RAGE 2

Artistically, it's uninspired. But mechanically, it's one of the best shooters I've played in years.

The playground is very real in this game. You're meant to have more toys to mess with than the story's length can realistically justify. That feels like the whole point. Rage 2 left me wanting in the best way, and I can't wait to see what's next.

I hoped for better. I’m still plugging away at it, and I’m not willing to slap a score onto Rage 2 this early. That said, it’s not doing much for me at this point in time. I’ve found myself wanting to reinstall Doom and replay that instead. It’ll take half the time, and I think I’d probably have twice as much fun.

Rage 2 is enjoyable as long as I make the effort to do very simple things in the silliest ways possible, and game’s many systems reward this style of play more by their quality than by any extrinsic payoff. There is creativity and joy hidden here. You just have to find it beneath the pile of ideas pulled from a thousand other games.

The parts I like far outweigh the parts I don’t. I’ve got my weirdo NPCs, my Ark hunting, my Whoopinkoffs and Dimbledicks. I’ve found every Ark, now, but I still plan on gambolling between side activities. I still want to explore, even though I wish I was exploring a world that had been less generically destroyed. Most of all, I want to do more super-powered fighting. I might not even bother swapping from that rifle.

Rage 2 is a game that knows what it is and what it wants to do, and it does that particular thing very well. There’s a bit of fluff padding out the experience, but the core of the game is solid. Really, though, Rage 2 does something very rare: it offers an experience you’ve already seen plenty of times, but makes it fun regardless.

The interplay between the AI, your abilities, the physics of the world, and your guns is some of the best I’ve seen, and I never thought I would be saying anything like that about a sequel to Brown Shooter: Apocalypse. There’s much more to this than its kooky, pink-hued marketing campaign. If you sleep on it, you’re sleeping on one of the best – if not the best – single-player FPS games of this generation.