• Format: Xbox 360 (version reviewed), PS3, PC
• Unleashed: Out Now
• Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
• Developer: id Software
• Players: 1 – 4
• Site: http://www.rage.com/

Silent takedowns have been slowly seeping into shooters ever since AI was granted a ‘blissfully unaware’ mode. Most of the time you need to sneak into neck sniffing distance of your target and then tap a button to watch a drawn out and often gruesome animation that depicts your stealth victory. Rage takes the alternate approach and instead gives you a silent takedown you can throw at people. It glides through the air, decapitates the target and then returns to your hand. Awesome.

We love the wingstick, a tri-pronged boomerang that features in lots of Rage’s promotional material and gives you raw killing power in your non-gun hand. It has possibly become our favourite inventory item in a game ever and definitely helps set the zanier tone that features throughout id Software’s latest title.

Crossbow bolts are a great way to settle disagreements with locals.

Stepping away from the much darker, horror museum worlds of Quake and Doom, Rage is more like a horror-themed rollercoaster. Yes, there is plenty of gore, mutilated bodies and creatures that belong in nightmares, but Rage’s setting sits a lot more on the crazy side of things. For example, one character you meet has some sort of robot parrot-like creature perched on his shoulder, and another runs a reality TV show where contestants must kill waves of mutants for cash. It’s a brave leap away from what we have seen previously from id Software, but they have made a vibrant and entertaining world that sets the apocalyptic, broken society tone well.

Story-wise, things aren’t quite as well assembled. The game is set 100 years after a meteorite hits Earth and smooshes life as we know it. Fortunately, the player was buried in an ark, a subterranean chamber designed to preserve life post-meteor. Players emerge from the ark to a wasteland and the game gets going. You meet John Goodman who hands you a gun, and then the rest of the game’s story is slowly trickled to you as you meet new characters who ask you to shoot at things in different areas. The plot mainly justifies the vast amounts shooting you’ll be doing, and fortunately, this is a very good thing.

Big shooty guns are always the core of id’s games, and there’s no exception here. Every gun sounds brilliant and actually feels like they do damage. Enemies recoil as you blow chunks of life from their bodies, each successful hit sparking a pained reaction. Slamming mutants into the wall with shotgun blasts, or hearing your bullets dent and ricochet off of dense armour is immensely satisfying. The run and gun carnage is very fun and feels miles away from other shooters that give you a bad guy shooting gallery that is best viewed through iron sights. You will occasionally run across a bullet sponge bad guy that can take four sniper rifle bullets to his unshielded face which upsets the rhythm slightly, but this isn’t a major issue for the most part.

Deformed tentacle monsters struggle to maintain friendships.

Health regenerates slowly but can be aided with healing items in your inventory. Should you go down a quick time-like event allows you to use an implanted defibrillator to revive yourself. This has to recharge before it works again and so never feels overpowered or like a cheat. In fact, this second chance helps compensate your frustration should you not have healing items equipped. Talking of equipment, the inventory system can get confusing in the heat of the moment as you can only have one item assigned to your quick-use button. It’s very easy to throw a wingstick when you mean to heal, or use a precious bandage when you don’t need it.

From a distance and at a glance, Rage looks fantastic, with beautiful sprawling environments and detailed character models that are amongst the best in the gaming world. When you get right up close to some areas and really start to study them, some of the textures look low quality and not quite as magic is it all first appeared. However, the world of Rage is so manic and chaotic that you rarely have time to stop and scrutinise the few areas that don’t quite match up to the majority of the game’s graphical superiority.

You can traverse the world via car, where the game gives you a third person view of the vehicular carnage. There are only four vehicles in the standard version of the game, but they are fun to drive and introduce another layer of combat. You can also participate in several races to upgrade your vehicles. Whilst the races do get tiresome eventually, you don’t need to complete many to get the upgrades you require, and only a handful are mandatory.

You know you've kicked the hornets' nest when these guys appear.

Vehicle combat spills over into the online mode where there are several car arena modes that allow you to compete with three other players. It’s surprisingly fun and reminds us of classic Twisted Metal style gameplay, even if the environments feel a bit sparse at times. A co-op mode also lets you and a pal pick up guns and stroll through unique missions that fill in some of the back story from the main game. The lack of a competitive on-foot multiplayer mode strikes us as odd, but the modes available are good, even if they lack the long lasting appeal that some online modes add.

Rage is a great single player game that offers excellent gunplay from start to finish. The ending appears very abruptly after about 10 hours and serves as the game’s biggest disappointment, but other than that there is not much to fault. The shooting mechanics are fantastic, as are the enemies and environments. Navigation is never an issue as you just need to follow the carnage around the brilliantly designed mission areas to find your next objective. Id have done a great job at creating a shooter that has a classic feel to it, whilst still sticking to modern FPS principles.

