Rage (video game)

They were going to name it Apathy, but it just didn't test as well.

Go for burial. Atlas control signing off. May we live to see another day.

A First-Person Shooter-slash-Driving Game hybrid by Id Software released on October 4, 2011, RAGE is based on the idTech 5 engine and set on Earth in the 2135, over a hundred years after a collision with the real-life asteroid 99942 Apophis. The player is cast as a survivor who awakens from cryogenic preservation to explore a post-apocalyptic world populated by mutants and raiders.

Early gameplay videos focused on the vehicular combat aspect of the game, leading to speculation that id was Playing Against Type by releasing a non-FPS game. More recent information clarified that the game is primarily an FPS with significant racing, free-driving, and RPG elements. And yes, comparisons to Borderlands are inevitable.

Tropes used in RAGE include:

Abandoned Hospital: One of the earliest and creepiest levels takes place in one of these.
Abnormal Ammo: Almost every gun has special types of ammo aside from it's standard type, with a variety of effects. It can be as simple as armor-piercing rounds, or as outlandish as dynamite-rigged crossbow bolts.
After the End
The Alcoholic: A whole bandit gang of them, who are named the "Wasted" clan.
Anticlimax Boss: One of the most recurring reviewer complaints. By the time the player has reached Capitol Prime, they've fought a towering mutant colossus, which has been clearly modified by Authority tech. For added difficulty, it is only vulnerable to the rocket launcher at certain times. And for the final battle...the player fights several waves of regular sized mutants, who have been clearly modified by Authority tech but easily dispatched by Sentries, Turrets, or the Infinity+1 Sword / Eleventh-Hour Superpower that is the Authority Pulse Cannon.
Anti-Frustration Features: When you find the rocket launcher, a boss fight will start and the boss will only be harmed by rockets in a certain spot at a certain time. If you run out of rockets during the fight, rockets will spawn in a chute near where you found it.
Apocalypse How: Type 2.
Applied Phlebotinum: The assault rifle can make use of Feltrite-infused rounds, granting armor piercing capability.
The Apunkalypse
Attack Drone: You can build and use Sentry Bots to aid you in battle. The Gearheads gang also use them.
Authority Equals Asskicking: The Gearhead Boss is equipped with a grenade launcher and can take more damage than even a Giant Mook, requiring more than 160 basic assault rifle rounds to put down. A handful of advanced Wingsticks to the face will do him in pretty quickly, though.
Awesome Yet Practical: Quite a few things, actually.
- Two Turrets can mow down mutants like no tomorrow, not to mention heavily damage some bigger foes, and they'll do it far more cost-efficiently than if you'd been using your own ammo. Not only that, but you can salvage a few parts from them when you're done.
- Sentry bots are even more useful: they follow you, can easily climb over cover and debris, and pack a fair bit of firepower for their size. And they have a strong melee attack. Like Turrets, they're cheap to build and easy to replace. And, unlike Turrets, they don't degrade as they fire: they're with you until they die or you scrap them.
- The Wingstick is awesome because it can be used during reloads, can decapitate multiple opponents and then flies back to you so you can use it again. Having a large stock of Advanced Wingsticks is a really deadly arsenal.
- Some other weapons, particularly the ones that shoot explosive ammunitions.The Pop Rocket shotgun and the crossbow with exploding darts are awesome for their Gorn and their large damage.
  - The shotgun especially, this must be an id thing. Buck shot makes short work of any unarmored enemy, especially mutants. Pulse rounds are there in case you need EMP based weaponry. And Pop Rockets are great for groups or armored targets (and are surprisingly cheap to make).
Bald of Evil: The "Ghost" clan and the mutants.
BFG: Plenty around (this is the developer that invented the BFG, after all), but the name of the Authority Pulse Cannon's alternate ammo is BFG.
