Grown to like this rather a lot now, played for hours and I am on disc 2.

The weapons are great, wingsticks and as usual RC bomb cars are good fun.

Very borderlands-ish but without all the weapons having point values

I haz dis.

Boy is it pretty.

Boy are the loading times tedious.

Boy does it repeat sections and pass them off as new missions.

Boy are the races boring.

Boy is the shooting boring after a while.

Boy I'm sick of driving from A to B to A to C to A to B to A.

Boy do I wish I was playing Dark Souls...

Hang on, I've entered dead city and it's looking interesting again. I can't tell you how lovely it looks on the PS3. Resistence 3 still pisses all over it though... I was going to say 'despite being linear', but it's better for it.

I thought the graphics were great, the controls imprecise and unwieldy, the baddies too athletic and the ammo supplies too disingenuous for a corridor shooter. I'm sure there's a deep seam of gameplay in there ready to be mined but I don't want to based on the demo, particularly as we're back in Borderlands again. It really is just borderlands, setting wise. Yorn.

It looks great on the Xbox 360 as well, with a 60 fps frame rate that you won't quite believe until you see it. When I (finally) got into fights, though, I got the definite impression that this game was not designed for game pads. So I'll hold out until I get round to it on the PC.

It's got shit again. Repeating sections with different enemies. This time they're the guys from FEAR who talk through comms that are so loud that everyone can hear them.

Plus ID haven't got a fucking clue how to do assault rifles have they?

This assault rifles sounds like someone trying to disguise the noise of their squits from a queue waiting outside the door.

You shouldn't moan about Rage. This is the thread where people gush verily about the game Rage.

Bought rage, played main quest line, sold rage. It was cool but I wouldn't want to play it again. Needed to be a little more in depth, upgrades needed to be more meaningful. Did enjoy it however.

Haven't played this, despite the Fallout/Borderlands comparisons because from what I've heard I smell the tedious mucking about of Far Cry 2.

The demo is on my Xbox, though so it is enturely my own fault.

The only Fallout/Borderlands comparison I would make is the setting.

The thing I like most about it at the moment are the mutants. They run, dodge, weave, clamber up the walls, cling to the roofs and swing across pipes. They're awesome.

But not fearsome.

In pairs and threes they fall quickly to a shotgun slug to the face. The "ouff" of being hit failing to convey the impact of a blow. Tens of them fall quickly without breaking into a sweat.

But I don't blame the mutants. They're doing they're best and doing it well, it's the fault of the combat; of the customisable weapons. There's no weight. No boom. No cranium crunching splinter of skull and brains. The combat feels wooly, lightweight and tame.

Rocket launchers splutter into action, armour piecing bullets zap instead of smash, fists slap rather than crunch. It's disappointing because ID made weapons cool. They brought a chainsaw to a knife fight. So why is Rage so, so... tame?

It's old school sensibilities are worn on its sleeve and everything that isn't a mutant can take several shots to the face and keep coming. Guys with tin hats can withstand much of what you have in your armoury and buckets of dispensed ammo is left on the floor following a firefight with 'some guys' and you wish thd mutants were back to trouble you.

The environments are lush. The graphics awesome. The sun blisters the land and eeks its way into cracks and broken windows. Incidental details are everywhere: boxes, bottles, litter, broken glass to broken floors of a building.

So you smack a box with the butt of your shotgun. And nothing.

Nothing is more destructible than it already is and everything is rooted to the spot. Cans stand steadfast from the pop of your handgun to the full barrage of a stream of missiles from the rocket launcher. It's picturesque but not interactive. It's like walking around a painting.

What else? Check points spaced a fair distance apart. Lengthy loading times. Checkpoints that start not at the start of the area you were but at the door that leads you to the area you were; meaning a restart begins with 'death, lengthy load of other area, spawn at door, press x, lengthy load of where you died'. The defibrillator bit is tedious too where you play an easy mini game to continue. It's just odd and annoyingly breaks the fiction too. Lord knows what they were thinking and why it's included.

Oh I don't know, it's alright but not great. Far from it. When I've clocked the main story I don't think I'll be seeing it again.

It's only average at best, I think ID must have just been asleep when developing this game & failed to look at what was being developed around them. It looks pretty but that is all, I got RAGE with it but still continued to complete.

And. I've. Finished? Erm... Only two hubs then? I've rattled through the main quest arc in what turned out to be rapido time.

But where was the fucking story?

I swear the final hub had no more than 5 quests. Let's think: blow up the tube for no reason - done. Reroute the power for the tattoo headed guy - done. Get the disc drive thing for no reason - done. Very short blow up the bridge thing for no reason - done. Then the upload the data mission to end the game abruptly. Yeah, that's five.

In retrospect Rage was shit. Utter dogshit.

There's little reason to use the turrets or the spider robots and I spent all my money between missions on shit loads of shotgun shells which could fuck up most enemies day. The remaining weapons were boring as hell and I'd made the mistake of saving the most powerful stuff for the big brutes that never came. The ginormous dead city boss has no other competitor in the game. The power station boss was no match for 9 explosive shotgun shells and didn't hit me once. There's no end boss and instead you're treated to the same enemies you'd been fighting to get to the last section some more. Cept this time they only jump out in twos instead of three. Sensing I'd misjudged when the end may come I deployed the spider robots and kicked back as I suddenly realised I was no longer needed.

And then it ends after a prolonged shoot out and *hnnngh* waiting to press three buttons. That's the finale? Get fucked ID. You're clearly no longer relevant to game design.

So the campaign must have only taken about five hours ignoring the padding and filler missions. Each mission has the same structure: walk around hub and collect mission, drive to area, do mission, find handy shortcut to get back to the car, drive back, talk to some poorly animated no-character character. Collect next mission. It's GTA without the humour, artful characterisation, story or, dammit, fun. It's not even scary.

The side mission just repeat areas you've been and ask you to fight the same enemies again so why bother? I'm not into collectables or cheevos (or at least the cheevos here weren't interesting enough to bother with) so the joy of repeating the same wooly combat I'd just spent 10 minutes doing had zero interest for me.

I'm just astonished its so bad. It's looks lovely. The buggy is actually decent fun to push around in and controls pretty good. The races are dull and although varied just can't sustain your interest when what you want to be doing is going back to dead city and tackling those funky mutants again.

You actually do end up on a return visit but the mutants have cleared out and the FEAR clones have invaded. Tch.

Also, where the fuck are these mega textures? I could barely tell the difference from , say, Halo's buggy sections. The draw distances are similar and Rage takes place mainly in canyons so you never get the expanse of land to traverse like Halo. I couldnt tell the difference in these sections. Personally I'd have preferred something less pretty indoors but interactive.

Something like Resistence 3. Something like FEAR 3. Both games are light years ahead of Rage. Both games are fun. Rage isn't. It's tedious. It's looked at the competition and thought 'you know what people like? Collecting stuff, messing around with mini games, wasting their time. They want more useless shit crammed into their games.'

Resistence 3, against all odds, was the best shooter of last year. It did it because it looked at the most beloved game from around 10 years ago and wondered why no one was copying it. Rage has just looked at what games are doing now. And that's why it's a load of old shit.

3/10. Marked up because even though it was shit it had the decency to be brief.

Wow.. I'd just come into this thread to say I've got this and played it in multiplayer tonight. I haven't touched the single player game but it looks lovely!

I was going to play it next but after that review, I think I might go with something else.