I don't recall when I last had so much fun playing a single player game.
The graphics are outstanding, really top notch technology.
In all seriousness, the gameplay might as well be poop, since landscape, the setting, atmosphere and themes are something that any post-apocalyptic fanatic will plainly love to death.
Now combine this with id tech5, and there you have it, an incredibly tasty meal <3
Now you might enounter some problems with graphic cards that have less than 1gb (or 2gb)memory, it's because of the Megatextures (take a look at this you lazy bum, it's actually interesting), which are both innovative and awesome but at the same time one of my main grudges with rage. Texture streaming is not fun, although there are some workarounds and configs, which takes me to the next flaw -
CONFIGS.
Seriously id? You guys were known for making every shit possible open-source, you let the community make maps, edit *.pk3 files, not to mention configs. Everyone has their own and can create a whole new gaming experience with modified HUDs, changing phsysics et cetera...
The case in rage is a bit different.
id decided to lock a hefty portion of config commands.
Don't get me wrong, some of them maybe need to be blocked, but what about cg_togglezoom?
Let's make this a bit more drastic, shall we?
We're talking a basic movement command like crouching here, not noimp or shownormals or adjusting friction/walk speed.
Since we're talking about movement, rage is the only new-gen game that I know that has a decent strafing physics that can really boost you to really high speeds AND it has rampjumps which can throw you in the air like there's no tomorrow.
The character animation is very lively, every NPC you encounter is charismatic and doesn't look like a god damn robot. I like it
Some of these douchebags are there because they own shops, repair stuff, give quests or just give info about the game and your surroundings.
Quests are unimaginative. Fetch this, kill that - maybe I'm drawing too much fallout influence on this one, it's not supposed to be a story based RPG after all.
The enemies are somewhat easy to put down even on nightmare difficulty, I was expecting more challenge and I don't like the idea of regenerating health (at least not as fast) and defibrillator (if you die, you can "respawn" and continue if your defib is working (resets every xy minutes).
I wasn't expecting much from races and combat with cars/ATVs, but they managed to make it fun, fast and playable.
There's a boatload of doom, fallout, quake and other references scattered around the wasteland.
Boss battles are cool and dynamic, weaponry is imaginative and smart - various types of ammo for different enemies, a whole lot of usable items (RC bomb car, wingsticks etc
To make this a bit shorter and sum it up in a tl;dr
The game is definitely worth your time and money, online is a bit wank and can easily be neglected.
Maybe not worth 50€, but if you come across a deal (anything below 30), grab it and give it a spin.
Great graphics, fun and enaging gameplay, some minor issues with textures and locked cvars.
dlc and modtools, since months they say a announcement is coming soon. i wish they would give a tiny little info about the dlc to make me hot for it.
anyway, i think the dlc will be big and great.
in the meantime you can read the rage comic and novel. the comic was a bit short, contains the story how the wasteland mutants originated. the novel was nice, i liked the dialog, the enviroment wasnt described in detail but i guess we played the game so we have the locations in our head. other readers liked the novel too, see amazon comments.
if rage gets an sequel game isnt decided, i think it has to do with sales figures from the 2011 game. these numbers arent openly released so a speculation makes no sense. bethesda said recently they dont drop the new ip rage, so that could mean a rage II is possible. to do a new ip is a big risk in the gaming business from what i understand. we live in a world full of sequels :)
i forgot, rage isnt a fps revolution but a fun game. locations are cool i remember them all, weapons and shooting is fun (highlights sentry bots, wingstick, sentrys fighting sentrys), car driving also. multiplayer is races and coop missions (on hard you learn all corners and crates where you can hide). shooting mutants was really great, i loved the little creatures.