Big Bad: General Cross of the Authority, supposedly, who's known by the much more Evil Overlord name of "The Visionary" in the novel. You never actually see him, much less fight him. You only hear his propaganda blared through Authority radios in occupied Subwaytown near the end of the game, and even then his speeches are rather short and uncommon, unlike, say, President Eden.
Body Horror: The mutants.
Bland-Name Product: Some of the sellable items you can find combine this trope with Easter Egg, such as Quayola Quayons (in 64 shades of brown!) and Pinkies snack cakes.
Brick Joke: An unsettling one. In the beginning, Dan Hagar rescues you and drives past some Ghost Clan bandits who are busy menacing some other Wastelanders. Dan, outgunned as he is, does not intervene. On your second trip through the Ghost Clan hideout, you can see the woman they were capturing dead and strung up by her arms.
British Accent: The Wasted bandits have some rather hilarious ones.
Car Fu: Highly effective, and made more so by ramming plate upgrades on some cars.
Casting Gag: Id has gone on record of saying that they hired John Goodman due to Dan Hagar's visual similarities to Walter Sobchak.
Collectible Card Game: In hidden corners throughout the towns and dungeons, you can find cards to be used during a betting card game.
Cool Car
Crossover: Players who pre-ordered Rage during Quakecon received the Wingstick as a wearable accessory for The Engineer in Team Fortress 2.
Cyber Cyclops: The Authority's helmets give them this appearance, complete with Red Eyes, Take Warning. They aren't actually cycloptic, of course.
Co-Op Multiplayer: The only on-foot multi-player mode is Co-Op. Given id's long history of competitive deathmatch modes, this took many fans by surprise. There is competitive death racing, however.
Daylight Horror: The hospital in the "Dead City" level. Entire rooms covered in blood and organic matter. Its like Dead Space meets Fallout with that eerie light shining through all the broken windows.
Deadly Game: Mutant Bash TV, run by J. K. Stiles. The Wasteland Races also count, even if the player can only actually die in the former.
Death by Adaptation: In the novelization, Kavasir is killed by the Authority for assisting the protagonist, while Loosum Hagar is last seen fighting in a Last Stand situation near the end of the book in order to save the protagonist and Captain Marshall from the Authority: her death isn't explicitly shown, but her situation was pretty hopeless and all the characters assume she's dead.
Death Is Cheap: Provided your battery's still charged, you don't actually die; you just need to execute a "defibrillator" minigame to shock yourself back to life right on the spot, stunning anyone who might be standing over you. Unlike, say, BioShock (series) however, it is possible to die for real if you get killed while your defibrillator is still recharging from its last usage.
Developer's Room: There's a secret "Developer Graffiti Room" in one level with the id Software logo made out of scrap parts and the signatures of the game's dev team all over the walls.
Easter Egg: A room styled after Wolfenstein 3D with a "Wolf Goblet" inside is hidden in one of the first levels. Another secret room is modeled after the first level of Doom and has a Doomguy bobblehead where the armor used to be, and yet another is modeled after the difficulty selection room in the original Quake and contains a plush Shambler.
- There's also a Vault Boy Bobblehead that you can find on the Mayor of Wellspring's desk.
  - Ditto one for NBA star Blake Griffin on the mayor's desk in Subway Town. Griffin was heavily featured in the advertising.
- One of the TV's behind J. K. Stiles' chair has the Id Software logo running on it.
EMP: Sentry Guns, Sentry Bots, and certain Authority generators can be disabled by this, inflicted through EMP grenades or Pulse rounds from the shotgun.
The Empire: The Authority seems to want be this, though there's plenty of opposition. The Enclave meets The Combine.
Enemy Chatter: Each of the bandit clans usually have a group of mooks who talk among themselves if the player doesn't alert them to their location. For example, a couple of Wasted clan mooks will discuss Mutant Bash TV while a third can be seen sweeping up their hideout.
Excuse Plot: Big rock hits earth. You survive. You get lots of cool weapons, blow some shit up, and try to save the world.
Faceless Goons: The Authority Enforcers all cover their faces with featureless red helmets. And beneath those helmets are black skull-like masks.
