Last game of John Karmak: Rage review

You know this joke: no matter how Iranian scientists try to invent a nuclear bomb, it always turns out nasvay. This intention is also applicable to ID Software, only those in turn inevitably release the corridor shooter from the 1st person. Rage 2010 This is another corridor shooter from the 1st person, disguised as an open-world shooter in the open world.

The adventure in the open world is not something exotic for the end of the zero, and the general principles of such a format in the game are traced: a hub-location, a storyline that leads you to walk on all points of interest on the map, side tasks, encouraging this a couple more times, the gradual development of the hero-formally this is present in the Rage, only the resulting result resembles only a quarter of the original plan.

There is a typical story when the studio lost its ambitions, combined all the developments into a relatively tolerable whole and showed the world as it is. Unless you expect such amateur mistakes from Bethesda and Id Software.

This is expressed, first of all, on the scale – at the disposal of the player there is a world the size of a football field, according to which the SUV will run to the mission point and vice versa. And this world, besides the fact that it is tiny, is also immensely empty. This is literally a wasteland and the only reason for this "open world" exist, it is directly cars.

Roughly speaking, Rage is not even a shooter, but races for survival, because it was driving from end to end and participation in competitions occupied most of my time in the game. And the good that the pokatushki on reinforced cars from the "Mad Max" turned out to be funny, but to build under them the rest of the useless game is at least controversial.

The worthless open world is not even the main problem of the game – a lot can be forgiven for a good snoter, including the abomination of desolation. However, in 15 hours that I spent at Rage, I happened to shoot from hand weapons if 4 hours, because, this is the news, the epizodes in this game take 10-20 minutes maximum, and only a dozen plot tasks are with a dozen. Hence the fact that most of all the side orders are in one way or another draw you to repeat the race on such a kind of "dungeons" scattered through the vicinity. Although the “scattered” is the figure of speech, of course, because there are few such criminally few.

The final blow to Rage as a concept is that all the mentioned meager activity, whether it be races, or re -stripping "dungeons" – all this, by and large, you do not need a player as a player. If you think about it, then there is not a single successful game in Openvorld, which would not be RPG or, in extreme cases, would not resort to such a manipulative technique as a character in a character. From Fallout to Marvel’s Spider-Man-the player performs side missions to get something in return, become stronger or get equivalent to satisfaction. However, Rage remained in the era of purebred shooters – no upgrade of weapons, no opening skills, no improvement in the properties of the hero. Exceptional "run – shoot".

Rather, formally, the hero takes a certain development – as a result of one of the side quests, we get an improvement for radio -controlled machines with explosives. But these same cars are needed exactly for one plot task and you will never use them again – the game simply has no space for this, and for an attempt to use such disgrace against enemies, you will pay your head. Another example is a potion that can be made from very rare ingredients and which increases the maximum health supply by 10% to the end of the game-in Rage, by the way, there is a craft, as useless as the concept of a linear shooter in Openworth-Service.

Actually, what about the shooter as such. This is ID Software, almost the ancestor of the genre – they could not make a bad ganpley? Well, the shooting part in Rage is the most controversial component of the game-the controversial in the literal sense, it can be treated very differently, depending on the personal preferences of the playing. The unconditional dignity of the local shooting is the bias in the realism and perception of opponents as living people – from the obtained gunshot wounds, the thugs are twitched, fall, try to shoot back from a lying position, or rise and hobble away from the scene.

In the game, by the way, in addition to people there are also mutants, and they are also relatively well developed, but nothing really from human behavior in them is.

And such a performance looks most of the time very worthy – the behavior of the human body in space, the way it goes into a flight from a shot from a shotgun, or a sniper rifle, how it begins to decline to the ground, without withstanding a series of hits. By the standards of time, when the game went into release, it looks very decent.

However, such shooting has big problems. To begin with, shootings in Rage are too much like a shooting range, representing a slow positional firing, usually from a sniper rifle or a revolver with an eye. This would not be such a problem if the opponents had a conscience to die, receiving a consistent amount of lead in the body. However, the truth is that the Rage of those shooters where you need to send several revolving bullets to the unbroken head, or a whole automatic horn in the chest so that the target finally agrees to part with life. And this circumstance is not that completely spoils the pleasure of the game, but significantly reduces the delight of meeting with the "living" opponents, which I shared just higher.

