 I want to get a quick video up about Rage 2. I'm going to do a full review of this when I'm done, but this is a larger game than reviewers are saying it is, and I noticed something kind of strange about all those review scores. So let me explain why you should simply ignore almost every review you have read so far. After the logo. Okay, so if you've watched any of my videos, you'll know that in general I have grown to really dislike open world games. I am one of the four people who didn't like Red Dead Redemption 2 all that much. I think the new Assassin Creed games are unbelievably boring, and I think the most recent Far Cry game was average at very best, and it wasn't at its best all that often, and the last few years open world games have gotten bigger and bigger and bigger, with maps that are just ridiculously big and tedious to move around. They've gotten so long that whatever crappy story they try to tell becomes impossible to follow as you clear 15 bandit camps and spend 9 hours in between each story beat. And yet, there are still some open world games I like. Why did I love Horizon Zero Dawn and Spider-Man, The Witcher 3 and even Fallout 4, but not Far Cry 5 or Assassin's Creed? Because if a game is going to be a big, sprawling monster that doesn't have a carefully paced story or expertly designed levels, it needs to do something exceptionally well. It needs to have a strong, powerful hook that keeps me playing. It needs to either be small enough to not bore the share of me, or put a ridiculous amount of effort into making sure its world is dense and artistically distinct enough to not put me to sleep. Or, it has to have gameplay so good nothing else is really needed. Fallout 76 is a bad open world game with a map three times larger than it needs to be, and the game doesn't do anything well enough to overcome that problem. Ditto for Anthem AC Odyssey has an absurdly, stupidly big map, and it doesn't take long before you start seeing the exact same temples and hovels copy-pasted into the same generic scrublands. And it has neither the story or the gameplay to keep me interested for 70 hours. Far Cry 5 is pretty average across the board. Its map is too big, its story is too forgettable, its weapons and stealth are too generic. The actual gunplay is decent enough, but it's not nearly good enough to warrant 50 hours of it. In general, I need excellence to keep me playing. And yet, AC Odyssey and Far Cry 5 got glowing reviews. How is it that Far Cry 5 and the recent Assassin's Creed that are near the indistinguishable from Far Cry 4 and Assassin's Creed Origins got wonderful reviews and Rage 2 has this? I think it's fair to say the critics are finally starting to get as annoyed with open world games as I am. The last generation was the era of the military shooter, and this generation has been the era of the open world action title. A number of big franchises have taken their games open world and almost every big developer has released at least one open world game this generation. As a result, scores for these games might have started to fall outside of the very best of them. If you want high review scores in an open world action game going forward, you better be making something extremely polished and artsy and reviewer friendly like The Witcher 3 or Red Dead 2 or Horizon Zero Dawn. And as I've said, all of those games do something exceptionally well. Many of them do multiple things. The Witcher has its story, its mission and quest design, and amazing enemy variety. Horizon has rock solid combat, story and lore. Red Dead is a stunning technical achievement and will probably stand as the best graphics possible on a console until the next Rockstar game releases. Rage 2 has a few things that it does absolutely exceptionally well. As I noticed middling or bad reviews popping up for Rage 2, I went and looked at the Metacritic for Far Cry 5, a game that is quite literally indistinguishable from Far Cry 4, aside from being slightly worse in almost every way. Far Cry 5 sits in an 85. Rage 2, when I checked, was at a 72. And as all of you know, 72 means bad. It means a below average game. I don't understand. Rage 2 is quite good. Like I said, I'm going to do a full review on this next week or the week after, so let me just explain why the reviews of Rage 2 seem insane to me. Rage 2, as a shooter, is exceptionally good. It is easily one of the best two or three shooters of the generation. It features a rich and exciting suite of weapons, a nice dense map that is almost perfectly sized and that rarest of things in this day and age. Actually necessary, meaningful and powerful progression that's tied to satisfying gameplay systems. Let's start with the progression system because that's one of the most important things that Rage 2 gets right. And it's so good, I think it's quite possibly the best progression system I've ever seen in a first person shooter. In my review of Far Cry 5, I talked about how that game's progression system was both totally pointless and poorly implemented. You unlocked skills that had almost no gameplay value by getting XP for arbitrary accomplishments. The skill tree included such exciting gameplay systems as carrying a third gun, carrying a fourth gun, being able to stealth kill big enemies, being able to stealth kill enemies from above them, using a parachute, using the grappling hook to climb up a few very specific walls and hilariously letting you crouch walk at a reasonable speed because the base crouch walk is absurdly impossibly stupidly slow. Far Cry 5's progression system was boring basic bullshit gameplay mechanics that have no right being locked behind a skill tree to begin with. I don't need to learn how to crouch walk before I can be trusted to do it at a normal speed. I should not need to unlock a skill node to carry a third weapon. It's an insulting and stupid simplification of the previous game's already kind of stupid progression system. It might be the very worst progression system I've ever seen in a shooter. Rage's progression system includes things like using the force to turn an enemy into a flying projectile, double jumping and