So what is Rage? Are we going to see if this is the next FPS marvel from the original creators of the FPS genre? Well sit back and find out.

What we know of the story of Rage so far is that an asteroid has hit Earth turning it to a barren waste land. You play a character that has been kept in an Ark. An Ark is a group of people who have been put into cryo-sleep so that when the asteroid dust clears you can get started on rebuilding civilisation and the world. When you wake up you realise that things have not gone to plan. Firstly the particular Ark you were in has malfunctioned and you are the sole survivor and secondly the Earth has turned pretty non salvageable, mutants in habit the waste land and civilisation has taken a turn for the worst just to survive.

You may be thinking that this game is on the same sort of card as say Borderlands or Fallout 3. But this is id software we are talking about, and these guys know how to innovate games. Rage is more than a bog standard FPS game. It is an open world FPS which also relies on a lot of classic Quake and Doom style FPS game play coupled with the innovations to customise your own weapons, vehicles and gadgets. A perfect example here is that you can build and RC car bomb, meaning you can control a radio controlled toy car equipped with a bomb and detonate it into a pile of unsuspecting enemies. It’s little ideas like this that will make Rage fun and unique from all the rest.

That’s not all though, I did mention vehicles, and you get the opportunity to build vehicles from scratch meaning that your vehicle will be your very own creation. There is a lot of scope for customisation in this game which I am certainly looking forward too.

Rage is built on a brand new game engine built by id called the idTech5. id boast that this game engine is based on terrain and buildings that have literally been hand sculpted by the designers. What this means in literal terms I am not to sure but it seems to me that they may have imported sculptures somehow into the game engine. I’ll do some more reasearch into that and I’ll get back to you.

One of the things I am most excited about in Rage is the enemies. id are notorious for creating a variety of enemies. From what I have seen they have not skimped out here either. The AI in this game is amazing, there was some game footage I saw where the player was fighting against a clan ninja clan of sorts, and these enemies were jumping off walls and bridges to get to you, they were even wall running and doing back flips to dodge your bullets. This literally had me jaw dropped. There was also another piece of footage where the player was fighting against a gang of mutants and these enemies were more savage, animalistic types. So you will get a lot of enemy variety which I cannot wait for.

id have also said that they have incorporated a new pain mechanic into the AI system, meaning that enemies will generally react to where you shoot them. Why hasn’t anyone done this before? I am fed up of seeing some FPS games where an enemy is running at you and you shoot them in the leg and they are completely unphased by it. After seeing some gameplay and the pain mechanic in action I am actually pleased to see enemies holding their arms or legs in pain. Sure they are hard asses and will keep trying to kill you but it’s nice to see them experience pain.

So Rage looks like its going to one hell of a game. And before you guys out there say anything, this game was actually announced back in 2008 so pre dates Borderlands, so don’t start the whole Borderlands clone thing. Oh and unlike Duke Nukem Forever. Rage has a definite release date of September 2011. Thank god for that. It also got IGN’s game of E3 so its bound to be pretty good at least.

Garv

Before I dive straight into this review. I would just like to highlight that I have only played this game in single player. This game has been advertised as a co-op game as much as a single player game. But I have found that this game works damn well in single player, and here are my thoughts.

Cunningly dubbed as an RPS (Role Playing Shooter) Boarderlands, like any good game out there, throws you into the story line from the get go, there are four mercenaries, or mercs as they like to be called, on a bus they have just flown into a desolate and baron planet called Pandora to seek out something called the vault. Legend has it the Vault contains advanced alien weaponless with technology so advanced it will blow your mind, or indeed you enemies.

As the bus rolls on you get the choice to choose one of the mercs who have come along for the ride. You have the soldier named Roland, who is your classic, assault rifle and shot gun squaddy who most FPS fans are used to when playing things such as halo, duke nukem, doom, any FPS game under the sun. Then you have Lilth, the siren phase walker, If stealth and speed is your game, this is the chick you wanna be. If sniper rifles and range attacks are more your cuppa you will be be a lot happier playing as Mordecai. But if your a full on FPS guy who loves explosives and ripping people apart with your bare hands then take my advice and choose Brick.

Each of these four characters has a special skill that can be used, the soldier has a deployable turret, the siren can turn invisible and have a great increase in speed, the sniper has a friendly hawk like bird creature that will happily peck enemies eyes out and Brick, well he just goes absolutely nuts with his berserk mode and has an insane increase in melee attack and is slightly invunrable. All these skills last a limited amount of time before they conk out and have to regenerate again. This is your classic FPS gaming element, Quake had it with Quad Damage, Doom had it with Berserk packs and Nukem had it with an array of equipment top use, and for me it never gets old, there is nothing like have a short boost of power to get you out of a sticky situation.

