if then else

In real life, relationships are complex. In fact, human interaction of any sort is just about the most elaborate intermingling of social, psychological, and physical frameworks you’ll ever see. This is why successful movies, books, and television shows all focus on character growth and personal relationships; people love to see the intricacies at work.

However, these relationships can be molded, contorted into being what we want and, more often, what we don’t want. Through textual mediums such as instant messenger or e-mail, the lack of vocal inflection requires you to be much more deliberate in your diction and phrasing lest you offend someone. Over the phone, facial expressions and hand gestures are lost as your intent is filtered through the wire, requiring your interjecting sighs and chortles to communicate what your physical being cannot.

Take, for (a relevant) example, Call of Duty’s multiplayer voice chat. Without a face to put to the voice, the entire framework of communication laid out by the game effectively forces you to dehumanize your opponents and teammates. To you, they are just a bucket in which you can dump your frustrations, angers, and occasional bits of jubilation. The problem is that this bucket can talk back. It can volley back retorts, obscenities, and racial slurs with the best buckets out there. The rote, mindless action of the game is wholly engrossing, leaving minimal mental faculties for maintaining human decency. This is how you end up with shouting matches and rage quits.

Which makes Thatgamecompany’s Journey’s co-op interactions altogether fascinating. Everything is carefully crafted and placed to the sandy micrometer so as to form intensely personal relationships with what are ostensibly strangers and does so by forming a single, unique combination of two types of players. Although these numbers convey a sense of simplicity, the dependence on one another is as complex as you can find outside of the game’s rutilant sun.

At the most base interpretation of this affair, one person is a follower and the other is a leader (there is the chance that both parties mutually disengage from this enterprise, but that just makes them both a bad leader and a bad follower). Distilling it to such a rudimentary chemical reaction, though, is doing it a disservice. It is symbiotic necessity for mere existence.

As a leader, you must be brave and resolute. You must never falter or doubt yourself; your follower depends on you. You may not know where you are going or what you are doing, but you move ever forward; your follower has placed his trust in you. You can never quit; your follower believes in you.

As a leader, you are the lance that can pierce the unknown. Your intrepidness is the stalwart beam coming from the lighthouse leading you home. You are not a leader because you chose to be but because it was required of you. Without you, your partner is lost, sad, and alone. You have saved him from the gutter and placed him in your warm embrace where you can be the guiding light he needs to survive.

As a follower, you are reticent and reliable. You acknowledge your leader’s strength and ferocity but never question your own; you are the foundation upon which this relationship is built. You trust your leader because he trusts you; your leader would be nothing without you. You can never quit; your leader needs you.

As a follower, you are the armor that protects from the unknown. Your unwavering commitment is the boat you two will ride to shore and safety from the dangers of the turbulent sea. You are not a follower because you chose to be but because it was required of you. Without you, your partner is lost, sad, and alone. You walk by his side as the fuel to his fire that you both cannot live without.

Journey reduces multiplayer to one of the most basic types of relationships two people can have, but they’ve rebuilt it into one of the most maddening, heart-wrenching, enigmatic examples of beautiful codependency you’ll ever see. It doesn’t matter if you are the leader or the follower; applying those labels diminishes the significance of your relationship. You are one half of a whole. Without you, this gestalt does not exist.

Every emotion I’ve ever had for a sibling, a friend, a lover, or even a stranger I have felt playing Journey. By finding the bedrock upon which all other relationships are built, the game allows you to fill in the gaps with your own experiences and desires, whether you are aware of it or not. Some of you may be turned off by the blank emotional canvas presented to you where all the brushes are already dipped in affection and fellowship, but perhaps that is because you lack the trust to be a follower or the strength to be a leader. You are not playing your role for yourself. You are playing for this unknown person, this stranger that will become your light in the underground, this stranger that will become your fire on the snowy mountaintops.

This stranger that will become a physical necessity.

I could hear the hollow bellow from above. Even over the unrelenting, roaring wind, I could hear it.

I could see the white-hot gaze just ahead. Even through the snowy, sideways haze, I could see it.

Against it all, I prayed I was safe. I prayed we were safe. “Oh god oh god,” I heard myself mutter over and over again, waiting for the terror to pass, huddled in the shadows of this rocky remnant. I turned to my companion.

