Rage 2

Avalanche and Id team up to return to the apocalypse.

An Avalanche open-world game that moves and fights like an Id Software shooter, Rage 2 is about as enraging as a well-padded armchair. It’s a clear-cut piece of commercial arithmetic, a franchise handed off to a younger team with proven tech and a shared love of bloodshed, and while the results are engrossing, they’re yet to excite.

The game is set 30 years after its predecessor’s events on a somewhat lusher post-apocalyptic Earth, now bursting with plant life in addition to wilting scrapyards and baking desert highways. It stars Walker, a musclehead equipped with Ranger armour, and sees you fighting the first game’s resurgent Authority antagonists after they flatten your home town. As our hands-on begins we’re helping Loosum Hagar, mayor of Wellspring, put down a political rival, an objective that also introduces us to some genre-standard death race and arena side activities.