Rage 2: Preview Y8 Game

At the presentation in Stockholm, RAGE 2 seemed to be a rather good game. The dialogues are clearly "undercooked", but the shooter mechanics are quite decent. There is nothing to say about the graphics, but the trailers and artwork look interesting.

Initially, we were shown literally a 10-minute gameplay segment, a single level that could, imitating Hotline Miami, run 10 times in a row, squeezing all the nuances out of the combat system. In a linear location, the game felt relaxed and confident. But as part of a recent show, we were released into the open world - the emphasis shifted, and the overall picture became a little more unambiguous.

We see Avalanche - we mean a "sandbox" with some aspect raised to the absolute. Just Cause is physics and destructibility, Mad Max is a car and everything connected with it. RAGE 2 is an aggressive first person shooter.

The shooting that Y8 Games Center helped make is a powerful enough "unique selling proposition" to sell you a game. Not DOOM in the open world, but definitely something much more than another Far Cry . In the fresh demo, we had a new set of weapons and abilities, so it's already clear where in general the pumping will lead during the game.

And she will lead in the direction of Just Cause... Or, as the developers say, Avalanche-style action. All the character's abilities are designed to make you feel like a god compared to an NPC: every two minutes you can create a black hole, sucking everyone around, turn opponents into a projectile, attaching magnets to them and indicating the direction of gravity. There's also a bulletproof shield, Bulletstorm-like slowing enemies in the air, and a legitimate wallhack. All living things should scatter from you, but, for the sake of gameplay, it happily smashes against your face.

If in the first demo it was still a somewhat moderate hack, where opponents could withstand two shots from a shotgun, now the abilities and weapon modes (a homing salvo of six missiles!) Are tilting towards the purely Bulletstorm "entertain yourself". And this cannot be called a definite plus.

Fun fact! More dynamic than any other open-world shooter. But for an hour and a half, I never once needed to send someone into the air with gravipatrons. The game is starting to get sick of the Just Cause Syndrome : the authors imply that you need to freak out in it, but don't give a real reason to do it. This is why RAGE is not DOOMin the open world: there you constantly used all the opportunities, because in fact you were much weaker than your opponents.

Here, when you are vulnerable, it seems as if something is going wrong. I honestly didn’t understand the difficult firefights. When the enemy becomes too tenacious and does not get killed in the first 10 seconds, you have nothing to oppose to him: there is nowhere to run from the bullets, you cannot come close. Abilities are useless, you die quickly. Hopefully, I just didn’t have time to get used to shooting and this will remain just a suspicion, but for now it seems that RAGE 2 is based only on the power of the player and does not fit with "skill-dependent" tests.

But damn good during a relaxed, confident clearing of locations, when you overwhelm the servants with super powers, ride like a saiga on the roofs and through the walls you see where you can funny watch the next punk. Thanks to the open world, we can say for sure that this is basically what the game is about.

The open world didn’t have time to show anything innovative, but it didn’t really try. Convoys ride through the toxic wasteland, which can be attacked by car. If you get off the track a little, you will find a barn / dump / fort filled with enemies.

Unfortunately, I was not able to find a single third-party location where I would have to do something other than stylish killing of the enemy masses. "Break the solar panels" doesn't count. It turns out to be contradictory: on the one hand, as soon as you get off the road, you immediately run into something not marked on the map, interesting, on the other - there, most likely, you just need to shoot.

This even has a purpose: reputation points are earned separately for the three leaders of the resistance, and they give the pumping of equipment, abilities, weapons. The more I cleaned, the stronger I became. And as we learned earlier, getting stronger in this game is critical.

Fortunately, if it is not interesting, then all this can be passed and even flown: the new video showed a quadrocopter that saves you from wobbling along the roads, stupid convoys and oncoming cars. You can avoid unnecessary fuss and immediately fly to the storyline mission ... which will still be the "race".