But he was gone.

Tracks laid were he once stood. Following with my eye the path he now foolishly plowed, I could see him out in the distance. Darting back and forth between him and the skyward beast, my eyes could only attempt to communicate what my voice could not.

“Hey! Come back! Come back!”

It was pointless. The howling winter gusts swallowed my fevered pleas. But suddenly, the empty stare from above turns aggressive, rutilant. My words disappear. My stomach drops.

I begin to step out into the biting air. “Oh god oh god.” The feral creature begins to screech, leering back, preparing to strike. “Move faster! Faster!” I begin to run, dragging my feet through the knee-high powder. “If I can just reach him…” Unfinished thoughts rattle through my mind, unfinished because the ending unfathomable. Inevitable.

My scarf trails in the pale storm, flapping and twisting in the wind. It marks the path of a fool, a sap. Then, the fiend lurches forward, cutting through the frozen air with a searing, unknowable hate.

He collapses. I reach out.

Closer it comes.

He gives up. I refuse.

Screaming in, faster and faster.

He waits for his end. I touch his arm.

And to think, I didn’t even know his name.

Meeting strangers is like playing pachinko. Each time you meet a new one, you are dropping them into your own game of interpersonal fortune. You watch them, sometimes subconsciously, trickle down the ornate and noisy pegboard, bounding around, clinking and clanking from side to side until they come to a sudden and resolved stop.

Will they fall into your good graces and become a friend? What if they fall off the board completely and a stranger is all they will ever be? Tumbling and turning, they are as curious as you.

It’s awe-inspiring, then, when you come across an occasion where those transients you meet during your endeavors take a straight, unwavering path to a reserved and guarded place within you. They cut through the swath of pins and quickly arrive at somewhere much more intimate.

Such as it is with Journey, the latest release from artsy developers Thatgamecompany, and it is a grand experiment in pure, uncut game design. There are no spoken words, no exposition with which to tell you how to interpret the world around you. The title itself is all the instruction you need.

Everything is designed to move you forward. From the way you ski down the sandy dunes of the desert slopes to how the game has removed any possibility for negative progression, this game is about the journey. Even with the multiplayer, they have eliminated any opportunity to grief.

And I truly believe this game was made for multiplayer. Every conceit and every design minutia is put in place to foster a bond between two strangers. Communicating bolsters your flight; being in close proximity provides a warming heat of golden light; and your meditative transitions are positioned to show you are only one half of this experience.

The choice to prohibit voice and text chat while online is a bold and powerful one. You may not realize it, but just hearing how someone sounds or seeing the words they choose informs you with an immediate and everlasting impression.

Journey, however, lets you fill in the gaps for yourself. With no voice—just a melodic chirp to convey intent—you are free to turn that warble into whatever you desire. Every little peep told me a tale of joy in cooperatively conquering a puzzle or filled me with great despair as we both realize our journey has taken a turn for the worse. There is a gravitas you can create yourself that you could not do so otherwise with text and dialogue.

An intimate and familiar relationship is formed. An unqualified kinship develops universally and immediately. I had become frustrated with my companions, even hated them at points, but never did I want to leave them. Their inability to keep up was endearing, and their need to constantly move ahead before I was ready was misguided (or perhaps misinterpreted) concern for making sure the way was safe for us. The struggles we faced were our own and we would overcome them together.

Journey is altogether and simultaneously the most exhilarating, most terrifying, and most bewildering experience I’ve had in such a long time, and it is a triumph in every sense of the word. There are moments of pure, abject fear that froze me in my seat. There are moments where I felt as free and flowing as a bird on the wind.

There are moments where I knew I was playing something special.

You wake up on a train. You notice it’s not moving but neither are you. A wave of pain hits you as you try to stand. Looking down, you see blood. A lot of blood.

Your blood.

You can see outside the broken window and see that it is snowing, but something is wrong. You start to come out of your daze and sort out what you’re seeing, but suddenly, a crate and then a barrel come flying by your head toward the back of the train. As they burst through the door, revealing nothing but emptiness below, your seat begins to give way. You scramble for more solid ground, but you know you are in trouble; this train is going down with you in it.