If we told you that we recently had a chance to play an open-world post-apocalyptic first-person shooter with an emphasis on RPG elements and bloody combat, you’d likely ask “Which one?” In this case it would be id Software’s very own Rage, available to play at QuakeCon 2011 and a title that has every chance to shoot itself in the foot. We had about an hour and a half to get acquainted with Rage, and despite the initial sense of unpleasant regurgitation, we had a good deal of fun.

The opening kicked off with a large meteor crashing into the earth (a flash of pre-apocalyptic action, we suppose), followed by chaos. Hiding in some sort of stasis pod seemed to be a logical move in this situation, and the protagonist did so. Upon emerging from the chamber, however, it was discovered that this was no silly episode of Futurama: the world was smashed up, blew up, and beat up with reckless abandon. We took control at this point but stood no chance against the mutant forces of awfulness, so it was a lucky break when a survivor took pity and helped us out.

He and a small band of resistors lived out their days in a junky yet welcoming gas station (also smashed up, blew up, and beat up) and invited us to stay. The offer of companionship and a chance to go kill lots of bad guys suited us just fine, so we wasted no time in loading our pistol and driving a four-wheeler into the unknown.

If this situation does not look appealing, Rage might not be for you.

Our buggy was faster than a man with a mutant on his tail (we would know), especially when the boost was activated. Flying up ramps and launching the poor driver into walls was exhilarating, but the controls felt a little squirrelly, especially when using the all-too-sensitive brakes. Still, it got the job done, and we roared our way through the semi-open world with eager anticipation.

The mini-map pointed the way via a handy dotted line, and we were soon in enemy territory; only a pistol stood between us and a horrible death as angry survivors attempted to murder us. The shooting felt both responsive and fluid, rewarding us for paying close attention to our foes. They hid behind cover of all sorts, sometimes taking us on with blindfire, to make good use of the grimy environment. The bolder ones (including those with flaming bats) charged us with all their might, but a sound smack to the head sent them spiralling away. However, they used melee attacks of their own, so spamming the punch button did us no favours.

The animation was a highlight of our experience. Enemies limped away when injured or even fell to the ground and tried to shoot at us from their prone position. Of course, gore flew every which way, specifically when grenades were in use. We also found ourselves a shotgun and some sharp blades that could be thrown through the air, upping the count of beheadings substantially.

It's not the muscles, the scars, the belt of grenades, or even the tank tattooed on his chest; that mustache commands respect.

Rage wasn’t very tough on Normal difficulty, but when we did finally go down, a mini-game was there to pull us from death’s icy grip. By dexterously aligning the thumb sticks and nailing the timing on some button presses, our health was refilled relative to our (sloppy) performance. Whether or not this skill can be abused as an easy way out remains to be seen, but it’s a neat addition on its own.

While Rage’s combat certainly hit the spot in terms of solid, tried-and-true shooting, there wasn’t anything especially original about it. There are, however, some light RPG additions to spice things up: for example, junk can be salvaged and combined to make brand new items. We made ourselves a device to break locks and a nifty scope for our pistol, both of which came in handy right away.

We sold the extra contents of our inventory back at the base, purchasing some healing kits in exchange. The locals were also willing to teach us how to use certain weapons and hand out missions to complete, the latter of which move the story forward. Tips during lengthy loading screens told us to head off the beaten path and explore, but most of these excursion ended with dead ends or invisible walls; often both. These early parts of Rage might be more confined than later portions, but we didn’t see a whole lot of open-ended opportunities.

Many mooses died for this manly costume to live.

For such a thoroughly apocalypsed world, Rage managed to look spiffy. Character models were detailed to an impressive degree, set in a dusty land under a glorious sky. It’s often ugly, sure — but that’s the point. Our main concern was the texture pop-in that plagued even the nearest of surfaces. We only had access to the PS3 version, but it could use some polishing up before hitting store shelves.

We weren’t blown away during our time with Rage, yet the intense fights kept us pushing forward and yearning for more. Ninety minutes was hardly enough time to dig into this promising game’s many layers — we didn’t even touch the racing or multiplayer — but it’ll have to work hard to dig itself out of the potentially stale genre pit. Keep your eyes open and your Acme Mutant Repellent at hand as we rapidly approach its October release date.

ZeniMax Media, the parent company of games publisher Bethesda Softworks, has just announced that it has acquired Swedish game developer, MachineGames.

MachineGames was founded in 2009 by former members of Starbreeze Studios, the team behind The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay and The Darkness, both which met positive reception from critics. Currently the studio is working on an as yet unannounced title to be published by Bethesda that is being built on id Software’s id Tech 5 engine technology.

