RAGE

RAGE is the kind of game that I'll often cite as an example of why you should wait for a game to be reduced in price before buying it, and how in many cases it's not that long of a wait. Released in October 2011 for the now all too common $60, by the Winter Sale of the same year it was down to $15. It didn't stop there, as during each of the major Steam sales during 2012 it was on sale for $5, or, to put it another way, less than 10% of the original price. So I decided it would be a good time to finally get around and try this game, in hopes of discovering just what it was that caused such a massive price drop, as Bethesda generally doesn't cut their prices very much on their titles (Skyrim, a year and a half later, is still full priced) unless they are some kind of flop, i.e. Brink.

The story for Rage is one that shouldn't be unfamiliar to really anyone. Earth was hit by an asteroid, but apparently there was enough warning that several Arks were built and scattered about in the hopes that when they opened the planet would be habitable again, and these survivors would be the seeds of a new world. Of course, as during any post apocalyptic game, it turns out that the life ending threat didn't do a terribly thorough job, and so you awaken into a world full of chaos, bandits, and a few attempts at civilization. Also, don't forget the required evil overlord group with superior technology and dubious connections to some kind of mutant threat. From there things take a pretty predictable course over the life of the game, as you complete jobs for various individuals, unlocking access to the next town, and eventually being recruited to join the resistance to overthrow said evil overlord.

You'll know when you're getting a quest in this game. All that's missing is the XP and quest rewards icons, thought I'd like to point out that it might make sense to give someone the armor before you send them into a dangerous bandit hideout.

After you're saved from murderous bandits by an apparently good natured settler, you'll be told that he really stirred up a hornets nest, and he needs your help to kill all the bandits, in the form of a quest. You'll also, if you spend time looking around the settlement, discover things like collectible cards for one of this game's many minigames, the store that you'll become all too familiar with to purchase ammo or construction parts, and someone that will train you in the use of the wingstick, which is just one of this game's constructible weapons you can make from parts you find or buy, after you've acquired the schematic, producing things like RC cars with bombs on them, or sentry turrets.

That makes this game anything but a pure and simple FPS, and even then things played very differently from what I've experienced in the past. The weapon choices are all pretty stereotypical, covering the basics such as pistol, shotgun, something that looks like a modified AK-47 for an assault rifle, and a sniper rifle. Add to those the silent killer that is the crossbow, and then round it out with a couple of weapons from the technologically superior Authority - rocket launcher, machine gun, and something like a chain gun - and you've got a decent selection of weaponry.

The crossbow isn't effective in this situation.

In addition to your firearms, there are several weapons or special ammunition you can craft. Crafting requires knowledge of a schematic, either found or purchased, and a collection of parts that you can likewise find or purchase. For a direct weapon, you're looking at something like the wingstick, which I guess could best be described as a boomerang on steroids, and with a limited homing system. It's something you can assigning to a quick slot, utilizing F1-4 and the Q keys to select and fire it. Other useful offensive weapons include things like the aforementioned RC bomb or sentry gun, as well as EMP grenades or, my personal favorite, the sentry bot, which is a walking machine gun that can jump up over obstacles and tackle, and then impale, enemies, which is great when they are hiding behind cover.  There is also a selection of special ammunition you can make, ranging from mind control arrows, high damage pistol rounds, or rockets you can fire from your shotgun. To round out what you can craft, you'll also discover some personal augmentations or otherwise useful items, like bandages, an infusion that increases your max health, or an item which can be used to access certain locked doors.