You fall through the car, rattling around like a Plinko ball, and eventually fall through to the railing just beneath the door. You are now dangling from the rear of the train, the very end of the line at the sheer face of the cliff. The mystery of how you got there takes a backseat.

You move, but it hurts. You climb, but it’s slow. You jump, grab, and clamber about, but you are dying. You are dying, and no one is there to watch.

You are watching two men walk down a dark English street. They enter a surprisingly lively pub where there are men drinking, talking, and, by and large, looking like thugs. This is because in almost caricature-like fashion, they are thugs. English thugs in a pub drinking beer, working the thug beat to ensure an underhanded dealing goes in the favor of their employer.

This is entirely new, what you’re seeing, but it’s still very familiar: two finely dressed cohorts are lead surreptitiously by meaner-looking men to a rather dapper and well-spoken gentleman. Apologies, introductions, brass tacks: it’s all above-board in the action adventure heist genre.

In the most dramatic and fore-telling fashion, a double-cross is revealed; the fellow with the tie and the British accent is screwing these two charming fellows out of money, an ostensibly valuable ring, and their well-being. A few quips and now they’re fighting, bar-style.

Every action is game-like, just as every movement is exaggerated and almost comical; bashing a fellow’s head with a cue stick, being dragged facedown across a bar and out a window, and throwing down with three confused but equally hostile foes upon landing are almost to be expected and soon after actually happen.

There is never any real gravitas here. It’s apparent from the outset that these two men, despite one’s advancing age and the other’s cheery disposition, are more than capable of handling themselves against these pawns (and the clichéd brute). For every hit they take, they are ready to deal three more until they make their way to the back alley for their less-than-ideal escape, but not before one last encounter with the bad guy.

Some storied banter leads to two implausible deaths; implausible because these are the leads. For all their trials and labored tasks, they cannot die. Their progress is forever locked in step towards the end of this story.

You are either the hero or the spectator. Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception took a step backwards from its predecessor and put you back into the role of an intervening viewer. You went from the natural reveal of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves where all your knowledge grew with Nathan’s through the game’s diegesis and the impetus of waking up on the train with a commensurate amount of confusion to simply observing another action fantasy. I’d much rather be the guy who saves the world than watch the guy who does it.

Even if I am dying.

If you aren’t familiar with Dishonored, that’s all right because I wasn’t either. All I knew heading into my QuakeCon demo was that it was a first-person shooter from Arkane Studios and there may or may not be rats. While both of those things are true, there is a whole lot more to Dishonored that just Schrödinger critters.

Indeed, Dishonored is a game that takes place in the first-person perspective, but it is less of a shooter and more of a mixed action stealth game. You play as a “supernatural assassin” and are far more capable of inflicting pain than dealing with it. The natural recourse of this characteristic is stealth, and it is here in spades.

It has been most aptly described, I believe, as BioShock meets Thief meets Deus Ex meets Half-Life. When I first heard this, I thought that sounded a bit convoluted. That’s a lot of greatness to cram into one game (unless they meant it as merely the intersection of just the bad stuff from those four games, in which case oh sweet crikey). But as I watched more of Arkane’s cofounders Harvey Smith and Raphael Colantonio playing through Dishonored, I got it, and boy do I want more of it.

The demo starts off pretty simple with just some minor side street exploration and explanation of the game’s story and the mission’s objectives (to find and kill a lawyer). As I said before, you are a supernatural assassin, but you, as Corvo, actually used to be a bodyguard. That is until you are accused of murdering the Empress, the person you were hired to protect. Corvo claims Lord Regent framed him, but not many people are willing to buy your story. This bit of history will be explored at some point during the game, but not in this mission.

If you can’t tell by now, there is a heavy Victorian era influence on the game. I want to call it steampunk as there are some seriously modern elements to the world of Dunwall, but as not only do the developers want to avoid that label, it also seems that Dishonored doesn’t go far back enough into the retro half of the steampunk genre to make it fully fall under that banner. Generally speaking, the visuals are where I draw the largest similarities to BioShock, especially BioShock Infinite. The colors are rather vivid and there is a lot of contrast in its palette.