Jerk Gustafsson, the studio’s CEO who will also oversee development as Executive Producer, expressed his studio’s enthusiasm at joining ZeniMax by saying, “Working with our new colleagues at id and the world class publisher, Bethesda Softworks, is a tremendous opportunity.”

“MachineGames has assembled a dedicated team that has extensive experience working together to produce quality games. We are excited to create a new AAA title for gamers on id Tech 5 that will push the game development envelope.”

What sort of man should I expect Tim Willits, the Creative Director for Rage, to be? Perhaps a slobbish Comic Book Guy style stereotype, given his hardcore PC gaming background. Then again, he worked on the Doom and Quake games; so perhaps you would expect an aloof business type, corrupted by the astounding success of id.

When I meet him, Tim Willits is neither of these things. He’s a casually dressed, casually spoken guy who shows deserved pride in id’s heritage, and genuine enthusiasm for his new game Rage. Speaking of which; is it an FPS game with vehicle elements, or a vehicle game with FPS elements?

“It’s a first person game.” he affirms. “If you’re familiar with id software you know you’re running around shooting bad guys; a great feel, great weapons…the vehicle combat and vehicle racing stuff is adding to the experience. I think the confusion came in the beginning when we talked a lot about the racing and vehicle combat, and it kind of got skewed in the wrong direction. It is at its core a first person game; if you’re a fan of id software, don’t stress about the game. We’ve made the vehicle combat and racing as intuitive as possible for first person shooters; it’s very straightforward, normal controls. Whenever we ran into a situation where we could use realistic vehicle physics or fun vehicle physics, we went the fun way. For instance you get air control when you come off a jump; which isn’t realistic, but way more fun.

If you’re the type of gamer who enjoys racing around the wasteland hunting bandits or doing the races, you can spend quite a bit of time doing that. If you’re the type of player who just wants to go with the story, you don’t really like that driving around business, you can just use it to go from point A to point B and then get on with the hardcore first person action. There is player choice, and the story is open but directed. So there’s a story arc that you follow, but we give you opportunities to go on side missions, and mod stuff, things of that nature.”

So it’s something of a departure from previous id games?

“We’ve tried to mix up the weapons and ammo types, we have engineering items… we have mutant bandits in the clan authority that you fight against. Every new environment that you go into we give you something new to play with whether that’s a weapon, ammo type, or engineering item. Those things are all fun and grand, and they add to the experience; but when you have that shotgun in your hand, and it’s just you and a bad guy; you pull that trigger, and that is classic id software. It’s true to the id fans, but trying to branch out and expand the experience, and definitely trying to reach more fans. Could we be seeing the birth of a new franchise here, I wonder?

“I sure hope it is! The universes that the other games exist in are actually pretty narrowly defined. In Doom, all it is is scientists opening a doorway into hell, you’ve gotta stop it. But with Rage, we’ve tried to make a whole world. As a player you can imagine things happened before you got there, things will happen after you leave. The game world is rich enough for us to give us leverage for things like the iphone. We’re going to have an iphone release this Fall; it’s not going to be the Rage game, but a very small subset. It actually revolves around just a fragment of what you experience in the real game. If you don’t have a rich universe, you can’t do that.”

Running around a post – apocalyptic world shooting things is not a new idea in today’s industry; but Willits is confident Rage will avoid a feeling of same old same old.

“That’s one of the reasons it’s difficult working on games as long as we do. When I started working on this, there were no post apocalyptic games out. It’s not Fallout 3, it’s not an RPG – and it’s not just a corridor shooter. I think when people see it and experience it, it will definitely stand apart.”

Speaking of corridor shooters, you might think that perhaps he regrets making games that are so easily pigeonholed into that often reviled genre…

“No. Trust me, any game where you pick up a shotgun; doesn’t matter if you’re Call of Duty or you’re Crysis. You need to thank id software for that. There is very little I would do differently. Rage does offer something more; there are corridors you run around and shoot stuff in, but it offers much more than that.”

I almost feel sorry for Willits when I ask him if that means we’ll never see another corridor shooter from his studio. The initial answer is ‘Eeerrrrr.. hmm.’ before he settles for “It may be too early to answer that question. We’ll wait and see. I mean, doing the classic corridor shooter is still fun.”

“I don’t know anything about the next generation of consoles, but you may see them without optical discs.” he says, on another subject regarding the future. “It would definitely help with piracy, and anything we can do to fight piracy and give people the options of games on demand, you know, is a win – win for everybody. It’ll be interesting to see what the future holds. But games have gotten bigger. Rage is gonna be a big – ass game, and downloading all that may take a while.”