This was done, at least, for two https://nongamstop-casinos.uk/review/lucki-casino/ reasons-firstly, as they said, the game is small, there are few missions here, and those that are, are a race in a cramped rectum for 10 minutes. Therefore, at least something should be an obstacle to the player, not allowing to defeat the plot adventure in a couple of hours-in this case, this is a reserve of enemies health. Moreover, sometimes it doesn’t even matter where exactly you shoot – you can first get the rowdy in the head, and then in the hand, and only then it will be bought out.

Secondly, in the worst Bioshock traditions, we have several types of cartridges for armament here here. And they share on the principle of "bad" and "good". "Bad" ammunition are out of almost immediately that it only exacerbates as the game passes. However, unlike Bioshock, “good” bullets here are not in short supply and you will use the whole subsequent game mainly by them, only sometimes switching to a budget analogue, rather from savings.

Economics in Rage-which sounds very loud in the context of this game is not that you are broken, there is something to spend money on, but very quickly you stop needing something. And if you experienced with F5-F9 a local casino, then the need disappears even earlier. One way or another, cheap and expensive ammunition is a disgusting technique in both examples given.

Despite the fact that the opponents in the game are divided into several categories – from simple suffocations with wasteland to UberSoldat in armor from Crysis – the tactics of the battle against them does not change. The requirement for bullets is changing, as already mentioned. The automatic rifle is probably the most useless type of barrel in the game, and it should be forgotten immediately by acquiring a machine gun-but for some reason I did not and operated a half-dead rifle almost to the very titers. I even enjoyed the arrows that “control the mind”, and that it bears the meaningful name of “BFG cartridges” – everything was waiting for a special case. I waited to say what to say.

Actually, I alternated the worthless cartridges with high-quality, despite the fact that I had a lot of money-the property of the psyche intervened, which encourages the accumulation of resources, and if I forgot about the inventory and possible craft in the first hours of the game, then the preservation of good cartridges for some reason seemed important to me important.

The main character can carry with him somewhere in a thousand rounds of each kind-at first I thought that he was a bottomless. 1039 rounds – the maximum amount of ammunition for a hand machine gun. And not a cartridge more.

And then the finale happened. It happened so quickly that I did not even believe at first-the game just began to show something: I let it into a new large city, expanded the horizons of wasteland, presented another weapon and a car, finally. On the screen after a dozen, just the beginning of something to happen and that’s it-the end.

I am lied if I say that I was bored or unpleasant to spend time in Rage, even with a whole pile of the vices, but hit my forehead against the final CGI-Videorole, I thought-and what I saw in the game? What did I spend time on?

And it turns out that Rage from the beginning to the credits can be confidently passing for 5 hours in 5, maybe 6. I devoted three times more time to the game. And I was engaged in exactly the fact that, as the genre of games in the open world prescribes, entertained himself. I participated in numerous races, trying to bring my car to perfection, and then one more; I delivered this dull mail by wasteland and coached the last entry; I lit up at the local Hartstone, which has reached the peak of KKI development and plays itself, demanding a minimal participation of the player; I, so that he was repeatedly selected in the same action-collection, where he was already in the plot to return the stolen booze and do other important things-despite the poverty of this game for maintenance, I had fun in it as best I could.

And I was even relatively fun-after all, the game is not so bad, and arcade races with shooting were quite successful. You can deal with all this, but there is one simple question – why? What is the need to spend time on these activity? What benefit he extracts for himself, what endheim?

But there is no endheim, the game has nothing to give you as a reward, except for the words that you are well done. The car is pumped, except, and against road bandits shows itself better, but if you buy penny lining shields, then no one in this game will hurt your buggy in life, and it is better to take place at all by wastelands at all pairs, without turning around. And yes, since it was fun, it made sense, but I fulfilled these instructions, including because I considered my actions as long -term investments – like in any modern project of the genre, when you first are grinding and then reap advantages. This is not in Rage.

Yes there is nothing here. The game deceives you from the very first minutes, immediately making an active action by a participant in the middle of the then seemingly large -scale wasteland, directing to run between several settlements, where every inhabitant is a personalized character with his own model and a set of replicas. There are also the first raids on the den of the bandits, which seems only to the prelude, and not the entire shooting part of the game. Well, Rage is a pretty beautiful video game by the standards of its years, how can you not be deceived by its charm-although highly wealthy faces and frank soap coexist here equally successfully.

I liked to spend time in the game, but as a result of Rage it is a disappointing product – a game that he does not know what it is about and for whom. Even those who just want to shoot people and freaks, there is nothing special to do, not to mention the rest. And yet the fact that the developers managed to realize does not look so bad – Rage is precisely an unfinished product, and not obviously mediocre. Maybe because the karmak was disappointed in the industry, or maybe by that time he was not interested in. His vaunted megatekostors are still loading before our eyes, albeit much faster than in the reliable year.

