I played the game back in the day, and when replaying the GOG version almost 20 years later was surprised how good it still holds up. It's a solid over-the-top and in-your-face shooter with a couple of abilities to make the hero stand out. The graphics are of course a bit dated but still do the job well. The set pieces are varied and support their respective mood well. Your gun never needs to reload, just like in a Hong Kong action movie. You can run out of ammo though, so the game encourages you to switch between weapons from time to time. Getting John Woo and Chow Yun Fat on board adds a sense of style that makes it stick out from other, similar games. If you are into the genre of pure action shooters, you should give this a try.
The game is a unsatisfying mix of Borderlands - but without the fun gunplay and the over the top characters - and Fallout - but without an interesting story and choices that actually matter. After trying for about 10 hours I gave up because I could not see anything engaging coming from it. Basically, you hop from planet to planet, where "planet" typically means a small area with a city and its outskirts. Each of them has a couple of quests. In theory, you can go off the beaten path and explore, but there's nothing really to find except a couple of monsters that are boring to fight. There's a skill tree you can assign points to everytime you level up. This allows for different build and probably a slightly different experience. All the main issues with the game remain the same though. A lot of reviews complain about the performance, which I cannot confirm. I played on a rig that is slightly above a Playstation 5. Things went fluent enough and I did not experience any stutter. On a purely technical level, the game worked fine for me.
Rage 1.5 improves upon the original in almost every aspect while preserving it's strength. The shooting mechanics are still solid and got a flexible upgrade systems. Graphics are more varied and don't just render desert in high resolution mega textures. Settlements are not static anymore but can be managed and grow. The pointless driving around is gone, and so are many of the mini games that did not add anything whatsoever to the game. The open world now actually is open and you can explore areas and encounter missions while you are there instead of having to find the proper quest giver first. The story is a bit inconsistent though. The Authority was renamed to The Institute. And the apocalypse suddenly wass caused by some war instead of a meteor. But then, id games never were about story anyway, right? The only thing that really irks me is the fact that the game is called Fallout instead if Rage.