then being able to hang in the air while aiming, extending your hang time by killing enemies, disrupting enemy aim by dashing to avoid projectiles and explosions, being able to slam the ground and kill everyone around you, being able to melee grenades back at enemies, throwing a gravity vortex that sucks in enemies and explosives and pulls them helplessly into the air. It gives you these things one at a time allowing you to figure out how best to chain them together into a chaotic dance of death. Rage's progression fundamentally alters the gameplay systems. It totally changes the flow of combat. It offers compelling choices as you then improve these skills by going out into the world to find specific activities that reward the upgrade currency. A good progression system slowly introduces the player to new gameplay mechanics. The whole point of a progression system used to be to allow the player to familiarize themselves with and then master a skill before introducing more. That's literally why it's called progression. You progress your skill and ability to use a mechanic before the game gives you another mechanic to learn. Giving the player access to all of Rage 2's combat skills at once would hurt the experience because you wouldn't end up using each one on its own to fully appreciate everything you can do with it. Slowly unlocking one after the other means by the time you've unlocked the ability to ground slam, you've pretty much mastered the force throw and are ready to put another tool into your rotation. Giving the player all the skills in Far Cry 5 would not change the game at all other than to make it less annoying. And then there's the way you unlock the progression tree itself. Far Cry 5 awarded perk points seemingly at random. You might acquire one for something as engaging as say killing five enemies with a shotgun or by killing five enemies with a Molotov cocktail. The game also awarded points from a few missions and occasionally by finding a magazine but these were extremely unsatisfying ways to unlock a skill tree. What it boiled down to was simply playing the game and opening the menu every 20 minutes to see how many skill perks you unlocked. Rage 2 smartly locks its new powers and upgrade points behind its most important systems exploration and combat. Scattered about are arcs that feature some of the game's most fun combat sections and hold all of the game's most important skills and weapons. This means that actively seeking out the arcs feels good. A, because what's in there makes the game actively more fun, not just less annoying. And B, some of the game's most hectic and fun combat encounters are around these arcs making it a three-sided reward system. You are rewarded for exploration by finding someplace interesting, getting a great combat section and then getting a powerful new tool to use in exploration and combat going forward. This aspect of the game is so well-designed and so fundamentally important to how a player interacts with a game that this system alone makes it a more well-designed and fun experience than Far Cry 5. Oh and just a quick aside, you should play this game on hard. Rage 2 gives you a surprising amount of mechanics to play with and the combat is so fun because the challenge doesn't come from enemies simply having more health. It comes from the enemy varieties and their abilities. Rage 2 is best when you feel like you're using all of the game's mechanics to solve combat puzzles and I think that for most of you playing on normal is going to be too easy and with that let's get to the second thing that Rage 2 does exceptionally well. Combat. Rage 1 wasn't all that good frankly. Combat was average. Exploration was average but Rage 2 is exceptionally good at combat. Listen, I am a simple man. I like FPS games that let me move fast and turn enemies into puddles of blood. I like shooters that are hectic and fast and pushed me to solve situations by using mechanics and not getting behind cover. Any game that lets me do things like this is going to rate very highly for me. Gunplay is straight up Doom 2016. Guns feel powerful, are animated well and have excellent sound design and add to that nearly perfect Doom formula. A fast movement speed and great gunplay are a bunch of really really excellent skills, tools and abilities. This is one of the very best shooters of the last 10 years. It feels very much like playing Doom combined with Destiny. As I was playing and enjoying using the dash evade ability it occurred to me that its inclusion in the upcoming Doom Eternal was almost certainly a result of people that it realizing how fucking fun it was to use here in Rage. Rage has great weapon design, fantastic gunplay, interesting enemies and bosses and loads of skills that are both fun to use and allow for the game to throw a lot of challenge at you. It's as good a shooter as you'll play this year outside of the next Doom game and its combat is miles more interesting and complex and deep than a Far Cry game. In fact I cannot for the life of me understand how anyone in the world can like Far Cry 5 more than this game. It makes zero sense to me, I don't get it. Did you like the combat in Doom 2016? Then you will like Rage 2, period. It is the exact same combat system with many of the same animations and some extra abilities thrown in for good measure. These combat encounters allow for a genuinely surprising amount of freedom and creativity. The combat is so good it is worth the asking price on that alone. Finally there's been a bunch of complaining that the main campaign missions only last 10 to 15 hours but I am convinced that this has more to do with the way that players have become conditioned to play open world games than it does Rage 2's design. While yes it is technically true that the game seems short if you simply drive from one main story mission to the next I am already 34 hours in and I have not gotten to the last zone. The modern open world game has lost all reason to even be open world at all. They are all ridiculously curated and end up being strangely linear. The reason Fallout 4 is still a good game even though it's a bad RPG