Conclusion

Having played RAGE 2 for a couple of hours, it feels to me like the developer tried to collect great ideas from other games to merge them in a new title, which seems to be a bit of a trend lately. The suit upgrades, which vastly increase the skillset and make combat more complex, are definitely inspired by Crysis. Vehicles, their mechanics and controls, remind me of Unreal Tournament. The gameplay is fast-paced, just like in DOOM. Humor tries to be a bit like Duke Nukem. Being able to adjust and tweak character progression through unlocks has become the standard these days, with every new title using it in some form. You do get some crafting, too, which does feel like a tacked-on time sink to increase playtime. Besides the main storyline, there are some basic side quests, but these mostly consist of "go to x and kill everything". I didn't encounter any noteworthy puzzles either. Maybe, they'll make an appearance later in the game.

The story in RAGE 2 is simple enough to be skippable. You're basically moving from hub to hub, killing everything in your way, which is fun, no doubt. The guns are sufficiently varied, and gunplay is good, especially when combined with the unlockable armor skills. It's not like you'll need a lot of tactical finesse, though. Most enemies are bullet sponges, and dodging is pretty much the only skill you need to master. For mouse and keyboard players, this complicates things a bit because the armor skills are bound to the CTRL key, which is a tad hard to reach, especially while pressing WASD at the same time and trying to smash keys like G or X. The game does let you remap those keys, so everyone can use their favorite keybinds. In terms of graphics settings, the game does well, offering plenty of those, including some new, unique ones. For example, I do like the dynamic FPS adjustment capabilities, which no doubt originate from consoles where such mechanisms are essential to reach playable FPS. Graphics are unremarkable, especially considering it's 2019. Most levels and a significant percentage of the large outdoor world look fairly boring, without a lot of attention to detail (check out our screenshots on page 2). This gets better in several side maps, but the graphics are definitely nothing to write home about.

Unlike Just Cause 4, which uses the same engine, but only DirectX 11, Avalanche decided to bring in the more modern Vulkan API for RAGE 2, which is great—we need modern APIs in new games. However, neither graphics fidelity nor performance is remarkable in any way. I wouldn't mind if textures were of a higher resolution, too. Had I not known, I'd say "this is DX11". Maybe, RAGE 2 is considered a first public release of the Apex Engine for Vulkan, to establish a stable baseline and move forward from there. Special technologies, like RTX, DLSS, Variable Rate Shading or similar, are completely missing from RAGE 2. The only thing worth mentioning is "Global Illumination", which really doesn't seem to do much here. Usually, it adds incredibly realistic lighting (with a large performance hit). Just the fact that it comes with negligible performance cost in RAGE 2 hints at a fairly minimal implementation of GI, too.

We tested 18 graphics cards in RAGE 2 today, each at three resolutions with the latest game-optimized drivers, and can conclude that, despite the weak graphics, RAGE 2 is a 2019 game in terms of hardware requirements. To achieve 60 FPS at 1080p Ultra, you need a GeForce GTX 1660 or Radeon RX 590. For 1440p gaming, a Vega 64 or RTX 2070 lets you reach 60 FPS. For 4K gaming, your only option is the RTX 2080 Ti, and even it only manages 50 FPS at Ultra settings. AMD cards are doing very well in RAGE 2, better than their NVIDIA counterparts. For example, the Radeon VII is usually around 10% behind the GeForce RTX 2080, but in RAGE 2, it matches it almost exactly. The same is happening with Vega 64, which is usually 20% behind the RTX 2070, yet manages to trade blows with it in RAGE 2. For the lower end, the picture is similar: we'd expect the RX 590 to be a few percentage points behind the GTX 1660, but here, it delivers almost the same performance. VRAM requirements of RAGE 2 are minimal; 3 GB is enough for 1080p, and 6 GB is plenty for 4K.

Overall, RAGE 2 is a solid first-person shooter with RPG elements that tries to include many concepts from other titles, but ends up being unremarkable in many ways. Still, if you are a fan of open world shooters or love post-apocalyptic titles, it's definitely worth checking out.

In case you were wondering about the Steam store page mentioning "Requires 3rd-Party Account: Bethesda.net", well, that's not exactly accurate. You definitely don't have to install the Bethesda launcher or make a Bethesda account for it. You can launch the game through Steam just fine, and it starts directly from there—no other launcher required.