The enemies you'll face come in three different types. The most common enemy you'll come across are bandits. Pretty standard stuff here, since you're faced with an intelligent, armed foe. They can be tough to kill, a combination of the lack of power of your firearms in general (not counting special ammo), things like armor on later enemies, and it seemingly taking multiple headshots to kill anything in this game, which forced me to use the sniper rifle more often than the assault rifle. The Authority forces are more dangerous than your run of the mill bandits, since they are well armed, have better armor, and have access to powerful technology like force field shields. It's with the latter that EMP grenades come in handy, as well as some of your better weapons, like the authority machine gun with armor piercing rounds. Mutants, the third and final type of enemy, are probably the most dangerous. They are not very intelligent, and generally only attack with melee weapons, but they are very fast and agile. They can quickly swarm you, dodging out of your line of fire or leaping off walls like some kind of parkour champ, suddenly switching from charging at you at ground level to coming down on top of you. Thankfully mutants are pretty easily dispatched, but they are definitely something to be wary of.

This is about as close to a mutant as I'd ever want to get.

You can break the world of Rage down into a few parts. First, there are the towns that you can enter, which are filled with shops, minigames, side jobs, and other events worth taking note of. There are also something like instances or dungeons, subzones that you'll head into on certain quests, and are usually where you'll find bandits or mutants have made their lair. Connecting all of these is the final area, the wasteland. It is a somewhat large, open environment, though not one you'd really want to spend any time in, and, thanks to your vehicle, you don't have to. There are four different vehicles in the game, which you'll need to traverse the expanse of wasteland if you want to have a chance of surviving bandit attacks, or generally making it from point A to B quickly, since there isn't a quick travel option in this game. You'll also encounter plenty of quests that require you to use your vehicle, or participate in races where you can earn special points that can be used to purchase upgrades such as better armor, weapons, better handling tires, and so forth. The races are only partly optional, as every now and then the main quest line will stop unless you win a special race. They can be fun in certain modes though, such as the rocket rally, which grants you points for capturing certain beacons or less points for destroying your competitors.

Racing isn't the only bonus for those completionists out there. Rage also includes a collection of minigames and special secrets, in the form of collectibles or hidden rooms. Some minigames are more basic, like a simon says game. Some are just a pain in the butt, like one that requires you to stab a knife between your fingers to hit a highlighted area, which is fine until you get to stage five which uses a randomized pattern rather than the set one of the first four levels. The most involved game is a card game that requires you to collect cards hidden throughout the game, and then use those cards to build a special deck. There is this whole system of ranged cards vs. melee cards, shields, healers, and so forth, which makes it pretty fun, and, as with all the minigames, a great way to earn some extra cash to feed your ammunition habit, since enemies often don't drop enough ammo to keep you stocked up. Another way to earn quick cash is by finding some of the secrets that litter the game. These can come in the form of special items, such as a Vault Boy bobblehead, that reference other iD and Bethesda games that sell for a huge amount of money, or just hidden rooms that are tributes to Doom or the devs. These types of things can be a fun little distraction from the rest of the game, and generally work to your benefit.

You'll do the races if you want to upgrade your ride. Also, that's Claudia Black from Farscape and Stargate SG-1. Other voices in this game that I recognized include John Goodman and the guy that plays the German fish on American Dad.

Okay, so that's the general idea of what to expect in Rage - shooter gameplay where the enemies are a bit tougher than normal, augmented by a crafting system to help you out in tough spots where you're pitted against either armored enemies or very fast ones, all capped off with a quasi open world and some vehicle combat and minigames to add some variety. Now it's time to tear all those notions of this being a good apart with criticism.

First off, the technical issues. These have plagued the game since release, and unfortunately have never been totally addressed. I run an nvidia card, so my issues were limited to single digit framerates for about a minute whenever I would enter the first wasteland zone, which is the area that connects all the instances and the main city for the first half of the game. That means every time I zoned out of the city or instance for any reason, which includes all the quests and side jobs that take place just outside the city gates or every race, I would have to deal with the massive drop in framerate. Furthermore, there are very few graphics options, and while there are benchmarks to help you determine if you can run a setting or two on high, the real nitty gritty stuff that you would expect to be able to mess with just isn't there. You used to be able to alter those things through the use of console commands, but apparently there was a patch released which disabled the console entirely, so you would first have to hunt down an unpatched exe. Thankfully I never had to deal with some of the other issues that litter the Steam forums for this game, because some of those do sound pretty bad.

