-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
RAGE 2 - Review Thread
- Thread starter vestan
- Start date
Welp, after spending the late morning and afternoon cruising through various reviews, this game definitely looks like it would work really well for me.
I just need a definitive analysis on performance for Pro/X. I'm in if it's a pretty sustained (doesn't need to be 100%) 60fps. Will literally go to the store and buy on confirmation.
It does sound like that might be too good to be true, though... If analysis proves that hearsay, I'll wait for a sale, but Rage 2 is definitely a game I want to play in the future.
I just need a definitive analysis on performance for Pro/X. I'm in if it's a pretty sustained (doesn't need to be 100%) 60fps. Will literally go to the store and buy on confirmation.
It does sound like that might be too good to be true, though... If analysis proves that hearsay, I'll wait for a sale, but Rage 2 is definitely a game I want to play in the future.
sounds great
won´t say anything else than: play it first...
Probably something I'll pick up at some point next gen. Really think I might just avoid all big massive open world games until then at this point.
Just please have better image quality than Just Cause 4 on it's release, because that game was a horror show in that regard. I realize it was a different team of Avalanche but the company as a whole should have been embarrased to let a game release in 2019 looking like that.
Haven't played it yet and won't until tomorrow night but I know what the game is and what it has in it and quite simply, it's right up my alley. I will literally have a blast with Rage 2. I love Mad Max (9/10 for me) and played the original Rage last summer (8/10 for me), gave Far Cry 5/New Dawn an 8/10 each and quite simply, I can just see it from all the gameplay I have watched, an easy overall 9/10 for me with the weak spot being the story but im not playing Rage 2 for the story so it being average isn't going to matter. The only complaint that I have had is the speed of the car combat. It needed to be increased a notch or two because Mad Max's car combat was fast and fluid where as in Rage 2 it looks fluid but slow as a turtle.
Eh reviews are not always right Reviewers loved Horizon and i found it to be a boring slog and only enjoyed the story. Where as reviewers were harsh on Days Gone and i loved every bit of it from the story to the gameplay. So its not always good to trust the reviews 100%
You cannot possibly know if it's a 9/10 yet... but I get that you're excited.
Trust me. I know. Excellent gunplay, shooting mechanics and upgrades. Check. Outposts and camps. Check. Activities and side quests. Check. I know the game is an Ubisoft style open world and I have played Avalanche Studios games before (Mad Max and JC3) so I know exactly what to expect and the game simply appeals and caters to what im looking for. I'll post my review when I 100% complete the game so two to three weeks if that.
This viewpoint has never, ever made any sense to me.
First off, I'm going to hazard a guess and say that most of us grew up with systems where "5/10", aka "getting half the things wrong" is a very, very bad thing, not just something which is "fine" or "middling". Doing half the things incorrectly is not the mark of a good professional in any system, anywhere, outside of baseball.
Second, a ~25 point score range - 75-100 - is plenty big (or 40 with 60-100, or 20 with 80-100, or whatever). There's already plenty of nuance that can be captured in such a range, and if that feels too limited, it's just as sensible to want a 750-1000 point scale; the numbers themselves aren't the point, and if it's about the context of what those numbers represent, well, see my first point.
Thirdly, It can help split our sense of ratings into tiers based on quartiles. We (and the rest of the gaming world) only really talk about games which we already know are going to be fine. We know it's going to be competent. That's just assumed. We don't really ever much talk about the 2/10s, the 5/10s, because why would we? We necessarily place more value talking about the stuff where, baseline, we can guess pretty consistently that they'll at least have a rough sense of what they're doing. So by splitting it up into 25/20 block point segments, we can say "oh, ok, the 75-100, those are what we should actually focus on; 50-74, those are the ones that got kinda close but still screwed up a pretty good amount", etc etc.
Last edited:
Rage 2 looks fun to play. But I don't feel confiden that I'll play much of it, so I'll wait until I find it cheap.
After 2 hours, I can already tell your mileage with this game will mirror that of Mad Max. Structurally, it's nearly identical. They took what they had and bolted on a ton more mechanics and upgrade systems onto it, but the only other game I've ever played that feels like this is Mad Max. It's that game redone as a first-person shooter, instead of an Arkham-style beat-em-up.
WTF did they do to the shadows on the enhanced platforms? The lower res, less accuracy shadows on the regular consoles at least look stable. The enhanced shadows on the X and the Pro look to have a ton of break up. Or is the shadow detail setting actually lower on the enhanced consoles to hit 60fps?
