Rage 2

My first few hours with Rage 2 genuinely impressed me. The moment you slot into the Ranger suit and start stringing together Nanotrite abilities with id Software's signature gunplay, something clicks that very few games manage. The shotgun alone -- with its alternate fire that sends enemies sailing over railings and off ledges -- is one of the best-feeling weapons in the genre. Layer on top of that the Slam ability that turns a ground pound into a crowd-clearing shockwave, Shatter for charging through armored enemies, and the Overdrive mode that cranks up damage, refills health, and makes every gun feel radioactive, and the core combat loop is genuinely outstanding. The feedback on hits, the ragdoll physics, the way explosions ripple through a crowd -- id Software's fingerprints are all over this, and they are impossible to ignore in the best possible way. The trouble is that everything holding that combat together is thin. The story follows Walker, a Ranger you can set as male or female, on a revenge mission against General Cross and his Authority faction -- mutants with jetpacks and heavy weapons. Three allied NPCs named Kvasir, Hagar, and Marshall each represent a track of "projects" you grind up to level five before unlocking one of the story's handful of actual missions. It sounds structured on paper. In practice, almost every objective funnels down to entering an area and wiping out waves of enemies, then driving across the map to the next marker. The world, a collaboration between id and Avalanche Studios, spans jungles in the north, swamps, and sun-scorched desert corridors, and while it looks vivid, it rarely gives you a reason to pull over and explore. Fast travel is restricted to main trader towns, which makes the constant back-and-forth feel more like commuting than adventuring. The main story can be wrapped up in roughly 13 hours of casual play, and the open world does not fill that gap convincingly. Progression is another sore point. There are two currencies -- cash for vendors and inventory slots, feltrite for character upgrades and healing -- plus separate skill trees for weapons, projects, and vehicles. The depth is real, but the layout is convoluted enough that new players may spend upgrade resources on the wrong things before they understand the system. Boss encounters suffer from a different problem: the difficulty ceiling is low enough that most can be burned down before their mechanics even get off the ground. The Rise of the Ghosts expansion added mechs, new vehicles, and a separate story arc post-launch, which is worth knowing if you want more mileage, but the base game still feels like it ran out of content ideas before it ran out of map. What saves Rage 2 from being a disappointment is how relentlessly good it feels when you are shooting things. The critic consensus landed in exactly the right place: outstanding shooter combat, boring campaign, underwhelming world. If you have played Doom 2016 and wished it had an open map, vehicle combat pulled from something like Mad Max, and a wider arsenal to experiment with, Rage 2 scratches that itch better than almost anything else in its category. If you are here for story, characters, or a world worth getting lost in, you will hit a wall well before the credits. Buy it with your expectations calibrated to the combat, not the package around it. Alex, Scout Team