Rage 2
So, I've been playing the copy I've got from the Epic giveaway and, yesterday, I finished it.
And it's a strange game. In the sense that it does not feel incomplete, but feels like they decided to do a couple of things very right and then, for the rest, do the minimum acceptable to complete it.
Everything in the game is attuned to the idea of go out there in the wild, explore and find stuff to kill and means to do it. And killing stuff is super fun and all. The world is rich with visual details and quite a few different environments as well. Exploring is fun, and there's an overabundance of resources and you're always getting a little more powerful, even if it's a bit too slow occasionally.
Past that, the game starts to feel bizarrely restricted. There's an introductory mission, then you're set to chase after 3 chars that, naturally become quest givers, and each has a grand total of only two missions. They ask you to complete side stuff in the world (each has their favored activity type from the exploration/side quest tab) so that they can complete their own projects that will benefit you as well, but you never learn or see the results of their projects, you only see the list of your power upgrades they provide. Finish those missions for these characters, and you're free to tackle the final mission and end the game. Early on, another character promises to rebuild your just destroyed stronghold home, but you never really see anything be done to it at all. It remains firmly the same very map from the initial mission, with even the same pieces of enemies in the middle of the rubble.
Furthermore, every side quest in the game isn't even marked in any way in your journal. They're all just excuses for an NPC to mark a place you may have not discovered yet in your map, so that you can go there kill enemies and find items. You may eventually return to the quest giver, but more often than not, the NPC will just thank you and that's all. On occasion, you'll come across an attempt of doing more traditional quest stuff, like finding someone, instead of just killing everything that moves, or getting payed for the trouble, but they're scarce and end up feeling somewhat out of place compared to the rest of them.
The enemies, individuals and factions, are fine, but I found them to be less interesting than their counterparts in the original Rage; there is a bit more variety in enemy types and behaviors here, just less factions and less diversity per enemy type, I felt.
I found the car driving around to be fine, but everything outside your main car feels like it was put there just because it made sense to be there. Also, once you acquire the Icarus, the only flying vehicle, you'll probably favor going around in it, instead of the car, simply because of convenience. That said, it is far from an ideal flying ship, it's programmed to fly up to a certain altitude above the ground, and only ever goes higher, if you fly over higher ground. Move into lower ground again, and it starts descending slowly. You may even fall into one of the various "bottomless" pits in the middle of the map (some lower parts of the canyons can be accessed, others can't. It's more or less always obvious, but every so often you can get confused). You'll frequently be flying into the abundant trees in certain areas of the map, though you never know which ones have collision and which ones don't.
The worse part is the late game. You get extra powerful, but the enemies never scale much. So you enter a settlement, initial pistol in hand, and wipe everyone out with just that and the super powers you amassed. Personally, by the very end, I rarely remembered using grenades, drones or wingsticks. Sub-bosses and bosses also become extremely easy, even if they remain one of the few occasions you'll feel the need to pull out one of the stronger weapons like the rocket launcher or the railgun equivalent. I don't think it's terrible that the enemies don't scale, but things get a bit too easy and the game don't seem too keen into throwing stronger random encounters into you when you're traveling around. Another weird thing, the initial overabundance of resources seem to dry up by the end. To be more specific, the upgrade system is vast and somewhat complex, with a lot of different resources types you need to either find, buy, or earn, and each one goes toward one, sometimes two, distinct system. But by the end of the game, you'll notice that you seem to always be short one point or another for that last upgrade in any given upgrade tree. So you'll find yourself checking online forums for pointers to where to find that final piece of upgrade point thingy or you'll be revisiting every completed marker on the map in search of that one extra thing. For the 3 quest givers, in particular, they cap out at level 18 (completing activities raises levels, every level gives 3 upgrade points for the project powers tab), but only two of them have repeatable activities and of the two, only one has a repeatable activity that it's not a long chore to exploit (because it levels the quest giver up fairly fast). Naturally, you'll need to get all three to level 18 to complete all project upgrade trees.
Overall, I loved my time with the game, and I didn't outright hate anything in it, but kept finding myself always wondering why each piece of it wasn't just a tad bit better or more developed.
I do want to try its DLC, though I don't think I will due to the out of place buy-in-game-currency-to-buy-DLC model they decided to use. Maybe if it gets heavily discounted some day.
EDIT: Watching an old review of Mad Max, a game which I played a few years ago and enjoyed a lot, but somehow, forgot most about it, I can say that Rage 2 feels a lot similar in structure, but simplifies a lot of the elements from that game, for better and for worse.
Post edited March 24, 2021 by Falci