These are your graphics options. There were plenty of useful console commands that you could use to improve your experience, with everything from an increased FOV to the ability to disable the HUD while taking screenshots.

Assuming you don't have any game breaking technical issues, or you can just force through them like I did with the whole wasteland fps drop, there are plenty of problems with the fundamental gameplay itself. From previews of the game I originally got the idea that Rage was more like Fallout 3 with bits of Borderlands thrown in, mostly in the form of vehicles and mutants that reminded me of the pizza cutter wielding bandits. Now I would say that isn't the case, and the game is much more of the pacing and style of Borderlands with some of the crafting system and overtones from Fallout 3 thrown in. You, like Borderlands, work around a central open world hub that covers just a portion of the game, with various instances and a city that require a loading screen to access located around that open area. As you progress, you'll head to each corner of that open world, doing the tasks associated with that area before you can move on, all in a very linear fashion. There are, unfortunately, only two open world hubs, if you will, that grace this game, with an equal number of large cities, in a way making it akin to playing the first two zones from Borderlands, rather than the huge open world in Fallout 3. The likeness to Fallout 3 comes from the general themes of Vault, I mean Ark, survivor coming out into a twisted world and setting out on a path to make things right, though we have no idea what our character's motivations are, unlike Fallout 3 where the goal is the noble one of finding your father. There is also the issue of crafting items, of which there are 19 schematics, but they are generally ammunition or upgrades of a previous schematic, such as the superior RC bomb or sentry turret, effectively cutting down the number of truly unique, and useful, items you can make. Sorry, no Rock-It Launcher here.

For some reason this guy reminds me of Moxxi from Borderlands.

To be completely honest, I get the feeling that Rage just doesn't know what kind of game it wants to be. It's not a pure enough FPS, what with a defibrillator built into your chest to revive you if you ever get overwhelmed, or just the way it takes a clip or two to kill most of the enemies in the game, thus falling into the whole "hide behind all cover" mentality that many games now require, though there are bandages that can be used to heal you, which might be useful if, say, the HUD included information like your current health beyond just a bloody ring when things get bad. It has some RPG elements, such as crafted gear, three different outfits for different bonuses, side missions for additional cash, and so on. Then there are other things like all these minigames, including the rage inducing Five Finger Fillet (they type of game where you have to stab your knife between your fingers), or the races which come in a few varieties. The problem is that Rage does all of these things, but it doesn't really do any of them particularly well, or have enough of them that they feel like they are what the game is really focused on. Even the story is incredibly shallow, with no real explanation about what makes you so special, why you join the resistance, the motivations behind the Authority, and why you are apparently the key to salvation. In fact, there are a few points that are made by others in the game that would seem pretty contradictory, such as one other Ark survivor telling you that most Ark survivors join the Authority, or, later, when the same individual explains that each survivor's data drive is only a small piece of the puzzle of larger data, but then it turns out that yours is pretty much the key to everything. That doesn't even cover things like how the game is so small there are only two cities, maybe three quest hubs, and a handful of side jobs which usually just ask you to go back and repeat one of the instances you had to clear out for the story, making the game as long as it is only because you repeat so much of what you had to do anyways. But hey, at least the graphics are beautiful, right?

See, beautiful, but in a people trying to scrape by in a city built in a subway station sort of way.

I could really go on for a while about how, in the end, Rage just feels more like a mediocre game with a AAA veneer than anything else I've played in a while, citing things like how the game seems like it was destined to be this long fulfilling adventure, but due to budget constraints it got axed down to about 10% of what it needs to be to live up to the whole Borderlands/Fallout 3 large world post apocalyptic vibe it's trying to set up, criticize the lack of certain features like a limited HUD that doesn't include your health or a map when you're inside instances, or point out how it took a year for the first DLC, which adds the ability to go back and replay through parts of the world you might have missed, to come out, which is still better than the promised mod tools, which took almost a year and a half, but maybe it'd just be better to point out that now I can see why this game goes on sale for only $5, and I feel that the $15 I shelled out wasn't worth the experience. It put in about 25 hours, but that's with getting every single player achievement except for beating the game on certain difficulties, so you could easily chop off a couple of hours if you're not back tracking to collect special cards, looking for hidden jump points, and basically being the college intern of the wastelands. In the end, this game is really just a wash of an experience - 5 out of 10.

