Byte Sized Review: Rage 2

RAGE was a terrific, but flawed, game. It had a simple but great storyline, fun mechanics and most of all, great gameplay. It was only set back by a bit of glitches, bad audio, tad bad voice acting at time and the now infamously ridiculed ending. There is a veeeeery bad review I wrote for it many years ago, but to put it in context, I gave it an 8/10, and honestly I'd stand by that. Maybe not the line of "It may very well be the Doom of this generation", but hey, it's still a great game. Especially worth it now for a cheap price and a 20-30 hour experience, longer if you do the side missions.

You may be wondering why I'm focusing on the original RAGE instead of its sequel. The reason being, I can bring myself to talk fondly of RAGE. I can't do that of RAGE 2.

RAGE 2 kicks off the action immediately; you choose your protagonist, and immediately set off to fight the Authority that's attacking your home, reducing it to rubble and twenty people left. You are the last Ranger, a bloodline of people from the Ark (that your OG protag opened) and can don special armor that gives your character abilities, such as extra jumps, groundpound, focus, etc. The world is massive and open for you to explore with your goal quite simply; kill the baddie, save the local communities.
And then it's over. The sequel for a 30 hour long game is barely 8 hours long, 6 if you discount the amount of grind. And yes, you will need to grind in order to continue playing story missions (much like how Saints Row required you to get Respect by doing certain tasks or in world activities). But taking that out, and just focusing on the story, for a full priced game...that's horrible. 
Don't get me wrong; the voice acting is pretty good, the graphics and sound effects look great, the gameplay is good too, but there's simply not enough or nothing innovative or new to keep me playing this long term. I barely managed to get through it because, in full honesty, the game is a generic shooter. I've been writing reviews for almost nine years, I've been playing a lot of games long since then, and this is as generic of a shooter as you'd find. The gameplay is DOOM (naturally speaking since Id made this game) mixed with a few others such as Saints Row, Infamous and a splash of Halo 5. I personally didn't find any bugs or problems with the game, so that's a small bonus to be had, 

It's fun, but it's nothing I haven't seen before. The story is lackluster, the open world is dead and repetitive (the extra tasks you need to do are mostly fetch quests or destruction based). If you're more of a casual gamer, barely played any shooters or mostly stick to one genre, you won't find many problems with this. Same if you're a giant DOOM fan or just don't care about stories or intricate details and rather blow/slam/explode/shoot things up. You'll have a blast.
But for the rest of us...wait until there's a price drop at the very least. If you have little curiosity, give it a pass all together. Nothing new to the genre is added, nothing of note can be said, and selling an 8 hour empty experience at full price is why I am dropping a point.
The original game is a TENTH of the original cost and almost four times longer. Spend your money there.

RAGE 2: 3/10