Rage 2 Review

Rage 2 follows a few decades after the first game. The tl;dr is an asteroid hit earth and a post-apocalyptic setting happened. You play as Walker. The Authority, an evil organization that was supposedly defeated in the first game, is back. Their robo-nudist leader kills your mother figure and Walker needs to help three losers to kill him. That’s it. That’s the story.

The plot is beyond half-assed. Quarter-assed at best. The first Rage was forgettable, but at least the story gave the world an atmosphere with an insidious hidden group behind the scenes. Outside of the opening scene the evil Authority just builds annoying towers and you see them like five times before the final battle. It’s not like Rage 2 had some big shoes to fill, but this is pathetic.

If I had to say something positive about the story, it’s that the ending is better than its predecessor. Although that’s not saying too much, because Rage 1’s ending was so shitty, it made Mass Effect 3’s look like the entirety of Avengers Endgame.

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There’s not a single person you care about in this game. The main character is the most bland and unlikable action protagonist there is. After seeing their mom essentially cut down before their eyes, they don’t even express…what’s that emotion you need for vengeance…oh that’s right, rage! They just make dumb snarky jokes and both the female and male character suck.

You pick their gender, but what you’re really choosing is their voice. The male feels like the pilot guy from the new Star Wars trilogy with less personality and the female is Captain Marvel. Have fun between those choices. The major characters are the most forgettable I’ve ever played. Cutscenes consist of them talking to you and sending you on errands. It’s pretty much the same quality as over the radio dialogue. It legitimately feels like their whole purpose in life is to be saved by you and then help you out

Rage 2 “sidequests” are basically just excuses to highlight the same old side objectives you come across throughout the game. If you want to add a little fun to these, I would try to find out which obscure voice the NPCs are trying to RIP off.

The story is obviously not the focus, it’s the gameplay and it’s a mixed bag at the least. The shooting on its own is fantastic. They basically copy and pasted Doom 2016’s core mechanics and added a few tweaks. Namely some powers and the kill multiplier. Killing enemies quickly means a higher kill streak, which means enemies drop more health and charge up your Rage mode (actually called Overdrive because Rage 2 wants to miss every opportunity possible).

Combat is fast, fun and satisfying in a vacuum. It’s completely different from the original’s aggressive cover-based mechanics, which honestly had potential, but I guess id software didn’t want to reinvent the wheel after making the best FPS this generation.

Rage 1’s other selling point was its car combat. The driving areas were really condensed and bandits had nothing better to do than harass the shit out of you and cause as much damage to your beautiful ride as possible. In Rage 2, enemy vehicles aren’t nearly as frequent and the map is pretty large. This essentially makes the car feel more like a Toyota Corolla designed to reliably get you from point A to B and less post-apocalyptic vehicular manslaughter action.

This brings up the other major issue with Rage 2. The open-world is bland an uninteresting, which means you don’t want to explore it. And unfortunately for Rage 2, you find new powers and guns by exploring and finding Arks, so the progression system is totally fucked. These locations should at least be sprinkled around some of the main roads you travel on when completing main missions, but they’re not. After beating the main story, I had about 5 of the 8 weapons and half the Nanotrite powers.

The weapons are pretty cool though. I’d say they’re like a second-rate Resistance catalog. Satisfying to use and they have different functions depending if you’re aiming down the sites or not. Although Rage 2 has a really annoying tendency to give you a tutorial every time you get something new.

Also, I can’t be the only one who is miss using the monocular with the pistol to form a poor man’s sniper. Not only did it get the job done, but it is fucking hilarious. Imagine this guy, but with a gun and lining up head-shots left and right just to flex on you and your bandit friends. I love it. You had to resort to those tactics in the original Rage because that game had difficulty. Rage 2 is really easy. Enemies are less aggressive and tactical this time around. They become complete fodder and just a total downgrade from aesthetics, animation and AI.

There’s also a lack of polish in Rage 2. I’m sure some of it will get patched up, but when I played menus would lag, I couldn’t access a vendor’s inventory sometimes and weird glitches. Rage 1 also had an issue with pop in, but the rubble on the ground?! I didn’t even know pop in could be that bad.

While we’re on color, why the hell is everything pink. It’s an odd pairing with the overwhelmingly brown world. And if there’s one color I associate with rage, the emotion, not the game, it’s hot pink (sarcasm alert).

Rage 2 is an abomination of a game. The overall design of the story, map, characters is so incredibly lazy. The whole vibe to this game comes off as what a multi-million-dollar company thinks as edgy. The combat is suffocated by the shoddy design of everything around it.  The poor pacing, tedious side objectives and underwhelming reward system just drag the whole thing down.

I gotta give it some credit though, it did the impossible. It made me nostalgic of the first Rage. Have you had a chance to play Rage 2 yet? Do you agree with me that it is a major disappointed? Let me know in the comment section below.

Check out my abbreviated video review here: