Rage 2 Review

"All of the Anger!"

Campaign

May 16, 2019 at 2:22pm

Sometimes it’s nice to jump into a game and just be able to blast things for awhile. That’s Rage 2, a gory and very visceral title that holds nothing back. It’s an interesting shooter as it presents a mostly open world environment that funnels into a linear style during regular missions. This sequel takes place quite a fair bit of time after the events of the first and follows a different society.

Things have changed and people have moved on, you get a good recap on this at the start. Once the initial recap is done you’re right into things and its basically straight action from that point. This is great as there’s almost never a dull moment. You’ll work through a number of core missions, but then it sort of lightens up.
Rage 2 Review Xbox Wallpaper Screenshot
Once it lightens up the game takes a turn towards that typical spot where you need to do side missions in order to access the core narrative again. I really hate these parts in open world games and in this situation it entirely killed the flow of the action. At the same time it did pad the experience a bit more. It also wasn’t too painful to work through, just blowing up some bandit dens or taking out checkpoints.

They have a fair bit of side activities to do, but they’re largely repetitive in nature across the regions. There’s a decent variety in the side content with bounties, or other tasks and even road based situations to compete in. I enjoyed the story for sure, it had some neat characters and some fun missions. The dialogue was excellent, you get to pick male or female for the character voice. I selected the latter as I thought she had more punk and that fits into this type of game, it was delivered well throughout.

Gameplay

Rage 2 is a largely great looking game, with the Xbox One X you’re getting 1080p at 60fps. This is great for those that love the smooth frame rates, but others like myself enjoy resolution options. With this lower resolution it doesn’t necessarily pop, but it’s still filled with weird and fun colors. There’s also a lot of density and destruction present here. There are things to blow up, piles of enemies to blast apart and lots of terrain to drive. When you’re racing around you really get to see a sense of destruction as the car breaks the terrain into pieces, for the most part.

I felt the vehicles could have handled a bit better out there. When you’re driving along it also makes the world feel somewhat small at times. When you’re first going out in the barren landscape it feels massive with a great draw distance, yet once you’ve been to places it doesn’t quite seem like that. This is furthered by two of the areas being given little focus until right at the end of the story. Going back to the shooter aspects, it’s just fun. It doesn’t try to complicate things, you get some badass weapons and you just get to destroy things. There’s a solid variety of enemies present, I would have liked to see more development for them though lore wise. You get so many neat guns, various extra weapons and an element of creativity in how you destroy things.

This is further advanced with deep skill and perk trees in order to enhance your character. These can do wild things for your combative options in the world as you basically gain supernatural abilities. I did notice performance wise that the menu had lag which was odd, it is well presented though. The spaces you fight in are very interesting within Rage 2. You get this large open world to explore, and are then funneled into more linear segments during main quests. This makes sense for the type of game this is and it works well. There’s some biome variation present, the swamps were super cool looking. Just a great mix of desolation and remnants of a lost society in this one.
Rage 2 Xbox Review

The Conclusion

Rage 2 is an adrenaline filled joy ride filled with carnage and essentially non-stop action. It’s just a lot of fun to play, and really enjoyable. I didn’t like the pause to push players towards side missions however, killed the pacing and made it somewhat boring for a period of my play time. This didn’t take too long, but at the same time I just want to stick with the narrative. I thought they could have perhaps taken this game further story wise.

The core game felt a tad limited in this regard, it’s still a solid play time yet I wanted more from it. The open world is filled with side activities, but these can be largely repetitive at times. They really nailed the gun elements here and the powers are fun, I also thought the skill system was excellent. This was a lot of fun to shoot things in and it delivers what it aims to provide in terms of gameplay. A really strange post-post apocalyptic world that shines in many ways with very neat locations.

Read our Far Cry: New Dawn Review
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Rage 2 Review on Xbox One X
Review Code Provided by 47

Rating Overall: 7.2

Gamerheadquarters Reviewer Jason Stettner