Fingore: The Ark Survivor can play "Five Finger Fillet" at the local bars in the different settlements. Messing up results in a first-person view of him stabbing himself with a knife. Ouch.
Firing One-Handed: The survivor uses his revolver one-handed, which is taken to ridiculous extremes when he uses his other hand on a monocular and can snipe with a pistol.
- Especially when loaded with Fat Mammas, which is the basic equivalent of firing a .50 cal anti-tank round from a rather small revolver.
- Or even better, the Killburst, a drum of roughly 20-30 bullets, which when the trigger is pulled is emptied in a single burst, in under a second. It happens so fast that the recoil from the first round doesn't even register until the things almost empty, at which point it all hits you at once and you're suddenly aiming at the sky unless you know its coming and bear down at the last second to compensate. Oh, and if you happen to be aiming all this at a single target, all of this ammo lands so fast it does nearly the same damage as THREE basic shotgun shells all at once, and will shred the armor off of nearly anything.
Gang of Hats: Each bandit clan has a theme: the Ghost Clan is a Religion of Evil that practices stealth and human sacrifice, the Gearheads are a bunch of Russian Gadgeteer Geniuses, the Wasted Clan consists of drunken, British thug-sounding Boisterous Bruisers, The Scorchers drive flame-colored cars and worship Apophis, the Shrouded are all hooded exiles from other clans, and the Jackals are pelt-wearing Wild Men.
- Unfortunately, after the devastation of the asteroid impact, the British accent had to be recreated from scratch using only Dick Van Dyke's legendary performance in Mary Poppins as a guide. Strike a light!
Gatling Good: Car-mounted Gatling guns aplenty. For bonus points, the gatling-style Authority Pulse Cannon obtained near the end of the game.
Genre Blindness: Atlas control fits this like a glove. They admit that they have no idea what state society is going to be in so they put their best and brightest in burrowing cryogenic chambers. This wouldn't be so bad if they hadn't also injected them with Nano-trites and failing to provide so much as a pistol. The predictable happens when you kick a bunch of recently awoken survivors into a post-apocalyptic wasteland with no weapons and no clue, they get kidnapped and killed for their Nano-trites.
Global Currency Exception: To buy race parts you need Racing Certificates, so you'll need to win races to get things like a minigun mounted on your buggy.
- You can also earn Racing Certificates from Sally for destroying bandit cars out in the wasteland, but since you only get 1 per vehicle its much easier to just win races.
Harder Than Hard: Nightmare difficulty.
Hide Your Children: Children are never seen, heard, or even mentioned in the game and no explanation is given for their absence. What makes this especially odd is that your weapons are disabled every time you enter a settlement, making it impossible to hurt any NPC's anyway.
Human Popsicle: Humanity's best and brightest were sealed in subterranean Arks to wait out the apocalypse. The protagonist's Ark malfunctioned, leaving him as its only survivor.
Infinity Plus One Gatling Gun: The Authority Pulse Cannon is only obtained before the last mission of the game. It has a high rate of fire, a large magazine, good accuracy, and makes absolute mincemeat out of any foe. The only possible downside is that ammunition is expensive and you only find it for free inside the last level (by which point you can't turn back), but the cost is largely irrelevant unless players plan to take it out into the Wasteland and stall the final quest.
Instant Death Bullet: Averted. One of the major features of the game is the wide and extremely flexible assortment of enemy animations, including death animations. Instead of simply going rag-doll as soon as they die, enemies have a variety of death animations that flow fluidly with their movement, momentum, and actions at the moment of death, including going into Last Stand.
Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: EVERYWHERE. This was one of the biggest complaints in the whole game. There's a good chance that this will cause the player to die AT LEAST once or twice per game.
- What's more aggravating is that this is all that is blocking you from reaching your usual point of egress, which happens to be not even a minute's walk from the objective, if not a door you can never open.
