Four years of media hype has been nullified in a single day as gamers publish their scathing summaries of id Software's latest first-person shooter. Professional reviews are mixed at best, with most sites concluding that Rage failed to deliver the goods. Although their final scores vary, the sites agree that the game is ultimately a shallow corridor shooter with gaping craters in its story, dialog, quests, and mechanics.
Ars Technica has the most unforgiving write-up we've seen today, calling the game "creatively and mechanically bankrupt." "It feels like a group of people had to create a game because they were under contract, not because they honestly enjoyed any aspect of their own creation," wrote Ben Kuchera in his console review. In fact, Kuchera went as far as to say that he only finished the 10-hour game because he was paid to.
Joystiq offers a similar verdict, albeit not as harsh: "RAGE is pretty at times, but it's not enough to paint over the truth -- that id's labor feels like a scaffolding for a game of bolder ideas, ideas which, for whatever reason, aren't realized. And the game that is there just isn't enough to compete with other, better shooters we've seen this year." For all its shortcomings, PC Gamer notes that it's still a satisfying linear shooter.
Users haven't been particularly thrilled with their purchase either, giving Rage a score of 4.2 out of 10 on Metacritic. Although many of the user reviews mention Rage's disappointing gameplay, much of the backlash stems from the game's various launch day bugs. One thread on Steam dedicated to Rage's issues has 24 pages of posts. The first entry mentions 17 bugs or other in-game problems. We'll include that full list below.
Issues:
- No custom settings for video cards.
- No console command. Read here to enable the console key via config file here.
- No Vsync options. Results in screen tearing. Forcing Vsync causes the game to crash the drivers and game. (AMD)
- Unable to skip intros? To disable the intro videos put this "+set com_skipIntroVideo 1" in the launch options of Rage via Steam.
- Mouse acceleration?
- Can't use Crossfire or SLI.
- Bad FoV for PCs. Short-term solution: FOV adjustment howto.
Bugs:
- Texture streaming is bad and slow resulting in always reloading the same textures thus causing the textures popping in effect.
- Missing/blinking textures.
- Game crashes when exiting the Arc.
- LoD issues(popins dispersing items).
- Crashing after intro video.
- Audio stuttering and not blending properly.
- Occasional artifacts appearing.
- Low frame rates with occasional fps spikes.
- Loading saves causes video card drivers to crash.
- Game fails to start with error code #51.
It's worth noting that AMD released a "Rage Performance Driver" for Radeon HD 5000 and 6000 series owners yesterday, but the company has urged players to avoid that release as it includes dated OGL files that cause graphics corruption. A new driver is expected sometime today. Nvidia owners should probably use last week's GeForce 285.38 beta drivers, which mention "improved compatibility and performance" with Rage.
https://www.techspot.com/news/45735-rage-slammed-with-negative-reviews-after-buggy-launch.html