The game also seems to play somewhat similarly to BioShock 2. You can dual wield weapons, though your sword is always bound to your right hand whereas your left is free to brandish firearms, blades, and spells. A power wheel comes up when you want to reassign powers and weapons and looks very much like when you want to reassign your plasmids and guns in BioShock. The way button prompts for looting and contextual actions are also very similar, but I supposed there are worse things to borrow from.

We are soon shown a dead body where a bunch of rats are munching down. This offers a chance for the developers to show off some of the new lighting tech they’ve brought into the Unreal Engine and explain that the world has come under a rat plague that has killed off half its population. Rats flee from light, so once it is introduced into the scene, they scatter and we carry on.

This is where we begin to see some of the dynamic movement available to the player which definitely reminds me of playing Thief games. You can lean around corners and mantle ledges and whatnot and that rooftop access is always an option. From what I could see, though, some actions were based on controls such as press right bumper to lean or something, but others were just button presses to climb on top of this dumpster. This was never clarified as to what was and what wasn’t organic to the controls and what were contextual sequences mapped to the action button.

We proceed to come across a lone guard on the street and quickly take cover. When in hiding, white streaks will come across a certain radius of the player’s central vision and show from which direction people might be coming from and how much—if at all—they are alerted to your presence. They quickly and quietly take him down and dump his body in a nearby dumpster so as not to alert any other people who might wander by.

Walking down an alley, they spot a woman in dire need of help. Three thugs are assaulting her and Smith explains that many things like this will happen during your missions where you can choose to accept and engage in side quests or not. Whether you succeed or fail or even try or don’t will all have an impact on the mission and possibly the entire story. In this particular case, they choose to intervene and we are shown our first taste of combat.

They equip a pistol and a sword and step into the alley. A fire flickers against the back wall and lights the scene nicely, providing very dramatic ambiance for the ensuing battle. As they maneuver Corvo around the enemies and take pot shots, it is immediately clear that the firearm is fairly sticky in its aiming; just come close to an enemy with the reticule and it will do its best to keep its sights trained on your foe. This, along with later action sequences and ammo provisions, gives the impression that certain encounters will definitely play out more favorably with close quarter’s weapons with the ability to parry and block enemy melee attacks whereas others are more geared towards fighting from a distance and using your powers to gain tactical advantage over entrenched enemies.

The final bad guy is dispatched with a brutal decapitation. The woman offers her thanks, but is soon devoured by a swarm of rats. What a rough day.

We then begin the task of actually breaking into the mansion with its inhabitants unaware. When hidden, a bit of text at the bottom of the screen will come up and say [hidden] so you won’t have to wonder “can he see me? He probably can’t see me…oh god he can see me!” Smith and Colantonio then explain the game’s use of “3D audio propagation.” What this means for you the player is that audio dissipates and bounces accurately across elements in the game world. So if someone is walking through a hallway ahead of you, you can tell if he is coming from the right or from the left and how far away he is from the entrance.

Corvo is then impeded by the mansion entrance. Rather than go in guns blazing (always an option) and giving the target a chance to escape, they choose to instead go stealth, but not in the way of crawling around and hiding in shadows. Instead, they show off a new power where you can possess other living creatures. In this case, they take control of a rat and crawl through an air duct and into an empty room.

They have to make it quick because this is not just mind control; this is full body inhabitance. This means that when the rat dies due to being stepped on or falling down a hole or something, you also die along with it. This also means, however, that when you cease possession of the rat, you are then wherever the rat is, hence the empty room.

After hiding from a couple more guards in some dark shadows, they discuss guard AI. The AI in this game is totally dynamic, so you can’t just count on memorizing patterns and counting down passes to get by. While I’m sure some of it is predetermined, there is also that element of randomness where a guard may meander a bit or get distracted by a painting or go warm himself up by the fire.

At this point, we’re told we’re approaching the guard with the key to the room that the lawyer is holed up in, and that if we were to fail to obtain the key, the mission could then branch of in several ways, including him running for it, having to find an alternative way in, or the mission turning into a firefight. In this case, they end up killing him and picking up the key and proceeding to the lawyer.

Things get physical rather quickly, but given that Corvo has several special powers at his disposal, it all ends up in his favor. First, we are shown that though the rat plague could harm the player as well, we do have the power to summon them to attack enemies. Then they use a time freeze power at which point they can freely move around the space to brutally attack the opposition at their leisure. Lastly, they use a wind blast technique that is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. It actually most reminds me of the blast powers in the Infamous series (though, to be fair, it also looks like a dozen other games with this sort of power such as Skyrim).

