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BethesdaDevs team up for post-apocalyptic sequel
Rage 2
The combinaTion of Doom and Quake
originator id Software and Just Cause/
Mad Max dev Avalanche Studios should be
potent, both firms having behind them the
smoking wreckage of multiple first and
third-person shooter hits.
Running on Avalanche’s Apex engine,
the game exclusively uses the Vulkan API,
and seems tied to frame rate in a strange
way. The graphics options want you to
pick a rate it can stick to, going so far as
to render at a lower resolution on the fly
before upscaling to your preferred output
resolution. Turn all this off, allow the
frame rate to drop, and the game seems
slower as a result.
This means it’s extremely smooth—
the slippery feeling of previous id games
combining with biomechanical enemies
to evoke the sense of a Quake 4 sequel as
much as the follow-up to John Carmack’s
2011 swansong.
The world of the first Rage—
devastated after the collision of asteroid
99942 Apophis with Earth in 2029—
returns, along with gibbering mutants,
trigger-happy bandits, cyberneticallyRage 2’s signature color is
hot pink, seen here in the
arrows that guide you.Towns are intelligently laid
out, full of conversations and
side missions.Oh, a bad guy? Do
you think? Subtle.There’s a weirdly
large number of CRT
monitors in the future.available. An Overdrive mode, which
powers up your shots and regenerates
your health, is activated after collecting
enough Feltrite—blue glowing capsules
dropped by dead enemies. They can be
attracted to you, but the main way to
get them is to run over them, making
run-and-gun close-up tactics the best
way to progress, going berserk with your
abilities until no one is left standing.
Rage 2 shows what a partnership
between id and other devs can bring. It’s a
bland world, but there’s enough sparkling
gunplay and super-powered massacres
to make it worth exploring. –ian evendenenhanced Authority figures, and the Arks
full of buried goodies, including nanotech
superpowers. Apart from this, there’s no
major plot link to the previous game.
You’re thrown out into the wasteland
with nothing but a suit of high-tech
armor, a vehicle, some guns, the series’s
trademark “wingstick” boomerang, and
a list of three people to find. Discover the
first, after a short but exhilarating drive
through the dust roads and rocks left
behind after the apocalypse, and one of
the best sewer-crawling mutant hunts
we’ve played, and side missions open up.
Play it in linear order and you might
think Rage 2 is short, but it’s designed to
be explored rather than blasted through
in one go. And that’s where the problems
start, because an open-world shooter
with vehicles and fast travel is exactly the
sort of game that tempts you to follow
its critical path to the end. It doesn’t help
that the wasteland is dull, and the sight
of shots being fired just over the next hill
aren’t always enough to draw you in.
That’s a shame, because the game
has some of the best combat currentlyRage 2
Raging Excellent shooting
with enemies who are good to
shoot; excellent vehicles, too.
aging Occasional texture pop; bland
world; strange softness about everything.
Recommended specs i7-4770/Ryzen 5
1600X; 8GB RAM; GTX 1070/Vega 56.
$60, http://www.bethesda.net, ESRB: M7
verdictin the lab
90 MAXIMUMPC aug 2019 maximumpc.com