Motor vehicles are tightly sewn into the DNA of the game: they allow you to get into any buggy or motorcycle, shoot at enemies from a turret, leave a mine behind - this is an important part of the mechanics, which is given a lot of time. But for now it is too early to judge her, because I do not want to negatively. It's okay to shoot on the go. To fly to the side of the road and get stuck in the trash is inconvenient. Falling off the bridge and being reborn at the checkpoint is unpleasant. Racing is bad.

The developer said that the races in the game take place regularly, but it is unclear why: the driving mechanics are primitive, pushing on the track without a weapon is simply not interesting. This is not Mad Max , where it was great to drive. Logically and physically, the car looks more like cars from Borderlands , but it is more bulky and likes to get stuck. Trying to justify this by marking PRE-BETA in the corner of the screen, I sit down on the quadcopter and fly to the nearest capsule with improvements.

I really liked how the pumping of the protagonist was arranged: those who fell to the Earth at the end of the first part of the capsule attracted special attention of local residents, whole settlements of bandits formed around them. Through them we make our way through the spacious city streets in the best format that the game is capable of, there we get an upgrade (in my case, a rocket launcher), go to a holographic simulation, where we are taught to use a new toy correctly, and then we go out and make our way back to exit through an even greater number of opponents, substituting for our shots.

There can be no doubt about what has served as the main reference point for game designers. Remember the earliest screenshots of Borderlands before the game was given a comic outlined style? This game is made by Avalanche . Realistic, but crazy and over-the-top post-apocalypse.

I'm serious about kinking: the game tries to be disgusting, vulgar, deliberately horrible. Instead of charming Moxie, here's a parody of her: a flabby old woman dressed like a cabaret girl. Her henchmen are naked slaves with indecent movements and creepy masks on their faces.

At the same time, the dialogues try to be bold, sharp and impetuous, but they do not pull at all. So far, the script, characters and briefings are the most unfortunate part of the game. They would definitely have to be squandered if it were not for the amusing enough storyline.

For example, I managed to go through three missions, in which I became the star of a bloody show on local television, a winner in races and climbed for titles to the main moneybag of the city in order to fall from the top of the tower into the basement with a locked mutant-overgrown. In a brief retelling and at the level of screensavers, scenery, images - it's really funny.

But the dialogues, the world and everything else seem so unnecessary and meaningless! When you walk around the city, literally everyone you meet tries to foist you on a task to clear a random point on the map. And the texts of these tasks of the universe are simply not needed - primitive, not funny enough. Thank God, the "Scroll" button invitingly signals that you can press it and go have fun.

What awaits in the secondary quest is clear: the mechanics are tailored specifically for the "medium scope", when there is a dump of port containers or a small arena with shelters and hills, where you can climb, where you can jump, where you can cheerfully snipe from the rocket launcher. But during story missions, the authors are clearly trying to move away from the basic part of the game and add variety.

Sometimes it's weird - for example, there is an arena on a TV show where electric pendulums kill enemies before they reach you. Sometimes it is inconvenient: the potential of local "abilities" is not revealed in tight corridors. But the writers are clearly trying to make the story missions interesting in every way, and the campaign definitely contradicts the open world at its best. I want to see it to the end.

The preview may give the impression that the game is drawn to "Prohodnyak", but this is not so. She really really wants to scold her - for unnecessary races with weak car physics, for the fact that absolutely every aspect of it (be it pink, madness, open world or parody characters) has already been done better. But this is the paradox: with a very average level of performance, RAGE 2- a good alternative to everything, and it bypasses many direct competitors on secondary points.

Is it not a very interesting open world compared to Far Cry ? But not a single "sandbox" provides such shooting mechanics. Not fun against the background of the "board"? But there is something to do besides the "grind" and the plot. Not DOOM? So there are not so many hours of gameplay. And it is the high "arithmetic mean" that RAGE 2 will cover in the absence of strong competitors.