12. Rage
FPS I basically knew nothing about. It is a product of its time I guess. Not what I would expect from an ID title. Has far too many gimmicks involved but fortunately it doesn't force you into using them, or the ones that it does are not an issue. The game follows the basic method of using tutorial moments when something is introduced before it just becomes a normal thing to do. But this continues well past the half-way part of the game and makes it feel like the game will be longer than it is.
Story: The story I don't understand at all. The beginning cutscene makes it seem like you are sent off into space to colonize other worlds, but the video shows a meteor hitting a planet. It doesn't say what planet it is, nor is the video clear enough to know (aka does it look like Earth or not). So I start the game thinking that my Ark pod is inside of the meteor. And the starting location, your Ark is located in an area that it looks like it hit. But it turns out this is entirely wrong. The meteor is something else entirely. Your ark is just on the planet this whole time but you were asleep for a really long time and just woke up. The starting area looks the way it does because of decay, not because your Ark hit it. The meteor breaks up and leaves some new element all over the place and funnily enough, this actually has little to do with the rest of the story. It starts with first helping the people that found you, and their friends. And then there is a resistance you do 2 things for, then you have to get the Mayor of Subway town to like you, but when you do the actual thing he wants you to do, you won't see him anymore. Then you suddenly have to go kill the Authority and no real reasons are given for this. They are written as some oppressive government but they don't seem to do anything against anyone (only the bandits do) and you have to go fight them just because. And guess what, the planet IS Earth after all. And you "defeat" the Authority by uploading some data and the game is over. The story is completely terrible, written worse than some B movies if you ask me.
For gameplay, it is an FPS but there are some driving elements. Driving is bad in the sense that it had to be done with the keyboard. In fact, it didn't support multiple input methods, you if you wanted to use KBM you couldn't use controller. It saw the controller and had keybinds for it, but it never worked. Driving was easy enough and you can actually win all of the races without using boost. Shooting in the car is auto-aim/homing so this makes up for no manual aiming control, but also there is no free-look when in car.
The shooting is not good. Even on easy and with good weapons, the enemies have too many hitpoints. There is location damage but unless you are at range this doesn't matter. Some enemies require multiple headshots to kill even with the sniper rifle. There is no such thing as a one hit kill with any armored enemy. Despite you can knock off their armor, their armor rating extends to un-armored portions. There is a lot of close-quarters enemy swarms that take place and it can be really intense. But it is not ideal when it takes 3 shots to take down an enemy and you have to manage not only that and reloads. During swarm sections, you can't use cover effectively for reload or heal. You can kite in some areas, but in others the game will set up barriers that you can't get past until you kill the amount of scripted enemies.
The game is also set up with all the extra gimmicks inside, like mini-games or collecting things. And there is a card game that is inside which was OK but fairly simple. The game has a false end like Fallout 3, so you can't play once you hit it. That was solved in DLC apparently.
The game has two different input methods baked into the game. One is during rendered gameplay and the other is in menus. And unfortunately, there is no options to set different speeds for each. What works on gameplay is going to cause really messed up menu usage. From what I can tell, it uses raw mouse input during gameplay. Being an older game, it appears to be based on standard DPI of years ago, so you need low DPI at start and set mouse sensitivity very low in order for normal look speeds. The issue comes in modern mice and higher (low) DPI, where gameplay is fine but the menus are messed up. The menu input doesn't use raw mouse for controlling the cursor. It uses screen segments (size of which depends on mouse sensitivity setting) that has the cursor jump between to make the cursor move. Basically it is actually still using the controller input for controlling the cursor. Setting the sensitivity too low makes it so the cursor takes a long time to move between large segments (cursor is slow or not moving), setting it "too high" (like 20%) makes it zoom all over the screen. There is no good middleground.
The audio is good but some issues. Music volume option is only for in-game and not for rendered or video cutscenes. Environmental audio is terrible as while it supports Surround, it plays the sounds in the wrong place. All enemies telegraph their presense or attack through audio and this works good. Subtitle option can be a mess in towns because it also shows subtitles for whatever is coming across the town's loudspeaker in addition to what an NPC is telling you. They are different colors but they should have made it so loudspeaker subtitles don't appear when talking to NPC.
It was an OK game, but really disjointed in story, missiong and audio. The graphics aren't that great except for the Authority level at the end. If I ever get the DLC and can play past the end, I'll give it another shot.