The name of this text, of course, is a kind of clickbeit – usually I don’t care about the authors of a work of art and I don’t focus on them, but in this case some symbolism is loomed, because John Karmak has always been an inventor, and Rage is an example of stagnation. Though DOOM 3, although it was a much smaller play, and looks much better – at least the gameplay there was much more verified and fascinating, and there was much more freedom at the level. Seriously, with the breathtaking number of invisible walls that are in Rage, doom 3 seems exemplary indicative from the point of view of Leoel Design and the interaction of the player with him.

If you ask me, then the game would go much more a format where, in the interval between large plot missions, 30-40 minutes, we would get into the hub, took quests, purchased everything necessary, and participate in those same races. And already within the framework of each individual mission, one could ride the wastelands on the buggy and shoot enough. And the plot could be served much more naturalistic and much less toothless. But we have what we have.

Well, as a final chord, let’s talk not even about the plot, but about the game setting, because Rage fails here. We are revealed by the world of terry post-apocalypse, in which everything is like a manual-and peaceful settlers in the wastelands, and terrible mutants on the ruins of cities, and evil raiders on the roads, and a ruthless government with soldiers in high-tech armor a little at a distance.

However, the biggest problem of the world presented is that you do not believe in it absolutely. In short, then, despite all this post -apocalypse, everything is fine here – there is oil, there is water supply, the wagon, weapons are fled, the main characters with the main character for services are paid. In words, of course, the locals are bad, but to such "bad" to some countries of our time, still fall and fall.

Or here are the bandits, for example. Everyone knows that "Mad Max 2: The Warrior of the Road" is the canon of the post -apocalypse as a setting as part of the adventure genre. There were bandits in that film, which means we should have bandits. This is just the question – by what principle these bandits are combined into communities?

If you look at the gang of reckless in the game, then the only assumption will be such that they all when they were football fans of some English club. The game simply does not allow any adequate reason for these muzzles and periodically the game simply does not allow it to attack it-just because there should be bandits in the postopock, and preferably eccentric and provocatively dressed, as in "Mad Max".

Other "bandits" and bandits cannot be called. The men have their own power station, which nourishes your decrepit underground town – maybe these are you bandits compared to them? So what, that they dress somehow strange-these are only the same notorious settlers behave as if they live not on an extinct planet, but somewhere in the west of Australia right now.

Well, the government, to which everyone treats with some kind of distrust, is the government and settlers of the Pustoshi in terms of technological potential as civilization from Mass Effect and a flock of monkeys. At the same time, it is simply impossible to force the latter to subordinate, so the insidious government first created and flooded the wasteland with mutants, and now he is also preparing from these same mutants a completely controlled army so that. To? Why do they do it? To finally press the city for a thousand people who do not even resist? The military forces of the government have air transport the size of separate settlements – what they are generally doing in this world?

Plot. And what is the plot? Asteroid Apophis in the zero was supposed to hit the ground and, apparently, still hit. And now people pretend that they survive in this new terrible world. And shortly before the disaster, the old government blessed a handful of people so that they once woke up and help to rebuild the world again. Well, they wake up and fight with the government. Because why not.

It is especially touched that in the game all these high-tech military facilities of the Government are guarded by 5-10 people. In the same Half-Life 2 there was also a giant threshold of conventions associated with the number of occupation forces thrown against resistance, but there it looked more logical than here. Despite the narrative of the game, a direct feeling is created that the government does not want anyone evil, and the locals simply slander him.

All this is quite funny in view of its naivety and complete isolation from all reliability. Too funny for such a game, taking into account those who made it. The same doom 3, actually, was very well thought out in the context of causality-although all scientific relativism and fantastic assumptions were mainly only for the entrance minutes of the game. Doom 3 from 2004 literally smarter Rage from 2010. Such things.

In general, I have nothing to add here. I do not regret the time spent in the game, about the money, what I paid for it – rather small. At the same time, I cannot recommend such a game to anyone, and henceforth I do not intend to return to it. Rage should remain in memory as a moralizing lesson that it is important to correlate your desires and capabilities, and what is more reasonable to do less, but better. The game could turn out a notorious linear shooter – a real linear shooter, or funny arcade races, since they so wanted to develop in this direction. But as a whole, these achievements are not generated by any complex structure. So there is nothing to play here.