is because it hasn't fallen into this trap yet. Acy Odyssey or Far Cry 5 will tell you exactly where to go. It will contrive a reason to send you to every single point of interest and will have you progress through each zone in a linear fashion completing tasks. Rage 2 is simply not designed this way. You'll see some reviews complaining that the main story quests of which there's only like 8 or 10 seem to want you to crisscross the map from top to bottom. But the game doesn't demand this of you and I didn't do that. I got to a zone and I explored it for all the interesting combat and upgrade materials. When I ended up near a story mission I did it. Or if I started getting bored I would decide to go do a story mission. Rage is clearly and obviously designed for you to not simply chase a mission icon. The fact that these missions would send you literally to the entire other end of the map kind of implies you're not expected to race directly there doesn't it? Again Fallout 4 is still a good open world game because it doesn't tell you what to do all the time. The game is best played wandering around discovering things and completing a mission when you get near it. Rage 2 is designed like Skyrim or the recent Fallout games and not Far Cry or Assassin's Creed. If you're looking for what I call a linear open world game this is not that. You will not be told where to go or what to do. You won't be laser focused on following a set path to progress the story. That set story path is quite literally the smallest part of the game. Rage 2 shines precisely because it does not do that. It gives you one of gaming's best ever combat systems and an interesting world with a wide variety of exploration and mission types and sets you loose to poke around and liquefy mutants. This is not a bad thing. This is a glorious thing and more importantly the fact that you can rush through and beat the game in 15 hours if you want is also a good thing. One of my main gripes with recent open world games is they are far far too long and simply do not have the gameplay chops or variety to justify that bloated length. Acy Odyssey was a fun 20-hour game smeared thinly over 80 fucking hours of bullshit time wasting and a very mediocre second rate combat system. Red Dead 2 was an unbelievably good 15-hour story campaign dragged out to 70 hours of looting beans from cabinets. All of these recent open world games have maps that are two or three times larger than is needed for the gameplay they have on offer. And with these huge maps you don't actually have freedom because the game will direct you where to go at all times. You don't explore, you follow mission markers and occasionally stumble on side content. Rage 2 is precisely opposite of that. It has a small map by modern open world standards. It doesn't tell you where to go. Stumbling on side content is the entire game and it is fucking glorious. You can drive across the whole map in no time at all and the map is loaded with the most important things the game does. Combat. Are there loads of interesting audio logs and compelling stories and mission design scattered everywhere? No, there's only loads of this. This. The map is exactly large enough so that every one or two minutes I will arrive at this. There are really cool boss fights, interesting bandit camps that serve as wonderfully designed combat arenas and linear dungeons that are well paced action set pieces. Every one of the complaints leveled against this game are insane to me. Were you expecting war and peace from the people who make doom and just cause? I wasn't. I was expecting this. This. And also this. Now the game is not perfect, of course. It is still an open world game with all the issues that come from that. It's got a load of design choices that annoy the shit at me like having to press X to pick shit up. Why? Why developers? Again, if your game is Fallout or Subnautica and features a bunch of shit that I don't want to pick up to save inventory space, yes, make me press the button. But if literally every single thing I pass I want, why do I need to strafe side to side pressing X? It makes no fucking sense and hurts the game. It features several bugs, including voices dropping out fairly regularly, not that it really matters what the game has to say. And it has a serious issue with performance that makes the entire game look blurry. I ended up solving this problem by turning off all anti-aliasing and depth of field, which means that you will occasionally get a weird jagged shadow, but I highly recommend you do the same thing so you don't get nauseous. And its driving is kind of average only. It'll take you more than half the game until you feel comfortable with it. Although once you do feel comfortable with it, it's actually kind of good. It just feels slow and sluggish. It could be better. The driving's at its best when you're attacking convoys and it's pretty fun then. But when you can't really turn and drive up a cliff, that's kind of annoying. And then, of course, its story is only average, but the story to this is also very average. Also this. Also this. Far Cry 5 has every single problem that Rage 2 has with almost none of the redeeming qualities that make this game actually fun to play. I like Rage 2 so much that I'm going to play it again immediately on the hardest difficulty. And then I'll have a review that focuses on all this shit that annoys me about it and all the other stuff the game does really, really well. But I thought it important to get a really short little video up to let you all know that the reviews here are very strange. And in my opinion, flat out wrong. Rage 2 is a very good game because it knows what's important and it does those things often and well. It's a game about doing this. And you will spend almost all of your time playing with some of the best FPS combat in recent years. If you're not playing anything right now and you've got 60 bucks and you had fun shooting demons in 2016, I guarantee you will have fun shooting mutants in Rage 2. It is a very easy game to recommend to anyone who loves shooters. Alright, I'll see you again soon. Thanks for coming. Bye.