Do you like shooting bandits in wastelands? Rage 2 is happy to oblige

The first-person shooting and gunplay is very satisfying, but there is one obvious thing holding back the Rage sequel.

The Mad Max-inspired aesthetic features prominently throughout Rage 2.

Way back in the 1990s, there were a couple of films released around the theme that a giant asteroid was going to slam into Earth and turn us all into future petrol for aliens or robots — Armageddon and Deep Impact in particular.

Id Software’s 2011 shooter Rage took this idea and ran with the scenario where the asteroid did indeed hit the planet and pretty much end civilisation as we know it in the process — except for some lucky survivors and members of a top-secret project to ride out the disaster in underground arks.

A century or so later, your ark malfunctioned and surfaced, unleashing your confused character on the world and into conflict with the authoritarian New World Order faction known as The Authority, who want to take over the world because of your standard-issue megalomania. The game was decent but short, and not something many people seriously expected a sequel to — but it has one and it’s out now.

Developed by Id Software and Avalanche Software and published by Bethesda on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, Rage 2 is a sequel to Rage, set a couple of decades after the events of the previous game.

The junk-world aesthetic is a big part of the game’s setting.

The Authority — led by a chap named General Cross doing a Mecha-Hitler impression — are back and still determined to take over what’s left of the world, starting with the settlement at Vineland where you live.

You can play either a male or female ranger named Walker, who is initially a low-ranking soldier who is trying to fight off the Authority attack, salvage a set of specialist armour from a recently deceased comrade, who basically decides “Why not Zoidberg?” and assumes the mantle of Walker, Wasteland Ranger.

All this is just a wafer-thin excuse to get you out in the wasteland shooting and blowing stuff up, and you’ll be doing plenty of that in Rage 2.

The combat itself is pretty good, reminiscent of Bethesda’s superb 2016 Doom and its excellent Wolfenstein games — it’s loud, it’s bloody, there are things exploding and stuff flying everywhere. It’s Id Software at their finest and the shooting and gunplay is very satisfying indeed.

Sadly the open-world vehicle combat (handled by Avalanche) isn’t nearly as exhilarating as the first-person firefights. It was clear the developers wanted to go for Road Warrior-type vehicle battles as you’d see in the Mad Max films, but instead the bandit cars just drive around aimlessly; they won’t attack you or chase you (unless you attack first) and there’s basically no reason at all to bother with it.

Rocket launchers are never not fun.

There are a number of cool vehicles in the game, including this tank, but little reason to bother using them.

Even driving from A to B isn’t particularly exciting — the world looks nice, but it’s still a generic post-apocalyptic wasteland that we’ve all seen many times before, and the vehicle handling isn’t anything to get excited about.

The world doesn’t feel alive or dynamic either — you’ll come across random firefights between factions but there is no reason for you to stop or get involved — and aside from a travelling vendor in a post-armageddon Mr Whippy van, you won’t encounter anyone friendly or interesting out on the roads.

Rage 2 generally tries not to take itself too seriously, although at times its attempts at humour come across as flat or forced. Walker’s commentary is amusing, but the “self-aware protagonist” thing has been done many, many times now and the novelty has long worn off.

Very few of the other characters in the game have ‘normal’ names — it’s almost like as soon as the asteroid hit, every surviving human decided to give themselves a new identity using a random name generator loaded with wrestling stage names, synthwave bands and a Bunnings catalogue. It’s supposed to be quirky and a bit silly, but it just came across as odd to me.

There are a few weapons available but you won’t really need any except the four or five you’ll trip over during the course of the game — your assault rifle does pretty much everything and later on you’ll get a rocket launcher for your bigger targets.

Do you like shooting bandits in wastelands? Rage 2 is happy to oblige.

That’s not to say the game’s weapons aren’t fun — they are — but the game seems to assume you’ve never played a first-person shooter before and insists on putting you through a tiresome tutorial every time you find a new weapon. Even my primary-school aged son knows how to aim down the sights or engage the alternate fire mode in a shooter game, so these tutorials end up being disruptive to the flow as well as vaguely patronising too.

It’s hard not to see some influence from the Fallout games in here — the junktown aesthetic, the quirky humour, the whole “people surviving the end of the world in special bunkers” thing — but Rage 2 is first and foremost a shooter; there’s no role-playing elements here, no choices to make, just bullets to be fired and enemies to be dispatched.

You can finish the main quest in about 10-12 hours, although there’s plenty more content in the game if you still want to shoot mutants, blow up sentry arrays or chase convoys — although none of it has any story content; it’s basically grinding for resources to upgrade your gear.

The game really shines towards the end when you start taking on bunkers and bases full of baddies, and the full potential of the combat system comes out to play — from explosions to superpowers to frantic action, it’s a great experience, but ultimately not enough to lift the entire game to a higher level.

Rage 2 is bombastic, it’s fun, and it’s loud, but it’s also flawed — missing that magnum primer it needs to launch it into ‘must-buy right now territory’. The game really needs to be tightened up — a 12-15 hour experience without the open world would have been great — or there needs to be a lot more content added to the open world to make it engaging.

Bethesda have laid out a road map for future content updates, so it remains to be seen how Rage 2 develops, but right now it’s not a buy-at-full-price title, despite being a decent enough game. If you can find it on sale for a good deal though, there’s the potential for short bursts of gunfire-related fun here — after all, not every game needs to be 50 hours long with a complex plot rivalling the previous seven seasons of Game of Thrones to be entertaining.

Originally published as Do you like shooting bandits in wastelands? Rage 2 is happy to oblige