So, the final breakdown:

Score: 5/10

Suggested Price: $5

R.U.S.E.

I decided to give R.U.S.E. a try because I wanted to mix things up a bit, and an RTS that tries to do something different seemed like the perfect way to fill that niche, though from here on out I'll refer to it as Ruse, because that's far less of a pain to type. As a personal aside, I generally don't go for RTS games because I play them far too slowly to succeed, preferring to build up a strong army over time, rather than quickly strike out with a few units in many different groups, yet found that Ruse worked very well, and played quite quickly, meaning that I didn't find myself spending a couple of hours on each level, like I might with other games. However, like all the games I review, I'm just covering the single player portion of the game, and while the mechanics and things will carry over, similar to an ESRB warning, online results may vary.

Ruse is set during World War II. The campaign follows the career of one promotion minded destined to be General by the name of Joe Sheridan. Though initially a low ranking officer in Africa, his tactical genius is quickly discovered when he meets a British intel officer by the name of Andrew Campbell. Unfortunately, Sheridan is not a patient man, and has a pretty high opinion of his abilities, so much so that he chafes at the thought of taking a subordinate role to other tactician Generals. Eventually, your superior has a fall from grace, where it also becomes apparent that someone has been leaking the Allies' military strategy to a very capable German officer, which sets the stage for this whole head to head dynamic when Sheridan is promoted, as the two have a history that spans the course of the war. The story gets wrapped up pretty nicely at the end of the war in Europe when you find out just who the leak is, and what his motivations are, though given the few characters in the game, it's pretty obvious who is bad news by about the third cut scene.

To drive home the "You're a Commanding Officer" point, the battlefield is actually a 3D map on a table, in a tactical room in some bunker (which you can see when you crane your neck), and units are represented with tokens.

The campaign does start during the earlier years of the war, and covers locations like North Africa, Italy, France, and of course Germany, over a total of 23 missions. Not only do your enemies and the environments change, ranging from the deserts of Africa to the beautiful countryside of Holland, where you're pitted against the remnants of Italian forces that refuse to surrender or veteran German soldiers, but you'll also discover that the devs attempted to match the evolution of war technology with the correct period. For example, as the war progresses, the Americans, who you predominately have control of, supersede Lee tanks with Shermans, B17 bombers are introduced, and some of the odder units of war, like the Calliope, make their way onto the battlefield. It may seems small, but it's a great way of making the war feel like this dynamic thing, as well as an attempt at being somewhat historical, but that goes away when people start talking about nukes way before the first one had been used.

What you're probably more interested in is the actual gameplay. I'll give Ruse credit for trying out a few new things that I haven't seen before. The first is the game's good rock-paper-scissors system for deterring the relative strengths and weaknesses of various units, and the way that the terrain or scouting units drastically change that balance. Units can be broken down into the following categories: Infantry, Armor, Anti-Armor, Artillery, Anti-Air, and Aircraft. Here things are basically how you would expect, with Infantry being vulnerable to the more powerful armor, but not ineffective against non-combat units like Anti-Armor or Anti-Air, Armor being strong against everything but Aircraft and Anti-Armor, and Aircraft superiority challenged only by other aircraft or strong Anti-Air units.

Units, when you don't have a direct bead on them via recon or another unit's line of sight, are shown as chips on the map, with a distinction between heavy and light units. This acts as a sort of fog of war system.

