RAGE. A new game from id, under a fair bit of flack from the gaming community on the PC. Well I’ve been playing for a short while (An hour and a half or so) and honestly, its not terrible. In fact, its pretty damn good. Basic plot is that an asteroid (Apophis Wiki Page) impacts the planet. You, chosen to survive awake 106 years later in a wasteland. factions fighting, scares resources. You get the idea. Now go explore and shoot stuff!

I’ve been playing it on the PC. I won’t lie, my machine is no slouch, but its by no means top of the line any more. And if we look at the choices you have in the graphics menu (It has been patched so that the user has more control) I’m running pretty lean on the settings front.Saying that though, the game is pretty. Well…. I say pretty. The character design and the gun models are great. As are items you interact with. Problem is, the background megatextures lack a certain something. I’ll demonstrate it below with a couple of examples, but the increase in settings doesn’t seem to help.

Here we can see some amazing modelling and texturing on the NPC. However the ground and pipe textures lack the same detail, and are compressed. Its is particularly apparent in the second image below, on the floor where the character is standing.

There is the texture pop in issue that is apparent too. I’m playing with a Quad core, 4GB ram and an nVidia 260GTX running a beta driver, and after the RAGE patch it is less noticable, but still there. A shame, but far better than the launch state, where it was god awful (Yogscast Texture Pop-in Example).

Otherwise it is a fun game. In fact i’ll be heading back into the wasteland once i’ve written this to drive very fast and shoot some things. I suggest checking it out if you are intruged by it, much like I was. I watched some videos and decided it was worth my time. Overall an solid 8 given some of the misgivings it has had!