Interface Screw: Some of the stronger mutants can do this. These same mutants also have ranged attacks and can deal a lot of damage in a short amount of time.
I Own This Town: The mayor of Subway Town makes it clear right from the start that the settlement is his and he won't think twice about throwing you out on your ass unless you make yourself useful to him. Then The Authority show up and take over near the end of the game.
Item Crafting: You'll find a lot of junk in the dungeons, which can be combined to make more useful stuff like healing bandages, lock-grinders (think lock-picks, only in the form of a giant drill) and other doo-dads. Some of the more powerful ammo types are only available through crafting.
Leaning on the Fourth Wall: In the game you can meet a wastelander who wears a Doom shirt, buy an id theme for your car, and play a collectable card game... staring the actual characters. None of these things are part of the storyline or side missions and can be easily overlooked by people who are eager to play through the main quest.
Loads and Loads of Loading: Not terrible overall compared to other games in the 360/PS3 generation, but simply booting the game from the title menu takes roughly a minute, as well as entering other areas. Loading other save files take about the same duration. Saving the game can also take a bit of time. In one particularly obnoxious case, simply entering and leaving Wellspring by accident takes quite a while to finish. Individually, it's bearable, but have a string of these moments, and it can get quite annoying.
Lost Forever: Quite a few things:
- Many of the trading cards can only be found during a level that is closed off once you complete it. To make matters worse, many of them are well hidden in the environment and extremely easy to miss.
- When you first arrive in Wellsprings you choose one of three outfits that give you different bonuses. The one you pick is the one you keep and it cannot be swapped out for another. The two left over can't be bought or traded for either.
- When you switch to disk 2 ANYTHING you haven't done on disk 1 is gone. If you missed a stunt jump or forgot a side mission you'll have to restart unless you're fine with waiting until your next playthrough to get them.
Lost Technology: The Nanotrites injected in all the Ark residents. And The Authority will acquire any Ark resident found either by payment or by force, to extract the Nanotrites for use in their experiments.
Ludicrous Gibs: Some of the more powerful weapons and ammo can do this. The downside is that, unlike Fallout, you can't loot the corpse bits that remain.
Magical Defibrillator: And how. The revive ability of the main character's Nanotrites is explicitly identified as a defibrillator, and beyond merely being able to resurrect the character from absolutely anything, it releases enough electricity to fatally electrocute nearby foes at the same time.
Magikarp Power: The Settler Pistol stars off fairly weak with its default ammo. Once the player finds alternative ammo, however, it becomes one of the best weapons in the game.
Meat Moss: Some of this shows up in the Abandoned Hospital part of the "Dead City" level.
Mineral MacGuffin: Feltrite ore, brought to Earth by Apophis and by the occasional meteor. It appears to have a variety of applications, but you mostly just sell the stuff for cash. The game tells you in a loading screen how valuable it is and how it should be saved for something really awesome, but there's only one instance when you can trade twenty shards for a defibrillator upgrade...and despite being supposedly one of the most potent and valuable energy source on the planet, it's just higher-tier vendor fodder.
Mooks:
- The Goomba: The Ghost Clan and the Wasted Clan are the first enemies you fight in the game, and compared to later bandit clans they have low health, no armor, and inferior equipment. The Ghost Clan in particular are Fragile Speedsters in that they can acrobatically navigate the environment impressively, but can't take much punishment at all.
- Giant Mook: The Shrouded Clan, the Gearheads, and the Authority all have heavily armored, minigun-wielding big guys that serve as mini-bosses. The Gearhead version has even heavier armor than normal, while the Authority ones have super-heavy power armor and a pulse cannon.
- Elite Mooks: The Authority's Enforcers are this compared to everyone else in the Wasteland, equipped with high-tech weapons and armor significantly more advanced than the cobbled-together stuff everyone else is using, and fighting with professional military tactics. The Gearheads and Jackal Clan are likewise significantly tougher and more greatly feared than any of the other bandit clans.
