Over half an hour of live game footage from id Software's new shooter, Rage, has left us with impressions of an awesome engine. And some worries.
Let me get this out of the way right now. Rage, the new game from id - you might have heard of a little game called Doom? - looks beautiful.
Brilliant lighting, wonderful physics engine, a refreshingly broad colour pallet, a truly interesting AI system, and a range of tasty game mechanics that really open up the game to any number of styles. But, to be honest, it's also highly derivative, and more than a little old fashioned.
I could describe the game, but in the interests of brevity I'll take a shortcut - combine Fallout 3 with Borderlands, and you pretty much have Rage in a nutshell.
Following warnings of an asteroid hurtling to Earth, underground cells have been setup to preserve humanity. You're one of these vault-like dwellers, and when you emerge, you find the surface dominated by vicious mutants of varying size (from puny to GIGANTIC), and populated by fortress towns of hard-scrabble survivors.
Thus Fallout.
Much of the game's travel is also based on vehices, and vehicle combat plays a large part in intra-quest gameplay.
Thus Borderlands.
We're not saying id's just copying its contempories, though. Gamers want post-apocalyptic settings - it's the number two most desired game type, according to those in the know, followed by near future combat, so it's a market to be played. And id's world is realised at a scale of detail that's heretofore unseen in gaming. We spent as much of the demo watching mutants get gibbed as we did ooh-ing and aah-ing at plantlife and arguably the most brilliant lighting engine yet seen in a game.
But that doesn't stop you thinking, as you watch a dunebuggy careen around stony ochre bluffs that we might have seen this story before.
That said, there are innovations outside of the engine. In fact, it's very possible to argue that id's streamlined this kind of game, and polished a lot of existing mechanics into much more workable variants. For instance, in manly action games, crafting systems are making their presence felt - Fallout 3 is a good example. But id's done away with the need for a worktable - if you have the goods, you can make what you want then and there.
Similarly, the vehicle combat also feels like the classic car combat game Interstate 76. it seems much more solid and responsive than other games like this, with a real Car Wars mentality. You can also upgrade vehicle weapons and parts, and many of them are fixed firing. Car combat, as much as it does remind us of Borderlands a lot, does look much better.
We're really torn about this one. We desperately want to play it, so it certainly scores high on the desirability rating, but we're still a little worried it will feel as - to be honest - underdone as Doom 3.
We don't want to, but we'll just have to wait and see.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012