RAGE

RAGE is a shooter that puts its weight on gunplay and a hostile wasteland mood, then asks the player to accept a lot of open space between the good bits. By our assessment, its strongest side is the crisp feel of combat and the id Software instinct for weapons that hit hard and sound right. The compromise is that the world and mission structure can feel thin beside the shooting, so the game works better as a combat piece than as a rich adventure. In practice it is a mix of driving, shooting, and rough exploration, with the pace changing whenever the road or the mission design takes over. Compared with the best shooters of its era, it is more uneven and more dependent on whether the combat loop is enough on its own.