I had a difficult time trying to get it to work on the PC. Five days of reading forums and eventually installing a patch, made it possible to get started.
The visuals and some of the levels are stunning. Excellent design and it made my jaw drop several times. Unfortunately, the level design itself is bad. Each map conveniently ends right where it started. It eliminates backtracking but it looks really stupid. Sometimes, you can even see the main objective right from where you start, except you have to take a 20 minute detour just to get there.
Everything has invisible walls and/or is clipped. There is nothing to explore. You can't really move a lot in most places, you can't even jump of a cliff. Hell, you can't even fall to your death in most places. This is basically an onrails shooter.
Driving is fun in the beginning, but you have to backtrack the same routes, with the same respawning enemies, at the same exact points, to same locations, for so many times that it really becomes repetitive and you just try and get it over with as quickly as possible. Same goes for the maps. However impressive some might be, all the bigger locations are visited twice. The first time you go from A to B and the second time you go from B to A. This makes the maps really predictable. If you think about it, you can cut the game in half content wise, since it's just repeating itself.
Megatexture does look great and no repeating textures make for some pretty pictures. Except, it means that all the textures upclose are very blurry to say the least and nothing in the world [asset wise] can move. Hell, even simple cans are superglued to the table/desk/whatever. The open world look is misleading, since you can go nowhere and the world consists out of 2 town maps, 2 outside maps and a dozen of maps you keep revisiting while still taking up 21 gb.
The quest system is downright awkward at times and I especially like the fact you can choose to accept quests, even though [with some] if you refuse, you can't continue the game. Not to mention that some of them are bugged or really retarded to say the least. Especially when you just visit the first town. You get sent from one place to the next for atleast 15 minutes before actually being able to get the quest.
Racing is actually quite cool, but again, only a couple of maps, limited race options, limited tuning options and no real benefits make them quite useless. Yes it's fun for a couple of races but you just don't have any motivation to keep doing it.
There is simply no real story. You wake up, are given an gun and play errand boy for +/-13 hours. The authority is bad, since everybody keeps reminding you of that and you have no choice other then to help the resistance. No explanations, no questions, just do as your told.
Isn't there anything good to say, except the visuals? Well yes, the different ammo types are a lot of fun. You can build cool stuff to help you kill your enemies in variety of ways and gunplay feels excellent. Enemy AI is good and you will have a lot of fun shooting. Too bad the entire game is far too easy and that every mutant encounter comes down to holding of the waves.
In the end, Rage is a dumbed down, unbalanced and mediocre shooter at best. It's unbelievable that this is the result of 7 years of work and a game of the legendary Id. For me, it was a HUGE disappointment.
I don't know why it has gotten so much hate.
