Much like Hollywood, game developers are starting to run out of original ideas and rehashing established franchises and adding some current-gen flair. The most recent being Road Rage, which is trying to cash in on one of the vehicular combat game of yesteryear: Road Rash. If you’re unfamiliar with the title, you would face off in motorcycle races using chains and other long range melee weapons to take down the other racers. Sounds fun, right? It was. So with this being said, Road Rage is fun too, right? Let’s take a look.

The game is an open world racer in the vein of the most recent Forza Horizon games, but looks more like a GTA San Andreas clone, albeit one in which you can’t leave your motorcycle. Like any open world game, the world is divided up into districts. Sadly, it’s not open for much exploration off the rip; if you leave the area your current objectives are on, you’ll immediately gain the attention of the law enforcement in the area and they will try and likely succeed at making you eat the pavement. These pesky officers of the law will also show up later in the game to add some additional mechanics to the often stale and repetitive game.

You’ll spend your time driving from point A to point B, occasionally picking up packages, assassinating other riders, picking up on circuit races, and performing style challenges. This is the bulk of the game, which does tend to get boring fairly quickly, as the title is very reliant on grinding. As you progress through the story missions, new districts will open up, which will lead to side objectives that can be completed for money. The earnings will be used to purchase new bikes, upgrades for said bikes, as well as weapons and items. Unfortunately, you have to unlock a certain number of extras to proceed, and the map does not show you the requirements until you drive to the marker to start the mission. This lead me on a wild goose chase multiple times looking for the next mission so I could move on with my current build.

The game is quite buggy, and I was subject to a large number of glitches ranging from invisible walls to being catapulted for no reason. The game often seemed to forget that I had died and left me to watch my rider lay on the pavement, forcing me to restart the event. Respawns are also an issue at times, as the game will drop you into the world from a highly elevated point, at which point you explode; this happened repeatedly in some instances.

The game’s visuals are on par with most late PS2/early PS3 games, and do not take advantage of the current-gen hardware in any obvious way. With a lot of texture popping and clipping, as well as a grey tone that’s washed over everything, Road Rage is kind of ugly to look at. Additionally, the character models are very static. You’ll sit on your bike with your weapon always at your side, and even when taking sharp turns, your rider never moves, almost like it’s an action figure stuck to an RC toy. The only exception to this is when you collide with certain obstacles in the game, which is weird because some that would result in certain death are ignored (if not driven through), and others that shouldn’t cause issue send you flying, as if you’re playing the Insurance Fraud mini-game from Saint’s Row.

The sound design isn’t much better, featuring a synch rock techno-ish soundtrack from the 90’s as well as boorish, poorly acted voice overs. Since the text pushing the story forward is displayed in a group text chat format (yeah, that annoying thing your mother or most annoying friend does), I found myself cranking my own heavy metal music and skipping the sound all together fairly early into my time with the title.

The controls and AI don’t fare much better, as the other riders will regularly veer off and slam into buildings for no good reason, which makes losing pretty difficult. Your worst adversary is going to be the controls, which most of the time feel as if you pushed the button to turn or brake 5+ seconds before the game reacts. This is less of an issue when you are the only racer on the screen; however, when 6 or so racers are present, with the open world atmosphere, the game barely runs at 30FPS and the aforementioned issue becomes more of a serious problem. The only remedy I found for this was to get ahead and stay there, which actually makes for a decent racing experience.

The combat, which you’d think would be at the forefront of the game, is also awkward. When you get within range of another racer, you’ll hit a button that will enter combat mode, which serves as an auto-aim like feature that conveniently pulls you closer to the racer and allows you to take a few swings at them. Due to the nature of the poor physics engine, this is a mess as well, since you or the racer you want to attack will likely hit another racer, invisible wall, or something from the game world, ending the battle before it even started. The sheer chaos this brings when in a large group is good for a laugh, but not much else.

In addition to the story mode, the game features a multiplayer mode that can be played with bots, locally with split-screen, or online. Sadly, I was only able to play this mode with bots, as the online option is not functioning as of writing. On launch day, which I assumed would have a higher player base, the game would freeze when selecting quick match. After a few minutes, I would be treated to not one, but two overly long loading screens. One to two minutes of loading is bad normally, but can be overlooked – having this occur back to back is obnoxious. Creating an online lobby proved just as fruitful, as no one was able to connect to my room. After thirty minutes of waiting, I gave the run with bots a go. This is essentially the same as the single player game, with a whopping 6 courses to select from and all of the racers, bikes, and weapons unlocked, taking away the sense of progression that most games’ online modes feature. I am unsure if this is reserved for the actual PVP mode, but would like to hope so. With some polish being added via a future update, Road Rage could be a fun title, but in its current state I would highly recommend trying the game prior to taking the plunge.

4 out of 10

Pros

• Driving Can Be Fun

Cons

• Controls Are Unresponsive
• Downright Ugly
• Glitches Galore
• Broken Multiplayer
• Repetitive

Road Rage was developed by Team 6 and published by Maximum Games. It was released on PC, PS4, and X1 November 14th, 2017 for $29.99. The game was provided to us for review on PS4. For more on Road Rage, visit its official site.

 

Here at GBG we use a rating method that you are more than likely familiar with – a scale of 1 to 10. For clarification, we intend on using the entire scale: 1-4 is something you should probably avoid paying for; 5-7 is something that is worth playing, but probably not at full price; 8-10 is a great title that you can feel confident about buying. If you have any questions or comments about how we rate a game, please let us know.

 

 

 

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