Though id have been keen to stress that all three versions of Rage will look and play exactly the same, it’s inevitable that a monster PC will have the best looking version. But how much better will that be?

“Well they all run at 60 hertz, but the thing that you get with Rage if you have a PC, is you can up the texture resolution. Then you can increase the texture buffer size, so you can get sharper textures sooner; but that’s pretty much it.”

I have no luck trying to squeeze even the tiniest piece of information about multiplayer out of Willits, though he does tell me “We want to make sure it’s good, and we need to make sure it’s different to what we’ve done in the past.”

“Well, the remote control car bomb from Black Ops” is one of the ideas in Rage that has since appeared in another game; but he assures me that he doesn’t worry about that sort of thing “too much!”. Looking at other games already on shop shelves, which ones does he admire?

“Well, I’m a big Modern Warfare 2 fan, like everyone else. I’ve actually made sure that the jump button is the same button. If 20 million people learn where the jump button is, don’t fucking change it! There’s lots of good games out right now. Red Dead Redemption’s good… there’s some pretty exciting games out there I’m waiting to play. I want to get a Kinect for the kids.”

Ah yes, motion control. It was Nintendo that started the trend of course, but id games are notable by their absence from the Wii lineup. Presumably this is down to issues of processing power?

“Mostly yes. And it’s not really our market. We have to focus on things that we can do well.”

So we’ll never see id titles on the Wii? He really doesn’t think they’d sell?

“It’s not worth it. We want to focus on the big three. Yes, I know the Wii’s the big one, it’s huge; but for us and the games we want to make, how we want to make them, we feel that the PC, the 360 and the PS3 are the main staples for it.”

As previously mentioned, Tim Willits comes from a hardcore PC gaming background. And while he still says mouse beats thumbstick…

“It’s still the most accurate form of aiming, but I play all my games with a controller now. I like it; I can sit on my couch, put my feet up. If you give me the choice of buying it on the PC or the 360, I’ll buy it on the 360. There are lots of big games that have proven that first person shooters can be successful on the consoles. I enjoy it. I only play Rage with a controller.”

“I’ve tried to get everyone on the team involved in the design process, so influence has come from lots of different sources.” he says, when asked to pinpoint influences on Rage. “Obviously you can see Mad Max in the world, but it has a definite ‘Rage’ feel. It will have a unique look, and definitely stand apart.”

Willits’ team is “A little over sixty”, which surprised me slightly; that makes it the same size as the notoriously small LittleBigPlanet developer Media Molecule “We’ve always been small. It’s really a core group of guys that make up the team, and everyone else kind of supports them. That core group has always been a dozen or so people, and that’s really the balance that developers need to maintain. Grab a core, focus on the core, and then build it up. Having more people doesn’t necessarily make your game any better or get it made any faster. You need to go for that core.

We have a good working environment, we make great games, you know, we’re all very close. It’s an environment that people want to stay in, we have a good turnover. It’s really worked out well for us.”

Surely being a bigshot at id software means there’s a danger people are afraid to tell him when his ideas are bad?

“No, trust me – lots of people tell me I have bad ideas! Make no mistake; most ideas I come up with are bad. I come up with more bad ideas than anybody I know. There will never be a time when people will not tell me my ideas are bad. If all my ideas were good, I’d be rich!” he says. I’m tempted to say something about children with no shoes, or possibly starving game developers; but resist the urge.

Compared to when he first started out in the industry, “I definitely have much more say. When I started I was a level designer, I just did what I wanted to do. Now I have to manage over sixty people and move them in one direction. It’s definitely much more exciting, much more rewarding. But sometimes I do miss making maps.”

And finally: one of the current trends for FPS games seems to be open worlds. What does Willits see as being the future of shooters?

“Well for Rage, it’s open but directed. It’s not an open world. The social aspect of gaming is big. I think you’re going to see a lot more people connecting with one another; game developers will make singleplayer games that have much more impact on what your friends are doing. You’re not going to play at the same time, but I can see the consequences of what you do in other people’s games – their universe. There is a lot more to the social aspect of gaming that I think we need to explore.”

The post apocalyptic shooter, Rage, developed by id Software has just had its publishing rights nabbed by Bethesda, leaving its former publisher EA out in the cold.

ZeniMax Media Inc is the parent company of both id Software and Bethesda, so it looks like every aspect of this game is going to be kept under the same corporate umbrella.

We have been assured though that the ongoing development of Rage has been unaffected by this change of hands, so it will really be towards the games release that anyone will be able to see if this was a good move or not.

No firm release date has been hinted at yet, other than a possibility of 2010, so we still have a slight wait before being able to play this thing on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.