- Heavily Armored Mook: Authority Enforcers wear a suit of hardened combat armor that allows them to soak almost a full magazine of assault rifle fire before falling. Gearheads wear makeshift metal suits which serve the same function and give them similar durability. In both cases, armor-piercing bullets are a big help against them.
- King Mook: The Large Mutant and Kraken mini-bosses which appear in a couple of levels.
Mutants: They're disorganized, but plentiful -- and some of them are gigantic. It gets worse: the mutants were a by-product of the Authority trying to use the Nanotrites to control humans and turn them into super soldiers as a means of controlling the post-apocalyptic Earth.
Mythology Gag:
- Various signs for Mixom Corporation can be found throughout the wasteland. Mixom was one of the major equipment suppliers for Mars Base in Doom 3.
Nanomachines: The before mentioned Nanotrites.
Nice Hat: Many different wastelanders have one of these. Jani, one of the vendors at Subway Town, has a particularly nice one with a red skull on it.
Obvious Beta: The PC version of Rage is filled with so many graphical and engine glitches, seen on a wide variety of hardware, that it seems it wasn't even play-tested for anything other than the consoles. The fact that it apparently wasn't designed to work at all with ATI video cards (which are half the cards in existence) doesn't exactly help matters, either.
Obviously Evil: One NPC unintentionally lampshades this when he said that the people of the Wasteland believed in General Cross and the Authority as beacons of hope and civilization...until their soldiers actually showed up, and the settlers saw what they looked like. Black-and-crimson armor, faceless masks, and beneath those, balaclavas that look like skulls. The Authority even occasionally puts a skull at the center of their already ominous-looking emblem.
Precision-Guided Boomerang: The much advertised Wingstick, a tri-bladed, nano-cored throwing weapon that tracks and deals extreme damage to the target, often decapitating it on a headshot. You can carry many of them, as they have limited durability. If they don't break on contact, they fly back to you or can be retrieved from the body. They can be upgraded to Advanced, dealing more damage and able to hit multiple targets.
Quest for Identity: The protagonist lost his memory and mission due to the damaged Ark. And he doesn't seem to ever recover them, or even want to.
- According to the Novel, we play as Nicholas Raine. Raine is a highly trained Marine Corps Lieutenant, that was put inside the Ark to help protect the others.
- That just makes Atlas control's Genre Blindness look even worse. They took enough precautions to put in an experienced soldier, but not enough to give him weapons or armor?
Red Shirts: Settlement guards will alongside you in a couple of missions against bandit raiders. They're competent combatants, but in many cases they're scripted to die in the middle of a firefight even if there aren't any enemies anywhere near them.
Regenerating Health: One of the thing that makes Ark survivors special is the Nanotrites in their blood that rebuild their body from almost any damage. This is why so many people are keen on sending you out into dungeons full of hostiles, and also why the Authority wants to capture you.
Critical Existence Failure: Not mutually exclusive with Regenerating Health, considering the defibrillator recharges. You can take all the punishment in the world, but once you get incapacitated and your defibrillator is empty, you're dead.
Revolvers Are Just Better: The Settler pistol, your starting weapon, is a hefty revolver that holds a whopping twelve rounds. Additional ammo types include the heftier Fat Boys (which are limited to six-round cylinders), all-in-one Killbursts, and Fat Mammas (which act like Fat Boys with the added benefit of penetration). In comparison, everyone else in the game who carries a pistol is limited to a Colt .45.
Rubber Band AI: Wonderfully averted in the racing sections. With the right upgrades and decent driving skills, you can leave your opponents in the dust, and the computer won't unfairly give them a speed boost or teleport them behind you.
Save Scumming: For the console version especially, players would best save the game every few minutes during the longer missions, because there's no guarantee that the auto save checkpoints will work in between every major area (think FPS games pre-Halo or for a more recent example, the first Mass Effect). Dying after 30 minutes of leisure progress and not saving at all since then is an easy route to frustration when the auto save you rely on fails you.
