Bright daylight fills your eyes as you step into the unknown world of post-Apophis Earth, civilisation as we know it eradicated by the catastrophic asteroid some 20 years or so into the future. Within seconds, you’re assaulted by crazies and saved by an unknown saviour. He rolls up in an off-road buggy and roars at you, “It’s not safe here. Get in.”

So begins RAGE: id Software’s first new IP in years and, to top it all off, a proper good slice of shooting action.

RAGE appears, at first, to be a whole new ball game in comparison to id Software titles of old when you first arrive at the rustic, nu-world Americana settlement of Hagar as a survivor of an underground shelter called an Ark. Dan Hagar, your aforementioned saviour, hands you a pistol and, replete with misleadingly serious quest dialogue that contrasts the fun shooting ahead, sends you off to take care of some local nasties.

On first inspection, RAGE bears a large number of similarities to other first-person shooter titles of late, but these similarities run only skin-deep. Hints of role-playing elements surface and vanish.  Looting of items isn’t restricted by quantity or weight; picking a “class” is simply a case of choosing one of three costumes with the perk of bartering, taking more damage or crafting more effective items using the junk you find. The world is big like those found in RPGs but it’s mostly linear, like a tree with off-shoot branches to journey along and return back from once completed. RAGE is a title accepting of the fact that it’s not an RPG, but it can damn well reference it, and it works well while instantly gratifying the FPS generation with fantastic if traditional gunplay.

The vehicles of RAGE can be customised, and you'll also unlock better ones as you go.

The Ghosts you encounter in the first couple of missions are excellent spokespeople for the sort of action you should come to expect for the 12-hour campaign. As athletic as they come, they swing from poles, vault over railings and bound off the walls, their artificial intelligence is able to detect level furniture and use it to their advantage. It’s a new feature of the id Tech 5 engine for which RAGE is the first commercial benchmark. The AI is also effective at coordinating enemies to flank you, blind-fire when you’re aiming through iron-sights or a scope and firing at you even when down.

Blasting each enemy in the face also carries the unique id hallmark of doing so several times in the face until they collapse. It’s not entirely realistic, but whether it’s hammering the trigger with the pistol or discharging a clip full of assault rifle rounds into a group of wasteland mutants, RAGE‘s weapons never fail to entertain. The lack of innovation in the armoury is subsidised by the imaginative ammo types available for each piece of kit.  The pistol’s “six bullets in one” Killburst, mind control crossbow bolts and the shotgun’s Pop Rockets – in which every pellet in the shell is an explosive – are particular highlights.

The main armoury is accompanied by a supply of backup items: grenades, EMP devices, RC bomb cars and the trademark “Wingsticks,” a three-pronged razor-sharp boomerang. Each one feels valid in a manner comparable to Resistance 3, in that each one has a purpose at some point in time and isn’t simply included for the sake of it. Wingsticks, along with other weapons, add-on items and your personal, life-saving defibrillator can be upgraded, as can your off-road vehicle used to traverse the landscape between towns in relative safety.

Driving the vehicles is an absolute joy, too. Considering id’s lack of experience in the racing genre, the handling of each of RAGE‘s off-road vehicles is surprisingly tight and responsive.  Point it where you want to go, and it’ll get there without much trouble. Each vehicle also has gatling guns or rockets installed, and replenishing these is as easy as buying them from a store in one of the game’s two main town hubs.

Each of these hubs — central to the wafer-thin, barely explained plot — are identical in structure, and not just because of their hilariously close proximity to enemy bases.  A bar offers up a card game to play and a job to do, racing tournaments are held with vehicle upgrades to win, townspeople will ask you to drive off to somewhere afar and retrieve an item for them, and somebody else will ask you to go shoot some troublemakers. It feels lazy.

The Authority are a shady, Orwellian organisation who feature somewhere in RAGE's incoherent plot.

Also lazy: RAGE‘s side-missions remain identical in structure in both main acts of the game, and these missions boil down to fetching and shooting with little else in between. It reduces the desire to actually bother taking part in them at all. The archaic save system is also hugely frustrating.  Dying mid-mission will cast you back to the very start, with no checkpointing in between. In this age of autosave it feels like an unnecessary step in the wrong direction.

It’s a good thing that the game looks astonishingly pretty. The id Tech 5 engine’s Megatexture technology lends the game a hugely detailed, cartoon-edged graphical style complemented by lighting that can, at the risk of cliche, be described as properly atmospheric in some of the closer-knit indoor areas. The astonishingly smooth character animations and constant 60 FPS frame rate do well to disguise the momentary texture pop-in that the engine currently suffers from.  If it’s a comfort, you have to look for it to notice it.

The soundscape of RAGE is also favourable, with a hole or two to look for. Some of the finest gun sounds in gaming can be found attached to your armoury, the score is something special and the voice acting of the townsfolk you met is superb.  It’s just a shame that every member of a clan has an identical voice to match their identical faces and ragged clothing. For a game that took so long to make 6 years it seems an odd thing to leave in.

Despite these setbacks, RAGE holds its own as a good piece of blam-blam instafun of nothing less than the sort of quality you’d expect from a developer like id. From the moment you step out of the Ark and hop into Dan Hagar’s car, there’s a great experience to be had if you ignore the wafer-thin plot and understand what the game is trying to be. It’s not an RPG, nor is it trying to be.  It’s merely taking snatches here and there and using them to enrich and supplement the excellent shooting mechanics. With ace multiplayer to consider too (review to come), RAGE is well worth a look if all-out gunplay is your bag.

Review copy of RAGE on Xbox 360 played to completion on Normal difficulty.

Check out our RambleView on RAGE here and check out our previous RAGE coverage here.