Wow, everyone saw it right! It was awesome! The trailer for Borderlands 3 looked epic and I can’t wait for …… was that? Wait, I’m being informed that was Rage 2? Seriously?
Okay, I have so many questions about this and I feel like I’m taking crazy pills right now. But can you blame me? So I’m extremely confused, excited and a little worried at the same time and here’s why.
Does anyone remember Rage?
Yeah, I’m not saying I’m not happy we’re getting a sequel and considering the trailer, Rage 2 looks to be a massive improvement! It’s like Borderlands on crack.
Clearly, the developers have taken a massive amount of influence from both Borderlands and Doom 2016 (which I loved). It looks to be insane, over the top and pure mayhem. The original Rage was fine but very bland, generic and 5 years too late to really matter. Now after 7 years we’re getting a sequel? While it’s great, I hope that 7 years was put into development and not a case of ID looking at how well Doom did and them thinking “well, let’s make Rage more like Doom then!”.
Trying to beat Borderlands at its own game?
Granted the major problem with Rage was the lack of personality and spirit. Borderlands has Charisma, charm and oozes tons of personality.
This looks pretty intense and screams Mad Max! But is it just cosmetic? We’ve seen other games do this before, where they look cool, scream out with personality and show off that they potentially have depth. Then Destiny 2 comes out and it’s just like the first with more Micro-Transactions.
Do we even care about the Apocalypse anymore?
Ha! It’s like the name of my series. Nice.
But seriously do we? Well, I guess Fallout 4 proved we still are and it just did the same thing as Fallout 3. I mean, we’ve seen it done before. Borderlands had it nailed for the action, end of the world game and Rage was just a bland mashup of Borderlands and Fallout 3. So it was nothing special, considering Rage’s lengthy development time.
What will Rage do that it’ll top Borderlands 3 or any other game set in a post-Apocalyptic world? Aside from the funky visuals and Punk style which have been done in Mad Max before, there’s so far nothing much to grasp in terms of personality. It’s just madness.
But the Mayhem looks so good!
Yeah, I will admit this trailer does make the game look absolutely mental and I love it. From the few minutes we got, I can see this will be heavily influenced by Doom’s combat and that’s fine by me.
There’s even mention of car combat which if done right can be an amazing dynamic. See driving in FPS games is normally just a means of traversing and even Borderlands never got this right. I can see the developers taking influence from both game and films of Mad Max. The game while a little dull but had great car combat and if the developers can pull off the driving combat to the same degree as the gunplay, then it’ll be a winner!
Plus I will admit that Rage was captivating in its own way. The boss fights were cool, the exploration was pretty decent and it was in all fairness a scaled down Borderlands with more grit.
But there was a big problem with the original game. The main issue which is our next point?
Repeating History?
Repetition is the key word here. Rage’s campaign was one of the most uninspired I had played and still to this day has a high spot on AAA grind fests. Act One is followed as so:
Go out, explore, kill, earn cash, win big race to get a better car then move to the next act.
Then Act Two:
Go out, explore, kill, earn cash, win big race to get a better car then move to the next act.
Then … Act Three:
Go out, explore, kill, earn cash, win big race to get a better car and then ….
Oh sweet Jesus, did the developer even bother to change things up a little? No, sadly they didn’t and all we got was a tired, generic plot of fight the big bad by upgrading your car, driving around to hideouts, kill bandits, monsters and loot the hell out of everything with quite a bit of backtracking. It was boring.
By the third area, I gave up all hope and forced myself to finish this grind fest. I bring this up because Bethesda is having a worrying track record for games that repeat themselves too much.
So final Thoughts?
Now I do like Fallout 4 but sadly it was a repeat of Fallout 4 with some Mods and a bigger, brighter range of color. Will the developers just follow the same way and repeat a tedious formula just with bigger guns and explosions?
Now I’ll give Rage 2 a chance and say that despite a Rage being a second-rate Borderlands, this looks promising. The developers are clearly livening things up and want us to have fun, the complete opposite of what the original Rage ended up to be. I don’t know about a sequel to a “meh” game that came out 7 years ago, but in all fairness, it’s got to be better than the first game.