Scenery Gorn: The Ark survivor goes on many, many missions that take him inside beautifully destroyed buildings. Many levels even have ruined cityscapes visible in the distance.
Sentry Gun: You can build and deploy these.
Scavenger World: It's thought that only Ark survivors and their descendants are capable of building anything anymore.
Sequel Hook: The game ends with the Resistance triggering the emergence of countless Arks, filled with even more numerous people who would be invaluable against the Authority. In essence, they are both an army and the people needed to rebuild after the army is finished. And then...cut to credits. The Big Bad is never fought, and the Authority is far from destroyed.
Shout-Out: In one early mission, you can find a familiar logo on a wall.
- There's a Doom Marine bobblehead on the dash of Dan Hagar's buggy, and optional BFG rounds for the Authority Pulse Cannon. Crazy Joe even wears a Doom 3 shirt.
- The highest difficulty level is called "Nightmare". Achievements for completing the game on certain difficulties are named after the difficulty levels from Doom.
- A Vault-Tec bobblehead is found on the mayor of Wellspring's desk.
- The double-barreled shotgun obtained from the "Anarchy Edition" largely serves as one to older Id Software games, as it is outdated by the time you receive the standard shotgun.
- By the game's end, the Authority-modified mutants look an awful lot like prototype Strogg.
- Two instances that appear to pay homage to Half Life. The first is during the rescue of Captain Marshall, in which the player fights off waves of soldiers coming in from one end of a cellblock. The second comes during the Authority occupation of Subway Town, when one Enforcer orders you to pick up a can on the ground in front of him. Doing so nets you a condescending "Good boy" from him (it's a can of dog food, too), but also a sellable item.
- "Mutant Bash TV" sounds awfully similar to Super Smash TV, don't you think? Better yet, it's more often called simply Bash TV (the game was called simply Smash TV in arcades and on other consoles), and several pieces of the host's banter strongly resemble lines from the earlier game.
Shotguns Are Just Better: Rage's shotgun is as effective as you'd expect from an Id Software game, able to deal with most threats and with plentiful ammo available.
Sinister Subway: Averted with Subway Town, which is one of the biggest and safest settlements in the wasteland. The surrounding tunnels and stations, however, play this straight by being filled with mutants.
Sniper Rifle: Excellent for popping heads, but has the dubious distinction of being the only gun without alternative ammo types.
- The gun is less practical then the crossbow. The crossbow has multiple ammo types, faster firing speed and more ammo around the maps. A player with a good aim, can use the crossbow in any situation that calls for long range fire power. Also, it brings up the question why there is a stand-one scope for the pistol, but not for the crossbow, as it can pull double duty.
Stuff Blowing Up: Frequently. You can inflict this via Frag Grenades, the Rocket Launcher or the vehicle-mounted homing rockets, as well as "Pop Rockets", small grenades fired from the shotgun, the classic Dynamite Bolts for the crossbow, remote-controlled mini bomb cars, vehicle-mounted mines, BFG rounds from the Pulse Cannon... this game isn't short on explosives.
Title Drop: In the ending of the novelization, which describes the protagonist's rage at the Authority and their crimes, and his determination to bring them down.
Weaponized Car: Of course.
Wild Man: Members of the Jackal Clan wear pelts, yelp like wolves and talk in complete gibberish. They have the highest proportion of melee-happy berserker enemies. A handful will use assault rifles, but most of the ranged ones just use crossbows.
X Meets Y: Borderlands meets Fallout meets BioShock (series).
Your Head Asplode: Even the humble Settler pistol can inflict one of these.
0% Approval Rating: The Authority is universally hated amongst the Settlers, to the point that everyone you meet who recognizes your Ark Suit will avoid revealing you to the Authority despite the hefty bounty they've placed on Ark survivors. This is compounded by the fact the Authority have a reputation for failing to actually pay on their deals, which you can experience firsthand in one sidequest where the town of Wellsprings tries to trade with them.