Airsoft Action 04 - Xmas 2011 | Page 90

Resident gamer Alex Wharton gets his hands on id Software’s post-apocalyptic shooter Rage and delivers his verdict, no holds barred… P erseverance – probably the most qualified word to describe my play through of Rage. Without it I don’t think I’d have got further than 30 minutes in. It’s not that Rage is a bad game – it’s decidedly average – but serious flaws in plot, structure and level design make the experience quite frustrating. The game opens with your character emerging from an Ark, a cryogenic safe-house that allowed the best minds to survive an apocalyptic asteroid. Ok, with you so far. 090 Xmas 2011 You meet a local who takes you to the nearest town and explains some of the fundamentals of the future. There’s an oppressive force called ‘The Authority’ (scary!) as well as mutants and bandits, all of which you’re going to have to deal with on your travels. So far it’s all gravy – not the most imaginative of scenarios but it’ll do. But at this point, as I was being tasked with all sorts of combat missions, I got confused. Wasn’t I one of the great minds, frozen to survive the apocalypse? Couldn’t they have got someone more suited to battling mutants? And this is Rage’s number one flaw: I don’t have the first inkling why I’m doing the things I’m doing. Surely when the writers sat down to flesh out the storyline they noticed this gaping hole in the players’ knowledge? It wouldn’t have taken much to sort out – just a few lines about me being a security officer would have at least given me something solid, and not left me on the look out for some sort of plot. Rage is the newest first-person shooter (FPS) from id Software, ‘the father of FPS’ and the company behind some of the great classic shooters: Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein 3D – the latter of which has long been considered the game that popularised the FPS genre of PC gaming. So where did id go wrong? Well in a sense it hasn’t – those familiar with Wolfenstein 3D won’t remember spending hours contemplating the game’s vastly complex storyline. Because the game didn’t have one, and the players didn’t care. Videogames have come a long way since the early 1990s though: today gamers expect story structure to rival the best of Jane Austen, character development that renders Shakespeare’s Hamlet a whimsical cartoon and graphics so realistic they make the outside world look pixelated. On all points but