id Software is no stranger to the first person shooter market. Hell, they practically invented it. With their newest entry into the genre, id’s RAGE promises to be another incredibly beautiful shooter, but will they be at a loss when it comes to actual gameplay?
Doom 3 offered incredible (at the time) graphics that added a lot to the atmosphere of the corridor shooter, but taking that away, that’s all Doom 3 was, a corridor shooter with monsters in the dark. Xbox 360 World Magazine offers a similar opinion and breaks down what could be RAGE’s downfall in the gameplay department.
It’s kind of funny of id to create a game that combines a lot of tenants of the genre. Things like environmental control via electrocuting water to kill multiple enemies is something that gamers are pretty familiar with and the admittance of more corridor shooting makes RAGE hard to really define itself from the regular flow of FPS games that come on to the market every year.
“id’s previous big hitters - Doom 3, for instance - were criticised in some quarters for merely presenting a prettier version of the corridor shooters that came before it. There are shades of this when RAGE blocks off the open world and gets a bit linear. If RAGE is little more than a loud recap of ten years of first-person shooting evolution, then who better to pay homage to the genre than the developers who nigh-on invented it?”
Will people play it? I have no doubts in my mind they will, but I can’t really find myself getting excited for this particular id title. I was let down by Doom 3 and while I know iD is always trying to think of the next big thing to revitalize the first person market, for me, RAGE isn’t it.
RAGE is the post-apocolyptic, open-world/corridor shooter of your dreams when it comes out in 2011 for Xbox 360, PS3, and PC.
Source: CVG