Man. These reviews make it sound like it's exactly made for me. All I wanna do some times is shoot things mindlessly. Let's go.
Luckily no time until school's out E3 weekend. Oughta be about $40 by then, enough savings to buy expansion too. Looks fun.
Luckily no time until school's out E3 weekend. Oughta be about $40 by then, enough savings to buy expansion too. Looks fun.
Yeah but this falls down when you have a large percentage of people who actually consider 79/100 and lower as bad
Look in this thread, look at the Days Gone thread
There are a certain percentage of people who see anything under 80 as bad, not even average, not even decent, but outright bad
Nevermind when people lose their minds over things like a Zelda or Uncharted game getting a score they deem too low
If anything, the main issue is putting a score on a game is always going to remove nuance from the actual written review/opinion, and agregating scores is an order of magnitude worse when it comes to losing context. If 10 people give a game a 5/10 and 10 people give the same game 10/10, it gets a 7.5/10, which is a score likely to put off a lot of people who would probably have liked it, and cause a lot of people to give it a go only for them to hate it
Can't have everything. While the game looks good on all consoles, base models are beginning to show their age in terms of clarity, a big difference. Looks like they sacrificed shadows for higher framerate and clarity.
Looks like it's lower, that in combination with both the X and Pro being 1080p despite the ~40% power gap has turned me off the game.
It absolutely does. When a game like Days Gone sells at the top spot in Japan of all places, two weeks in a row then you know there is a divide.
'Rage 2' Is 'Doom' Meets 'Mad Max' Meets Mediocrity
A compromised implementation of fundamentally good ideas that never seems to come together.
--Waypoint/Rob Zacny
It'd definitely be worth clicking through to the full article to read the rest of Rob's impressions. I particularly like the way hejuxtaposes the game against both Doom and Mad Max, from the perspective of someone who enjoyed elements of both. Shooting that can't match up to Doom's, mixed with car combat that doesn't come close to the best of Mad Max's, all wrapped up within a familiar and dull open world structure, and a story that essentially goes nowhere and does nothing of consequence.
It sounds like there might still be something here if you really want a new open world shooter with decent basic mechanics and nothing else, but I don't think I'm gonna be giving it a go. Better things to do and all that.
EDIT:
Ah, sorry, didn't check to see if the page had updated while I was writing!
A compromised implementation of fundamentally good ideas that never seems to come together.
It feels pretty great at first, and so do the special abilities you get to help overcome the odds, though if you haven't extensively hunted for them it's possible you just have one or two go-to powers like "shatter," which sends a blast of energy that strips off armor and knocks them back. It's a good crowd-control tool, and that's really the main thing in Rage because every fight just goes full-tilt until you've killed every single enemy nearby.
Finally, you get the notification that the location is complete, you get a small pile of money for upgrades and purchases, and it's over. You open the map, and see what other locations remain. You set a marker, and then head back to your car.
If only Rage 2 existed in a vacuum, its every moment might not remind you of the better games that it borrows from. The fast, gracefully violent combat would feel like a welcome return to the classic shooter formula that id Software pioneered and perfected across the 1990s, except that we already experienced this back in 2016 with the new edition of Doom which, frankly, did it better. Driving across the broken desert wastelands in armored muscle cars, shooting it out with roving enemy convoys, is kind of novel but it's also a pale shadow of what Avalanche Studios accomplished in its own Mad Max game in 2015. The entire campaign structure, where you bounce between a map covered in activities and hub locations where you get mission from thinly-written goofball characters, is reminiscent of the modern Far Cry series in all the wrong ways and few of the good ones.
--Waypoint/Rob Zacny
It'd definitely be worth clicking through to the full article to read the rest of Rob's impressions. I particularly like the way hejuxtaposes the game against both Doom and Mad Max, from the perspective of someone who enjoyed elements of both. Shooting that can't match up to Doom's, mixed with car combat that doesn't come close to the best of Mad Max's, all wrapped up within a familiar and dull open world structure, and a story that essentially goes nowhere and does nothing of consequence.
It sounds like there might still be something here if you really want a new open world shooter with decent basic mechanics and nothing else, but I don't think I'm gonna be giving it a go. Better things to do and all that.
EDIT:
Ah, sorry, didn't check to see if the page had updated while I was writing!
Last edited:
There are a few examples, but I think they align much more than they don't.
Ehhh... PC it is then; IQ is waaaay too soft and the dips in performance are not bad (depending on platform of course)... I understand why they choose to stick to a 1080p but I'd would liked the option to switch to a 4k (checkerboard or otherwise) and 30fps given the fact it isn't rock solid.
