3.5/5 ★ – hunkypet's review of Rage.

Typically overlooked and forgotten about when speaking about the X360/PS3 era of FPS games. Rage from a gameplay perspective is a supremely solid shooter. In a era when 60FPS was very uncommon in the console market, Rage aims for it and virtually sticks to it, making it one of the best playing and feeling games I can remember from that generation. The game is a looker, it still looks great today. It has vastly complex and sprawling landscapes with intriguing level design and world building. The only problem is at the time id Software used a texture streaming process called Mega Textures. Mega Textures caused a huge delay in the texture resolution being streamed up and sometimes would take 2/3 seconds for the textures to load... don’t get me wrong this isn’t ideal but in the heat of the moment it isn’t as bad as it sounds. I played on PS3 where the issue is also worse. For me at least it had a surprisingly interesting story, which is unusual for an FPS. It did start to dither away in the latter hours but it is one of the games key selling points. It’s also “open world” but that feels like a marketing ploy, I’d call it open linear. You have hub worlds with decent sized maps that allow you to drive across and reach the different levels/races/points of interest. In the levels themselves they are fairly linear and designed well enough to accommodate some serious shoot outs. A quick mention of the driving as it is pretty solid, I had a lot of fun, travelling across the hub worlds and competing in the racing events. It also has some light vehicular combat, while not particularly deep was fun enough. This focus is what made me prefer Rage to its sequel, there’s not to much bloat and it plays like a dream. I think it has a bad rap, and going back to it now really makes you see how hard this game was pushing the X360/PS3. When it’s firing on all cylinders it’s easily one of the best looking console games of that generation. Played on PS3