visit, the behaviour of the background
NPCs is amusing and gives each
town enough life to make the world
feel ‘real’. But as you’re revisiting
each, between side or main storyline
quests, you’ll soon realise those
townsfolk who are poking a drunk with
a stick are stuck poking that drunk
with a stick forever. Best not to look
too closely at the NPCs at all in fact,
they’re pretty fugly and everyone in
every town looks and dresses almost
identically. As for Walker and the
other main characters, although the
voice acting is decent, sometimes
the humour in the script feels a little
forced, unconvinced of its own place
in the game.
There are three main story quest-
givers. First there’s Mayor of Wellspring
Loosum Hagar, who’s locked in a
power struggle with the richest man in
the Wasteland, Klegg Clayton. Doctor
Kvasir is a crazy old scientist who
rides around on a giant mutant baby
and lives out in the swamps. John
Marshall is a grizzled oldveteran,and
each character has his orherown
quest-lines, which convergeonthe
main story. These queststrandsact
as a kind of RPG levellingdevice,
as well as ultimately
leading you to
the successful
implementation of
Project Dagger, athere, of sorts; other vehicles drive
around, badly, some will challenge you
to race. You’ll see roadside skirmishes
between mutants and humans, but
there’s no reward for getting involved,
no reason to stop. The only things
that will block your path are road-
chokers, controlled by Goon Squad
gangs, which will make you get out
of your car, kill everyone, raise the
roadblock and proceed. There are
also occasional raider bases at gas
stations which you can optionally
destroy, in order to gain favour with
the good guys’ communities, and grab
yourself some loot. Each of these
bases has a number of fuel dumps
to destroy, loot chests and datapads
to find – necessary to ‘clear’ each
location. Fun for the first ten times,
but it gets old.
Tribes calling quests
The world certainly does look nice. The
lighting and environmental effects are
very pretty, from dusty deserts and
vibrant swamps and forests to the
neon-lit towns.
In Rage, the earth had been laid
waste by a meteorite, but several
decades on, the world is healing,
allowing for more interesting and
colourful biomes than could be found
in the first game. The settlements are
vibrant and well-envisioned cyberpunk
hubs of struggling humanity; at first
074 THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE
plan devised years ago to put an end
the Authority. There are a bunch of
side-quests that are mostly found
in the settlement hubs, too. Story
missions are fetch-quests that
involve going somewhere, killing a lot
of enemies and coming back, while
side-quests are... exactly the same,
but without story progression or
significant reward.
There are some fun distractions out
in the Wasteland, which are revealed
by the story early on. To get close to
powerful Wasteland buffoon Klegg
Clayton, you need to first get popular
on the Wasteland’s biggest TV shows,
Mutant Bash TV and ChazCars. Tons
of violent fun, Mutant Bash involves
you killing mutants in a small arena
in the most gory way possible, while
ChazCars is just racing, fun but fairly
unspectacular. Both can be revisited
for cash and XP rewards.
Overall, though, the story itself is
thin, with Walker’s own narrative and
motivations underdeveloped. Theshort
cutWHAT IS IT?
FPS master id teams
up with open-world
expert Avalanche to
create a post-
apocalyptic
‘shooterverse’.
Shooting, driving and
looting in an open
world, then.
WHAT’S IT LIKE?
Rage, Mad Max,
Doom, Borderlands,
that sort of thing.
WHO’S IT FOR?
Fans of looter-
shooters, Mad Max, or
id’s best shooters.