During the battle, there are a couple things are somewhat meta to the game but totally organic to the world as well. The first is a chaos meter, which is the duality gauge of the game. It is not a morality meter like other games but rather a pure reflection of your impact on the amount of chaos in the world. If you keep killing people in an exceedingly irresponsible manner and fail to hide the bodies, you will increase your chaos meter significantly. On the other hand, if you manage to remain stealthy and keep the peace in the streets, the chaos meter will begin to drain.

Based on how chaotic you are as you complete mission, the story will change. It could be as small as certain side quests or avenues to your target are not accessible or have your mission dynamically chang objectives or could be as big as changing the outcome of the entire game. Needless to say, chaos is a very large part of Dishonored.

The second part is adrenaline, the usage for which we experienced earlier in the alley with the three thugs and the woman. Adrenaline is a constantly charging resource and can be used to great effect when you find yourself in a bind during battle. We’re only shown it being used offensively (the decapitation in the alley and here with another gruesome kill in the lawyer’s office), but it may also have other uses. They never really found time to clarify in the heat of battle.

Back to the mission, though, Corvo uses a power called blink which allows him to teleport to places ahead of him and does so to get from the upper levels of the mansion where the lawyer is down to the streets where he can make an escape. Unfortunately, a siren has sounded and guards begin to descend upon our hero.

Using some more powers and some gunplay, he eventually makes it through a portion of the guards and the courtyard to his escape point, but soon comes to a slightly more open but still hostile dock area that really makes me feel like we’re in Half-Life 2’s City 17. This feeling is soon reinforced as two large Tallboys—giant bipedal robots—come into view and begin attacking. He eventually takes them and a couple additional guards down after some ingenious usage of combined powers and weapons and the demo ends.

In the following Q&A, the developers point out some elements that were easy to miss or dismiss without knowing what they were. At some point during the demo inside the mansion, they had picked up a rune and some blueprints. Runes are collected and spent to upgrade and unlock new powers. More powerful abilities cost more runes, so it falls on the player to decide if they would rather have a wide variety of powers or utilize only a select few exceptionally powerful skills.

For the non-supernatural upgrades for your weapons, you can use the money you earn and find as you complete missions. Weapons will have their own upgrade tree where stats and abilities become more powerful and unlocked as you progress further down the tech tree.

Someone then asks about the nature of your uniqueness in the world of Dunwall. Smith and Colantonio confirm that there are indeed other supernatural characters in the game (such as the mysteriously named Outsider), but they are kept very secretive from the rest of the world. Most people are completely unaware that there even is such a thing as real magic. In fact, at some point during Corvo’s escape from the courtyard of the mansion, an enemy yells out “aggh! Witchcraft!” at the sight of you performing a wind blast.

Next comes up a question of how free players are to explore the world. As the designer for Deus Ex, Smith is all for exploration in every sense of the word. There is nothing truly off limits from the player as, if you want, you can attempt to get anywhere you can see including rooftops, sewers, or what have you. This continues into the usage of powers, too, as they all combine nicely through both design and happenstance.

During play testing, they discovered that players were combining powers in unexpected ways, like using the super jump and the blink abilities to quickly scale buildings that would otherwise prove too difficult or impossible to climb. Other players discovered that they could easily stealth into hidden paths by summoning a rat swarm, possessing one, and climbing through a gutter. A few more hostile testers even discovered that you could attach bombs to these rats before you possess them so you could hand deliver a deadly explosion to a batch of enemies before fully engaging in combat.

Next came up the topic of the game’s structure. While you do have a home base you return to between missions, there will be “absolutely no open world” as each mission (and thus environment and its accompanying predicament) is “handcrafted” to the story and the context of your plot progression. They are very much impressing the fact that while the flow of the game is open to the player and reactive to your actions, scenarios within missions are specially established beforehand to really fit the zeitgeist of the world of Dunwall and your place within its history. This, consequently, means that there will be absolutely no multiplayer in Dishonored.

