I only heard about RAGE but I decided to played it recently and I'm a bit confused with this game because of the general reception.
First, let me say that RAGE for it's time builds a pretty good post-apocalyptic environment. The areas, groups and gangs, settlements, characters and the dialouges with them adds to the overall atmosphere. It's nothing outstanding, but it's pretty good. Also, RAGE gameplay wise has some cool ideas: you can explore some areas for additional missions, collectibles or just collecting junk which you can sell in the shops to buy ammo, upgrades. You can craft all kinds of gadgets, there are a lot of different weapons with different ammo types to play with. Or you can play mini games, doing races, fight on the roads using your car, or if you own them you can do the DLC missions additionally. RAGE on provides all of that, which sounds pretty good... right?
Indeed sounds good, but even though you have everything to provide if the fundemantals are not in place, it won't be enjoyable and this is the issue with RAGE. This game is incredibly dull and not fun to play.
The missions are not interesting and they are basically the same, only the context is different. Story is like a nothing burger. It tries to set up how this wasteland work, what crews and settlements are out there and who is the main bad of the story and so on, but there is barely any motivation in the story for the player or anything to root for or root against. And honestly, the ending is just dry.
Also, once you figure out that if you stack up from the most important resources and you realize what type of weapon and/or bullet type is good against certain enemies you are basically set until the end and only resort to just a few weapons and gadgets, which is just makes the game even more boring until the end.
It's not that you can't experiment with these stuffs as you have a tons of options, but in my playthrough I couldn't find the patience to firstly learn the weapon wheel to know what button is for an exact weapon out of the tons I have and it was confusing to me. There are also several gadgets to use on foot and in your car, but I couldn't bring myself to try them out because most of them are situational and some of them just not worth it. Also the enemy AI can easily shut most of your gadgets down, so I only used like 2-3 of them, same with the guns. Enemy AI sometimes can be silly, when they just froze in one place until you decide to shoot them, or decides to shot their teammates because they were in their way when they were trying to kill you.
Occasionally the game crashes, however this issue is probably because of the modern systems. I only had like 3 crashes in my complete playthrough, it wasn't as bad as others had. Also, the game has graphics issues when textures flickers if you turn too fast. Also, the UI can be buggy, like for example when you try to play video poker and if you have a certain graphics settings on, you won't see your one or two of your cards for some reason.
I'm very honest about being confused with the reception of the game, because in my opinion this is mediocre. Sure, RAGE presents a pretty good post apocalyptic world with some decent ideas, but the core gameplay is not good enough. Also, the game feels like "half baked", it's like the game has lost some content along the way and some of it's mechanics got changed for some reason.
Either way, you can play it for awhile or even play it through as it's not long at all if you only focus on the story, but it's not really memorable. I can't really recommend this to anyone, maybe if you are really desperate to play this game, but get it on some kind of sale and don't have any expectation, but you still not gonna be in awe...
