RAGE Review

The irony of Bethesda’s acquisition of id is that it has made Rageand Fallout cousins when, in all 
honesty, it’s hard to imagine them getting along. There’s a resemblance, certainly – you can see it in the junkyard aesthetic of the rickety shanty towns that the inhabitants of both wastelands have thrown together, you can hear it in the snarls of the mutated monsters lurking in the hideouts beneath both game’s surfaces, and you can feel it in the similarly black-humoured approach to the end of civilisation. But the likeness only goes skin deep. Where Fallout is freeform, Rage is focused; where Fallout’s execution is shonky, Rage is technically flawless; and where Fallout is abstract and statistical, Rage is upfront and personal.

And, visually, id’s game blows Bethesda’s in-house title out of the water – and not just because it’s running at an unbroken 60fps or packing id’s much-vaunted MegaTexture tech. Beneath the brown, rugged surface there’s real character here – in the lined and weathered faces of NPCs, for instance, or in the way a shaft of sunlight has been angled to hit a pile of artfully aligned rubble just so. It’s an artistry that comes at the cost of environments that react to your bullets in only the most superficial of ways, but nonetheless, the world of Rage shows that id’s artists are capable of much more than gruesome cyber-horror.