RAGE is free on Steam this weekend

I heard it was a half-decent game, so I downloaded it. Pretty neat so far. It's not super well polished or really all that innovative, but it's got decent shooting mechanics, good art design and atmosphere, and is overall pretty fun.

The texture pop-in issue got to me pretty quickly, so I copied one of the special config files into the game files that unlocks 16k textures and pretty much eliminates pop-in, and while there are still a decent number ugly environmental textures, the game looks pretty goddamn good. Maxed everything on my 660ti with constant 60 FPS (even when I turn off V-sync in-game and in the Nvidia control panel, it always seems to cap at 60 no matter what). Heard the ending was kinda shit, but low expectations usually just mean I enjoy something more.

Link to config files for various VRAM configurations
There's still a tiny bit of pop-in, but it's not too noticeable if you're not looking for it. Like I said, a good number of in-game textures don't have high-res variants, but most of them do, and they look pretty sharp.

 

Played about 6 hours so far and got to the part with the Resistance. I heard that the Plot was a complete let-down, so I'm not expecting much, but it's been pretty fun so far, an interesting blend of mostly action-FPS gameplay with little bits of RPG and open-world elements. Could use quite a bit more polish, but it's still got a surprising amount of depth to things, and I'll likely finish it up.

 

Slow internet or small Hard Drive?

Anyways, I beat the game. Did all the side quests I could find (other than Races, only did a few of those since they're weren't all that interesting) and beat the game in about 10 hours.

I really liked the art style, and the Dead City/Blue Station levels gave me a really cool Metro vibe. There were a lot of really appealing vistas and the art style as a whole was really neat.

The plot was a jumbled mess. So many plot holes, and the reasons behind a lot of things were about as weak as they get, and so few things are ever explained. (What the hell is that Biomass in the city? Why is the Authority so interested in the Ark survivors anyways?)

Shooting was a mixed bag. I really liked the different ammo's, definitely got a really neat Bioshock vibe from how you have to manage resources properly, and I felt like I had missed out on a lot when I discovered how fun and useful Sentry Robots and Turrets were. The AI is also surprisingly smart in some areas; they retreat when outgunned, give each other covering fire when moving, use grenades intelligently but not excessively, and even space out their shooting as to maintain constant fire on you when they can.

Unfortunately, a lot of the enemies by the end boil down to meat sponges with impressive, albeit incredibly annoying acrobatic habits that just result in you having to backpedal and use lots of buckshot. All of the fun sandbox elements go out the window (fighting the Authority probably made for some of the best levels in the game, reminded me a lot of Half Life 2), and these guys make up at least 40% of the enemies you end up having to face. Vehicle combat is also surprisingly deep, but generally just boils down to how much money you have invested in your car and trying to drive backwards while waiting for your rockets to lock on. With shields and armor restores, it's almost too easy. Without them, it's almost too hard.

Overall, pretty fun. I definitely agree that it had a lot of potential, but it's an already pretty short experience that also recycles a decent number of game areas for repeat missions while trying to slow down the tempo by throwing enough enemies at you in some encounters to rival Serious Sam. It seems like they ran out of time, money, or both somewhere along the way, and the game suffered for it (which naturally led to the publishes deeming the franchise as a waste of time after all, it seems). Plenty of cool ideas, not the best execution.

I just realized this had a tacked-on multiplayer mode. Oh boy, well that explains a lot.

 

Wingsticks were surprisingly useful and fun.

And yeah, from what I read, the texture issues stem from them trying to make the most of the limited VRAM on consoles. The way that they compressed the textures and the video settings in general were pretty weird, although this is the first time I think I've really seen CUDA used to improve performance.