After having heard so little about Dishonored and yet enough for me to feel like I wasn’t going to entirely like where it was headed, after this demo, I feel excited. You can definitely feel where the pedigree of its designers came from (Deus Ex, Arx Fatalis) and also where the influences came from (Thief, BioShock, Half-Life), but none of it feels overly done. Certainly elements here and there are very reminiscent of those games in sometimes vague, sometimes specific ways, but there’s a certain cohesive feeling to it. So far, it seems that they took all the good parts of those games, left out the bad, and are attempting to make an altogether new and impressive game. Expect Dishonored on your PC, PS3, or 360 sometime in early summer of 2012.

Judging by everyone I talked to at QuakeCon, I was not alone in almost wholeheartedly writing off id Software‘s upcoming post-apocalyptic first-person shooter Rage. Also judging by everyone I talked to at QuakeCon, I am now not alone in feeling like a damn fool for having done so.

Rage is very much an id game when you look at it in the grand scheme of things. It’s certainly hard to quantify why I say that (though it’s also a sentiment John Carmack shared in his keynote this year), but you definitely get that sensation. Perhaps it’s the quick movement, or certain “kitchen sink” design choices that harkens to shooters of old, but it’s definitely hard to miss.

It says something that after spending three hours with the game last Friday, though, that I still can’t nail down what made the demo stand out so much. Yes, Rage is yet another post-apocalyptic shooter; yes, Rage is very brown; and yes to a dozen other things that you may have niggling doubts about over the game, but trust me, the sum is (thus far) much greater than its individual parts.

This preview will contain some specific information from the game, including spoilers.  Consider yourself warned.

The demo opens with a rather striking cinematic. Despite being very sparse in the narrative department, you can get the whole story, and even experience a tinge of emotion, as the exceptional orchestral music awakens something very dramatic deep inside of you. In short, the world is ending. 99942 Apophis is a very real and very large asteroid that has a one in 250,000 chance of colliding with Earth on April 13, 2036, but in the world of Rage, Apophis hits Earth in the most spectacularly catastrophic of ways on August 23, 2038, and it’s all downhill from there.

You play as the silent protagonist who turns out to be one of (if not the only) survivor of the Ark, a specially built housing chamber for those selected to carry on the human legacy. On both sides of the fortune spectrum, however, you are not alone. Following your awakening from your presumably long sleep, you stumble out into the Wasteland and are almost immediately attacked by a mutant, a moment that actually almost had me jump out of my seat. Fortunately for you, a non-Ark survivor named Dan Hagar (played by John Goodman) comes to your rescue and takes you away to Hagar Settlement, your first safe haven from the numerous hostiles he points out to you as you ride in his buggy.

The drive is pretty lengthy, so I get to looking around the world a fair bit, and it is gorgeous. True to many things Carmack said during his keynote/rant, it does look like a “moving painting,” and the expansive landscapes are rather impressive. Also true to his words, things get…”muddy” upon closer inspection. This is due to the MegaTexture (called Virtual Texturing with Rage and Doom 4′s advancements) technology’s limitation on how it wraps 4096×4096 pages of textures across all models and sprites, opting for impressive vistas and improved RAM usage over minute details and more easily created textures.

Hagar says a lot of things during the drive and upon your arrival at his settlement, but some key parts stand out: 1) you, like other Ark survivors, are special, 2) there is something called the Authority that seems to rule much of the world, and 3) it’s dangerous out there.

Throughout the demo, a lot of other characters and factions (and there seem to be a fair number of those hanging around) talk about the Authority. They track down and reward others who bring in Ark survivors, something Hagar mentions when he points out that your Ark suit is going to draw a lot of attention, but not much more is known about them. They might be experimenting on mutants, and they might also be attempting some martial law, but I never found out for sure what was true and what wasn’t.

It seems though that they, and many others, are looking for Ark survivors because of their “specialness,” the degree of which you begin to discover on your first mission for Dan Hagar. He loads you up with a pistol and a loaner ATV, and tells you to clear out the mutants that might have seen you two kill their buddies during your rescue.

The ATV handles pretty nicely. At first I felt like it was a bit sluggish with extremely tight handling, but there is a boost button and, boy howdy, do you haul ass with that boost. There’s a nice zoom out effect when you speed up, giving you that extra sense of seriously trucking across the terrain. It almost feels like the ATV handles analogously to the player in that you can change speeds and directions fairly quickly. When you hit the hand brake, you stop. Hard.

