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Rage 2 Looks Like a Great Id Game, But What About Its Open World?
We want to go wandering.
Rage 2 is an Id shooter alright. The furious-bordering-on-ridiculous pace, the bulging, oversized guns, that blood-spattered feedback designed to keep you pushing, pushing, pushing. Even the noise of it feels right. The soundtrack has the industrial pound of Doom 2016, newly augmented with ringing synths, and every gun I try sounds gratifyingly stupid - everything down to the humble pistol sounds like it could core out a beluga whale in a single shot.
My hands-on demo is a 10-minute run-through an abandoned space centre, now overrun by the mohawk-laden Goon Squad faction we got acquainted with in Rage 2’s first trailers. I play it four times. It’s a fetch quest of sorts, except what you’re fetching is an orbiting building that you need to crash into the neon pink-lit desert. The gauntlet to get to your goal is essentially a spiral staircase punctured with kill rooms, a corridor-fight-corridor structure that’ll be familiar to anyone who’s played an Id production.
Combat is a constantly shifting cocktail of gunplay, utilities and abilities. The primary weapons we were shown err on the side of normal - a pistol, an assault rifle and a booming shotgun - but manage the balance of “silly” and “precise” very nicely, feeling powerful but never out of control. It’s a follow-up in formula to Doom - you’re clearly a cut above the cannon fodder trying to kill you, but they will kill you if you give them half a chance. Even weaker enemies can soak up a fair few bullets before they drop - perhaps my only criticism is that they don’t react quite enough to taking a hit right now, making it harder to prioritise targets in busier scenes.
The utilities come in the form of grenades (pretty ordinary, although a perfect showcase for Rage 2’s surprisingly well-rendered gibs) and Rage’s trademark wingstick, a razor-edged boomerang that can now lock onto enemies and tear through them before flitting back to you like some blood-soaked pet bat (except when it just gets stuck in someone’s face and explodes).
Most interesting are Rage 2’s Nanotrite abilities, superpower-like attacks on a cooldown that meld beautifully into the flow of combat. I’m presented with two: Slam is a ground pound that sends victims flying into the air (perfect for building up Bulletstorm-like chains of attacks); better is Shatter, which is essentially a Star Wars Force Push, albeit a Force Push that has a tendency to make people burst when they hit walls.
These are aggressive, close-quarters moves, a clear mandate for how you’re meant to play the game - and that’s borne out by the final piece of the puzzle. Kill enough people, and kill them quickly enough, and you’ll earn what amounts to your ultimate, Overdrive, which could equally be called “The Doomguy Button”. Every attack becomes stronger, every enemy drops better loot, and you begin to regenerate health. For some reason, bullets also get bigger, leaving pie-sized holes in the walls. It’s dumb, and gross, and glorious.
Yes, this is truly an Id shooter - but rather sadly I still don’t know if it’s a quintessential Avalanche open world, too.
Rage 2’s pitch is intoxicating - the best FPS designers in the business partnering with a studio that’s made its name crafting endlessly compulsive worlds. It feels strange, then, that we’re given no hint as to the scale or style of that world in our demo, although we get a few hints in a hands-off presentation.
For a start, the promise that this won't be a post-apocalypse of sand, rocks and nothing else rings true. Id’s Tim Willits says the first Rage was his studio making “brown better than anyone else”, and it’s clear he doesn’t want to repeat the feat. The first area we’re shown is an emerald green bamboo forest, a path leading to a sun-streaked battlefield covered in defence turrets, currently being used to blow the legs off of jetpack-wearing mutants. It’s probably a wider colour palette used in a minute than in the entirety of Rage. In fact, the designers are insisting on calling this a post-post-apocalypse setting - it’s a world in the process of regrowing, not reeling, after disaster.
It certainly doesn’t look like Mad Max, Avalanche’s last devastated world, either - although it’s not abandoning that game’s good ideas. Where the original Rage’s vehicle sections had an air of floaty kart racing about them, the short section I’ve seen from the sequel looks encouraging.
Mad Max’s cars had real heft to them, making smashes and scrapes look and feel devastating. Rage 2’s vehicles are altogether more sophisticated than Max’s rustbuckets - and come with multiple auto-targeting weapons - but they definitely look as though they drive similarly. There’s another nice returning feature - convoys of enemy vehicles traverse the world, begging you to get yourself outnumbered in search of big rewards.
But there’s so much more we still don’t know. The developers say we can head anywhere in the open world from the beginning of the game, but the fundamentals of exploration are still a mystery. We don’t know how the map is revealed, how quests are given and discovered and, perhaps most importantly for an Avalanche game, how much mileage there is in simply messing around with the game’s colliding systems. Those waiting to know if there’s a Just Cause-style grappling hook item will need to keep waiting.
It feels strange for a game with two such distinctive sides to only show us one - but at least it’s a very encouraging side. Id’s influence is already extremely clear, but I’d want to see how Avalanche’s experience is paying off before I guess at what Rage 2 will be as a completed whole.
Preorder RAGE 2 today for PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
Joe Skrebels is IGN's UK News Editor, and he plans to complete a "Shatter-only" run of the game. It feels so good. Follow him on Twitter.