14 DAY TRIAL // I have only played about 8 hours of RAGE until now but I can safely say that the actual shooting in this game is great and manages to bring back fond memories of the time I spend with the various Quake and Doom titles of my youth.
id Softwqare have always had two big claims to fame: they tended to revolutionize the standard level for graphics quality when they launched something new and they put other developers to shame with the first person shooter gameplay, with smart (for the time) enemies, great selection of guns and nice arenas.
This was true for the first Doom and for the second Quake and it's still very much true for RAGE.
This is the game where enemies are challenging, not necessarily because they have overpowered guns or because they have a lot of health but because they move in patterns that are not easily determined and tend to make the player miss, grow frustrated, miss some more and then become a bloody puddle on the floor, trying to get as much health as possible out of the defibrillator mini-game.
There's also enough variety to keep it all interesting, with melee engagements mixed with ranged ones and some open rooms where creeping around in order to quickly take out a few targets at the beginning of the battle is crucial.
The weaponry that id Software created, while not really innovative, also feels right, hefty, powerful (even the starting pistol is a force to be reckoned with) and it's always satisfying to find some new alternate ammunition to fight with.
The only thing I am missing so far are some fights in really big spaces, allowing for more movement, with some vehicles mixed in for good measure.
There's plenty more to do in RAGE so the moment for big battles might yet come.