That, however, would make things far too simple, so you can utilize terrain and a few other mechanics to really alter the flow of battle. Infantry are weak when exposed out in the open, but while concealed in a woods or hidden in a city, though not actually inside a building as you could do in Company of Heroes, they gain an incredible combat bonus through the use of surprise attacks. This can be utilized against any land based unit, but what it does is make Infantry extremely potent against Armor, with the ability to destroy tanks in a volley or two, which, when added to the existing strengths against all other land based units makes Infantry some of your best units. Additionally, any other unit that can enter the woods gains this same combat bonus, such as certain lighter forms of Anti-Armor or Anti-Air, allowing relatively few units to hold off a much stronger force.

There are a couple of ways you can counter this however. You can't just barge into those areas with a tank, as they either cannot enter those areas, or in the case of a city, are so vulnerable that it wouldn't be wise. If you know roughly where a unit is, as you do get a brief glimpse of the enemy when your units are attacked, you might try some of the artillery units that are capable of firing on unseen targets and then just hope for the best. Eventually you would destroy the cover, but that would really take too long. So instead, you'll want to use one of the recon units. These come in a couple of flavors. For the Americans you initially have the Willis jeep, which can latter be replaced with the armed and armored Greyhound, both of which can head off road into the woods, and the recon air unit. All recon units have an incredibly large sight area, and can detect hidden units, allowing Armor, fighter-bombers, and all your other units to safely target those guys. Additionally, some units require recon to target an enemy at all, such as the fighter-bombers.

Recon has a large sight area, as denoted by the outer white circle. It is impacted by obstacles, and can become far less effective if used poorly. Additionally, this Greyhound has an attack range, which is the inner blue circle.

You'll have to develop your own strategies for dealing with things, but throughout the campaign I found that it was generally a great strategy to stack a few Anti-Armor and Anti-Aircraft units under the cover of a forest, with those units protected with a Greyhound for it's recon ability and a few Infantry units for extra protection. If I could, some of the long range artillery or a few fighter-bombers would be kept near by, just in case my enemy ever got the bright idea to try and scout my position and then take me out with some long range units.

Generally, the unit mechanics are all pretty cool. Many can be upgraded during the later parts of the game, by expending some of your cash resources to unlock new units, such as replacing Infantry with the elite Rangers, or the aforementioned Lee tanks with Shermans, though this only applies to new units and not existing ones. Other units can be unlocked, though they don't replace any previous unit, such as fighter-bombers or the Long Tom artillery, which seems like it's capable of hitting anything on the map with very little movement. This makes for a much simpler system for acquiring new or upgraded units than some other games take, since you don't have to build an armory, research two armor upgrades, and then build a research facility, and research new missiles, and then upgrade your factory to build the next unit.

The downside to upgrading is the initial cost, both in terms of resources and time lost, but generally the trade off is worth it, such as when you unlock the B17 bombers, which are also capable of air-to-air defense, rather than being sitting ducks for enemy fighters.

You do still need to construct some buildings though. Units are all produced at their respective bases, such as Barracks or Airfields for Infantry and Aircraft, respectively. You can also set up Anti-Air, Anti-Armor, or Machine Gun Nests, all as buildable structures. While most games require you to build some sort of worker unit that then goes out and spends lots of time constructing a building, Ruse follows an entirely different route. Instead, once you decide where to construct a building, a truck leaves your Headquarters, your main base, and travels along the roads to that point. Once there, your building is erected in about 2 seconds. It doesn't matter if its a unit construction building, a defensive building, or a supply depot that generates the resources you'll need in this game, all build nearly instantly. The down side is any building en route is extremely vulnerable, as are the supply trucks that bring resources back from supply depots to your HQ, so you'll want to make sure an area is well protected enough that you don't risk wasting resources. If you happen to get close enough to a truck en route with an Infantry unit, you might want to pass on actually destroying it, and instead use your Infantry to capture the completed building, which grants you full control over it, though it does destroy that unit in the process. Just be careful, because your enemy can do the same thing to you.

Some well placed lighter units can hold a choke point against much tougher enemies using the woods for cover, as you can tell from all the smoldering tank shells.

