete the game. It's the combat system and the skills that made me play this till the end. The giant bosses at least have some good design and offer some fun.

Compared to the first Rage, this iteration offers a larger world and super powers, which the first game lacked. This type of game is not targeted at an audience who wants puzzles or a deep plot to uncover. You can skip reading all the story contained in datapads because you don't need them to beat the game. In terms of environment art and world building the first Rage was superior. It's not the tech, it's about the director. Rage had loading screens to enter and exit each area, but at the same time each area that you were tasked with some mission had its own charm and personality. In spite of Rage 2 larger world to explore and the multiple locations, it gets repetitive pretty quickly.

The world in Rage was pretty much static and this is probably related to how megatexture pre computes lights and shadows. They also had a much smaller RAM pool. In Rage 2 the world is more alive with groups of bandits out in the wild, racers, the trader van that keeps roaming, the convoy boss, the authority sentries, some interactive plants and that balloon that randomly shows up with goodies to catch.

There is a striking difference between the environmental storytelling in Rage and Rage 2. I think this is what makes Rage feels better than Rage 2. In Rage we had hospitals, a city, bunkers, subways, residential buildings, etc. All showing a world after some planetary catastrophe. In Rage 2 the wasteland itself is larger. However, there is much less personality and attention to details in each hideout or location. Abandoned warehouses, abandoned buildings that you can't go inside, rusty metal, pipes, boxes, containers. All reused over and over throughout the whole world. They did split the wasteland into zones and each zones has its own theme, such as sand dunes and marshlands. What we don't see is some tight integration between the zone and some background story, which would have helped to make the game more interesting. We have towers and power lines in Rage 2's wasteland, but where are the power plants? This is one of the examples of how Rage had better environment storytelling than its sequel.

After reading Hourences' book "The Hows and Whys of Level Design" I could spot some very specific detail about the geography in Rage 2. How come Rage's environments felt more hostile than in Rage 2 even though the latter has a larger map? It's about the rocks. The canyons and rocky formations in Rage had sharper edges that conveyed a sense of an hostile climate and environment. In Rage 2 they adopted rocks and mountains with much rounder edges, which end up conveying a softer tone with less aggressive climate and environment. It's certainly a very different direction, combined with how Rage 2 brings strong saturated colors, a more humorous tone, colorful hair, colorful graffiti and VFX effects.

Compare Rage's terrain

to Rage 2's terrain

The extra RAM allowed Rage 2 to have dynamic day and night cycles and a much larger world. But that came at a cost. Now there is much less personality and the lighting has much less importance in creating the atmosphere of each location compared to Rage. The super powers in Rage 2 made the gameplay more fun, but they sacrificed the design of each location. Now each location is just some small set of constructions with no story to tell. For example: you don't get to see the ruins of what once was a restaurant and a kitchen for instance. Bandits live there, but you don't see bathrooms or bedrooms for example.

How can they explain that in 30 years the whole world has changed to the extent of having swamps and forests growing after the planetary catastrophe that devastated the world in the first game? The game world in Rage 2 has more than one biome but it doesn't feel like different continents or even countries.

The level design retains that concept of completing the mission and then having a shortcut to get back to the entrance without having to backtrack everything. However, I find the quality of the levels in Rage 2 to be lower than in Rage. In the cities they placed neon lights and too much clutter that makes it hard to navigate and find your way through. Outside the cities the marker on the map indicates where you have to go, but often I've found myself lost trying to find the damn entrance. Some places are dark and we don't have a flashlight!

The architecture of the authority bases retains the same style of Rage. However, they made a mess with the lights. There are just too many small lights which creature visual pollution that makes the environment art worse than in Rage. The art department added too much pipes, beams and other details that makes it hard to see things. The glass is almost invisible and multiple times I've shot at something without noticing the glass in front of me. The storage cabinets inside the bases has a magenta light to highlight them, but it's so small compared to the surroundings and with so many blue and red lights drawing your attention that it becomes hard to notice them.

The last mission has what I call a design flaw. There are 4 sentries protecting the entrance of the last base. To enter it you must be driving the authority's vehicle. The NPC tells you that you can deceive their security system by driving a vehicle that is familiar to them. The problem is that the whole game instructs you to destroy the sentries to earn credits. In the last mission the player would naturally keep doing it. If you didn't pay attention to the NPC's dialogue you are left lost with no clue about what to do, because the dialogue does not replay. When I looked for a guide I was surprised by how many other players had the same issue of not knowing how to enter the last base. Also, there is a huge invisible collision wall there.

The UI has sub levels and this makes it hard to navigate through logs, mission objectives, skills and upgrades.

Bethesda surely have had some hard influence in the game's direction because it's clear that this game borrows a lot of inspiration from Doom. The weapons, the power ups, the tutorials in the arks and they even added the BFG 9000 in the deluxe edition.

I experienced a lot of crashes. I have no idea if this is caused by Epic launcher or what. The sand dunes has a giant monster that would often knock my vehicle off the world, making me drive under the terrain.