Notícias
Sometimes you need a violent playground like Rage 2
T
Thomas Wilde
I tend to judge first-person shooters on how their shotguns feel. A good FPS shotgun ought to feel punchy and powerful. If it doesn’t feel like I’ve just hit someone with a mid-size sedan, it fails. Rage 2’s shotgun passes that first, most crucial test, then sweetens the deal with an alternate fire that lets you send people flying with a concussion blast. Anyone dumb enough to fight me near a safety railing or cliff’s edge is now going on a little trip, guaranteed.
Before that point, Rage 2 gets off to a slow start. You’re the last survivor of the Rangers, the only organization even vaguely interested in keeping order on this post-apocalyptic Earth. At the start of the game, you’re given a pistol, an assault rifle, a vehicle, and a mission: find the guy who killed the rest of the Rangers and punch his teeth down his neck.
That’ll take some work, though. In the meantime, there are several thousand bandits, mutants, cyborgs, and assorted maniacs who need a good swift kick. At this point, you can rove at will across this massive wilderness to explore, get in fights, and build a fleet of ramshackle cars.
The main reason to play Rage 2 is its arsenal. There are ruined complexes scattered throughout the map called Arks. After a certain point in the story, you’ve got free rein to go find them all. Each one’s got a new weapon for you, and with each new weapon, the game gets increasingly wild.
It’s not simply that these guns all have a good feel to them, or that you’ve got an effectively infinite number of fights to get into. Once you're four guns in, the arsenal really starts to come together.
The assault rifle, pistol, and rocket launcher are all genre staples, although the rocket launcher’s alternate fire lets you hose down a single target with a storm of homing missiles. Next up, there’s a portable railgun for long-distance engagements, a revolver that seeds its targets with remote-trigger incendiary rounds, and a full-auto plasma cannon.
However, while these are all great, the real fun started for me with the grav-dart launcher. An enemy takes only mild damage from the darts, but then you can aim your crosshairs anywhere else and right-click to throw that enemy in that direction. That can mean flinging them into open fire or live wires, tossing them into the stratosphere, or bouncing them off the ceiling.
That capacity for creative violence has made Rage 2 a game I keep coming back to. It’s effectively an endless number of reasons to get into engaging fights with some of the best-feeling, most creative weapons in any FPS. It makes me sound a little crazy, but sometimes, if I need cheering up, I’ll fire up Rage 2 and go skeet-shooting mutants with my trusty grav-dart launcher. Give it a try.
Rage 2 is available on the Epic Games Store.