Rage!

Solid brawler with a few hitches

Reviewed by Shawn from afro-ninja.com

Rage is an action-heavy fighting game where you collect new weapons and guns and attempt to battle your way through four levels of opposing stickmen. While it’s pretty fun, it does have a couple flaws that could have made for a much better experience.

There’s no particular story here, just fight stuff. The game controls nicely, but the controls themselves border on being a little complex. You’ve got two attack buttons, a roll button, a shooting button, weapons button, menu button, weapon drop button, super attack button, and the arrow keys. For the most part it’s intuitive but a little more than needed. For example I didn’t find the need to roll that much, nor did I ever want to drop my weapon. As you play you’ll see that you can harness two different weapons, one for shooting and one for attacking. You can find as well as buy upgrades for each one. My favorite part of the game is that the powerups you find are permanent. So if you collect a new sword at the end of a level but get killed by the boss, you can at least replay that level with the new sword. Likewise, you could technically replay the first level over and over until you have enough money for a better weapon before starting another level. Fighting enemies fast enough will also send your character into ‘rage’ mode, where you can move faster, attack harder, and clear the screen with a super-powered attack.

Graphics are fairly plain (we’re talking stick figures here) but the fluidity of the attacking/movement animations makes up for it. The ‘rage’ animation is particularly cool to see. It’s also nice to see a game with a full and varied custom soundtrack. Some of the tunes have a generic midi sound to them, but for the sake of originality it’s more than excusable. The volume bar is easily accessible in the top right of the screen at all times, which is good.

My main problem is with the game’s weapon system. Every time you start a level you must re-equip the ones you want, and each level starts with enemies running at you. This is somewhat understandable, but for some reason the exact same thing happens when you start a boss fight. Like I really planned on taking on the boss with no weapons out? Instead in each case you must pause the game, go to the weapons menu, and choose what you want. Which leads into problem #2- the pause menu itself. For some reason the pause menu is fully animated, and while it looks neat the first time, I got pretty bored waiting for it to finish so I could just set my weapons again. It just adds a small level of tedium that shouldn’t be there.

Overall Rage is a pretty complete package- You can fight through four adventure mode levels, each with their own boss and unique level design. You can play to unlock new weapons to use, and then after that you can play arcade survival mode for more coins, a chance to enter high scores, and cheat codes. There’s also a tutorial mode to get you familiar with the game’s controls. With just a few alterations regarding the issues I mentioned above, Rage could become a truly great series.

Click here to play Rage!






Comments (3) [view all]

  Latest comment left by nakamis:

great review

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