This game does the FPS genre justice. It has the aiming system where you look down the barrel/sight, that we associate with games like Modern Warfare and FEAR. There is a huge amount of weapons to find, make and customize, kind of in the same vein as Bioshock. Hell it also has re-generating shields from the likes of Halo. Speaking of Halo, you remember how the vehicles in that game controlled? Mainly using the left stick to accelerate, reverse etc. Boarderlands uses the same set up here when it comes to it vehicles. So you can see Gear Box has taken inspiration from a lot of First Person Shooter games. I love it when a game developer does its research.

But as you are fully aware this is as much of an RPG game as it is an FPS game. As you can imagine this is a real time combat RPG. When aiming at an enemy you will get his/her/its health and shield bars and what level they are at so if you level 4 and your opponent is level 12. Run away. You are given experience for each kill, each mission you complete and for each of the huge ammo boxes that are hidden and scattered across Pandora. With each level up you gain skill points which you can assign to a skill tree. This skill tree is linked to both your characters special skill and your character his/her self. So if you play the game with the Soldier Roland, such as I did you will get a skill tree linked to you and the scorpion turret. With skill points going towards things like your health and ammo capacity, to your scorpion turrets power and regeneration time. You can also acquire skills that enable your turret to regenerate the players health and shield. So you really can have a good play with what skills you want to assign and how you want your character to grow. You can also customise your character to a curtain extent, by changing his/her colour and name. Its a nice little touch and can be done at any time but as you can probably gather, you can’t customise every aspect of their appearance like you can with say Fallout 3. But you can’t have everything.

Graphically this game takes the cell shaded approach to its visuals. In one word it looks fantastic. It is very stylised and some what refreshing to see the FPS point of view taking on that graphical style. Sure XIII did it back on the original Xbox, but to see a game of this generation do it is nice to see. There is a lot of detail in this game visuals, and really reminds me of the drawing style that graphic novels such as Spawn and The Darkness use. You get bugs and glitches every now and then in this game, but I have come to realise that huge games such as this and fallout. Your not going to get every single bug and glitch out of there because quite frankly, it is just to big.

I never though I would see the day that and FPS and an RPG would get on so well and produce a game such as this. I tried to come up with an FPS, RPG idea in my game design module back in uni and miserably faild. So thanks Gear Box and 2K, This is awesome!

Garv.

May I introduce Borderlands, a new game from Gearbox Software that combines First Person Shooting and Role Playing game into a nice combination in a post apocalyptic world. Yes basically the same idea as Fallout 3 has.  But in Borderlands you have class choices as opposed to bringing up your character through choices made throughout the game, like Fallout.Bborderlands also takes a cell shaded graphically style and I think but cannot be sure (so please correct me if I am wrong) it also has a more comedic outlook on postapocalyptic RPG survival.

Ok so lets take a look at the standards Fallout 3 has layed down. I loved Fallout 3 it was so new and diverse. It was following the same style as Oblivion, but in my opinion it took it a step further it took the idea of a postapocalyptic sci-fi shooter, added all the elements that make most RPG games take over your life. I was pretty flabbergasted that an FPS and an RPG could meld together so well. It was gritty, grimy gruesome and really gave you the feeling of kill or be killed in a savage world.

Now, Borderlands sounds to me that, it can hit all these marks. Ok so if you have not gathered already, I have not played it, and to be honest I was pretty gutted I didn’t get my hands on it at Eurogamer. What I really think that it is doing that sets it apart from Fallout is its comedic/light-hearted take on it. I dunno about you guys out there, but I really cannot take cell shaded games as seriously as, what I like to call, true graphic games. But with that said The game play sounds pretty damn good in my opinion. You get to choose from four different characters  a Soldier, a Hunter,  a Siren, and a Berserker. Each class has a different skill tree in game. This means throughout the game you gain skill points which you can apply to your skill tree to get character specific skills. Say if you are the Hunter, your skills in the skill tree will be composed of Revolvers, Gunslinging and Sniping. This in turn will give the entire game a great deal of replay value.

So each of these games are defiantly both RPG’s both thankfully they are FPS RPG’s in their own right. Fallout 3 has the gritty, grimy and somewhat mundane outlook on post apocalyptic life and survival. It also has a character system that is totally customisable and you can build it strictly from the ground up.

Borderlands to me on the other hand is more of a game that will focuses on the game play more than the story and character customisation. Making gamers out there pretty much choose a person and jump straight into the action. Kind of taking a Final Fantasy outlook on RPG games.

So Will Borderlands be the next Fallout 3? To be frank why would games want to be the next anything? Borderlands has enough unique elements that I think it will do very well on its own.

Garv