While the way Ruse handles buildings, unit production, low build times, and many other aspects of the game are very nice, what really makes the game unique are the ruses. A ruse is a trick you can use to either grant yourself more information about your enemy, confound your enemy, or alter the way units behave. They are as follows: Decryption let's you know your enemy's movement plan, such that when a unit under the effects of Decryption is ordered to move to a new location, you'll see an arrow that represents the destination, allowing you to prepare. Spy reveals all the units in the area that aren't hidden in woods, letting you know what they actually are, rather than just the blank markers they are normally denoted by. Radio Silence hides your units from the enemy, making them invisible unless there is a line of sight detection. Camouflage Net does the same thing, but for buildings, and you're advised to use that when there are incoming bombers or artillery. Decoy Building creates a false base, and if an enemy Infantry unit attempts to capture it, that unit will die. Decoy Offensive launches a fake attack on an area of the map, though these false units are easily destroyed, and it will alert the commander that those are decoy units. Reverse Intel changes the map markers for light and heavy units, such that it will look like there are only a few Infantry approaching, until you realize they are all tanks. Blitz increases the movement speed of all units in the area, including your en route buildings and supply trucks. Terror is a propaganda campaign that increases the likelihood the enemy units will flee in battle, called being routed, which occurs normally when health is very low and results in loss of unit control and low movement speed. Fanaticism counters this and orders your units to fight to the death. Your ability to use ruses recharges automatically over time, and you can only have two active per sector, a subdivision of the map, at any one time, so you'll have to choose wisely, though the proper use of a ruse can change the course of a battle.

You'll know what the sector boundaries are when you attempt to use a ruse, or you zoom way out.

Generally, Ruse is a pretty good game. The game is quickly paced, but that works well because you don't put tons of time into doing research or waiting five minutes for a single unit to build. The rock-paper-scissors system is well balanced,  though if your enemy has a formation of Anti-Air, Anti-Armor, a recon, and a few tanks around for good measure, well, that can be a tough nut to crack. Despite of all that, I do have a few criticisms, though some of the portions of the game I disliked the most, such as the minimalist HUD being so much so that it doesn't display the hotkeys to build units, or that units are automatically deselected after being given an order, which can be problematic if, say, you realize that your units are walking into an ambush, and since they move at different speeds, it becomes an issue to reselect all of them, are all issues that can be addressed by fully exploring the options menu, something I discovered only as I went to double check something before posting this review. So, close call on looking like the idiot I am there, and I may have even helped someone else out. That leaves the biggest complaint at "Ubisoft," including having to log into their Uplay service to play the game, though at least this one doesn't launch the Uplay client first from Steam, and then allow you to launch the actual game, like Assassin's Creed 2 does. Also, I would have liked to see the ability to capture certain Anti-Armor or Anti-Air units, like Company of Heroes did, since you can already capture buildings, but I suppose that's just wishful thinking. Basically, if you have an issue with things being a little too different from most RTS interfaces, check options.

I put a really good amount of time into this game, as it took me 22 hours to get through the campaign, which includes time to get all the secondary objectives, and quite a few failures later in the game. That is pretty short when compared to how I usually fare in an RTS (for example, I'm playing Supreme Commander right now, and after 3 hours I'm still in the second mission), but the pace of the game was good, and when combined with things like the only having to manage one resource, quick unit deployment, and so on, I'd suggest this as a nice introduction to the RTS genre because it is so easy to play, unlike some games that require hours to build your ultimate weapons. You can expect missions where you have to hold out for a certain amount of time, others where you must complete an objective within a timeline, ones where you are granted only a few units and no ability to make more. The story is nothing to write home about, though it does seem like there would be a second game that would take place in the Pacific based on some closing lines, though Japan was added as a playable nation in a DLC. If you've got the desire, I'd say Ruse is a game worth picking up when it's in the $5 or so range, maybe even up to $10. As for the quality of the experience itself, I'd say that, give how easy it is to get into it and start playing, Ruse is very good, rating a 8 out of 10.

So, the final breakdown:

Score: 8/10

Suggested Price $5-10