And I am definitely in the camp of knowing and understanding this game doesn't do anything particularly well or does anything new and exciting; I'm not gonna lie, I just want to blow up random sh*t.
Last edited:
Saves me the $60
Maybe in your world where a game is only worth your time during a "deep sale".
This rhetoric is in abundance on this forum, but again, this is a forum and hardly represents the true numbers of what fans truly like.
Have you counted all the games this year and what Era predictions were?
I don't think they'll work out like you think to paint it accurately as "in abundance".
Looks average as expected. Gonna pick it up in a few years for 5 bucks. Library fodder pretty much.
I've reached a time in my life where I value my time a bit more than when I was younger. Outside of few select games from my favourite devs, anything that isn't raising the bar and not scoring in the high 80s/90s is not really worth my time and money in the year or two of its release. I'll pick it up later for cheap but it's probably gonna sit in my library anyways.
The market is huge and saturated, you really need to impress to get me to spend a good chunk of/or the full price.
I've reached a time in my life where I value my time a bit more than when I was younger. Outside of few select games from my favourite devs, anything that isn't raising the bar and not scoring in the high 80s/90s is not really worth my time and money in the year or two of its release. I'll pick it up later for cheap but it's probably gonna sit in my library anyways.
The market is huge and saturated, you really need to impress to get me to spend a good chunk of/or the full price.
Last edited:
I'm not sure it does. These games get middling reviews because they're middling titles. You can still have fun with them, but that doesn't mean those flaws aren't still there. Have you even played this game to know the reviews are so inaccurate?
They're actually totally fine and a good predictor of game quality. "But ________ has a low metacritic and is actually good! Surely this anecdote proves they're totally worthless!"
Same here. I think I could have actually overlooked some of the by-the-numbers open world design if the combat looked more frantic and engaging. In the QL the encounters are over just as quickly as they began - would have loved to see more overwhelming numbers and danger. Everything just seemed so empty...
For a critic like myself who actually believes that "6 = Good", they're a massive pain in the ass.
It sounds like this game structurally is basically Mad Max, except fixing the one thing that's completely unpalatable about Mad Max(the me-too Arkham combat).
That's basically enough for me since something that scratches the Bulletstorm itch has been a long time coming.
That's basically enough for me since something that scratches the Bulletstorm itch has been a long time coming.
I agree with Jeff's statement about the abilities; sure, cooldowns decreases can be obtained, but they should have leaned in more on AWESOME looking abilities -- hell maybe even to a point where you can rely on using them as oppose to guns most of the time. Also, more active/interesting enemy AI/encounters.
"Score aggregates are just plain trash, unless they give great score to games I like."
Ftfy.
This is the narrative more and more I share the exact same sentiment regarding Horizon and Days Gone. I can't wait to play Days Gone each day however Horizon is boring.
But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Not only have we long be conditioned to see things under 80 as bad, breaking it up in weighted quartiles/quintiles/whatever you want is helpful for parsing larger amounts of info, while still allowing for as much granular nuance as anyone could want. If someone can find that half the things in a game are bad, and someone else can find that none of the things in a game are bad, yeah, a 7.5 sounds about right to me. Numbers are a way to save time when assessing quality, and frankly, the modern scoring structure that games use (connection to things like bonuses aside) works pretty great.
If someone wants to go around saying that being in the mathematical middle (a coldly clinical approach which I mostly see from people who otherwise decry quantifying quality) - a 5 - is what the mark of a middling game, go nuts I guess, but don't expect others to use that same system, because it doesn't make sense. Having "half of everything was good and half of everything was bad" equal "squarely in the middle" isn't how society works, it isn't how quality works, it doesn't allow for any more range of nuance that the "7.5=middling" system lacks, and it doesn't consider the true full scope of just how bad things can truly get.
Last edited:
For a game as crazy as Rage 2 portrays itself, how the hell can it end up having bland characters? lol
Um...You got it wrong but alright.
I've got no dogs in this race or any other.
Apart from the fact that my statement was solely to relay the actual experiences people have had, and not whether I myself necessarily agree with them, this just sounds like the classic 'Of course the people in the OT are positive about a game...' dismissal that is trotted out on this forum all too often and is frankly just tired at this point.
The point of that part of my post you quoted was to simply observe that the disparity between critical consensus and audience consensus, especially outside the forum, has become more and more common with more games recently. Whether I am on either side for those specific games is immaterial to the discussion, even if I personally HAVE been on the opposing end of a critical consensus for many games from this generation and prior.