And for the record, if you hit something hard enough, you will go flying and probably die.

Upon reaching the enemy hideout, you start clearing them out. The pistol you are given is weak, fires slowly and, honestly, gave me almost immediate doubt as to whether or not id had already lost my interest in this game. But, I pressed on.

I should mention at this point, though, that I encountered a few bugs that involved enemies shooting through solid walls, and getting stuck on geometry, but those are fairly minor. I have total confidence those are simply affectations of being a preview build.

Eventually the mutants captured me and sent me to the “kill room.” Lo and behold, they actually did kill me, but here is where you get your first taste of being a special Ark survivor; all Ark survivors have nanotechnology floating around inside of them, and in this particular case, you can revive yourself when you die. It occurs through a little minigame where you have to match the analog sticks (I was playing on Xbox 360, though a PS3 and PC build were also available) with what is shown on screen and simultaneously pull both triggers. If I had to compare it something I’ve never actually done but imagine being somewhat similar in sensation, it’s kind of like using a defibrillator. Depending on how you manage the final defibrillation, you get some portion of your health back and cause an explosion of sorts that knocks down—if not kills—all of the nearby enemies.

Supposedly, there will be other Ark powers to discover, but that was the only one I was given in my time with the game.

While it seems that it was a predetermined action that you are captured by the mutants, it wouldn’t have surprised me if they were just sneaky enough to pull it off regardless. Once they catch sight of you, the mutants will immediately start running towards you, and bounding off the walls and ceiling to avoid your fire. It actually gets quite tense. At some point I was backed all the way into a corner, and at the last second managed to pop my pursuer in the noggin.

Of course, I could have also used my melee attack, which turns out to be fairly powerful. Once I got the feel for the game, I started capping runners in the knee and then using a melee to finish them off. This is not a criticism for being yet another FPS where the melee is an instant kill, last ditch effort sort of attack but rather how well the game plays. Things move fluidly and quickly enough to where I can shoot a runner or two in the leg, unload a couple more rounds in those behind cover with guns, and then come back to finish those on the ground before they recover. It all feels amazingly satisfying.

It gets even better once you ditch the useless pistol. Or rather, once you ditch the useless pistol ammo. Some weapons have multiple ammo types, and the pistol upgrades to fat rounds that turn it more into a traditional magnum-class revolver, rather than a starter handgun. It usually killed enemies in one shot, though that particular ammo was somewhat scarce. Of course, there were also the crossbow, sniper rifle, assault rifle, shotgun, and a bladed boomerang to use.

The boomerang was earned through a shooting gallery minigame with Hagar’s daughter, and it was hardly the last side game I encountered in Rage. There is also a whole bunch of racing, car combat with buggy upgrades to boot, collectible cards which in turn become its own game, and more. Now you know why I said it had a “kitchen sink” sort of feel to it.

I guess that’s why Rage actually kind of reminds me of Borderlands. It’s not just the art style (though I’m sure that has something to do with it), but rather how the game is tied together. You chat people up in the open world environment, they tell you to go places and what they’ll give you upon your return, and then you shoot someone, collect something, or flip a switch. When you’re not doing that, there are plenty of job boards hanging around where you can pick up and complete different side quests, such as the one that continually rewards you for killing bandits in particular areas of the map. There’s also a battle arena that is very much Mad Moxxi.

Unfortunately, the vehicles are pretty subpar compared to Borderlands’ or any other game’s vehicles. Aside from the ATV, for some reason the rest of the whip sets all handle in an excessively floaty fashion. If you go any faster than walking speed, you instantly lose any semblance of turning radius and traction. This isn’t a problem on some of the early race tracks, where they are wide and the turns are soft, but when you’re combating multiple bandit vehicles, or attempting to finesse around Hagar’s garage, it definitely gets a bit annoying.

However, that’s really all I can put on my cons list after three hours with Rage. Given that I’ve really only explored a small fraction of the game, I can’t say for sure if it stays that engaging or fun or varied the whole time, but I can definitely say I liked those three hours a whole lot. Like, a lot a lot.