RAGE: The Scorchers

If you never played RAGE, buy it. Then buy this. Play it, love it, and when the "Insert Disc 2" prompt pops up, simply walk away, smiling.

What a blast from the past. [March 2013, p.81]

The Scorchers is a fine way to re-familiarise yourself and extend the run-time of this under-appreciated throwback shooter.

It all comes down to the question, if you want more of Rage. Depending on which difficulty setting you're playing on, this is two to four hours of that for the price of about 5 euros. That's pretty decent, considering that there are full price games with just about twice as much of content out there. To surmise: a good story, if you want to call it a story, solid, fresh enemies and new corridors for you to shoot through, that are enjoyable in spite of their linearity. If that sounds like a good evenings' entertainment for you, you can't go wrong with The Scorchers.

The entire Scorchers section lasts six levels, and took me between two and three hours to complete, but it also only costs five dollars. That is not a bad deal when you consider comparable DLC packs. What it lacks in direction, it makes up for in sheer content.

Great value DLC. For $5 you get a new set of missions available at the start of the game, a new gun, and more Mutant Bash TV. Not only that, but the DLC has the same-high quality graphics and gameplay that comes with the rest of the main game. In terms of price for quality, this is easily one of the best add-ons that I've downloaded.

Just got done finishing this one. Some new hand-crafted maps are introduced, as well as a new Mutant type, new Scorcher bandits, a new weapon, and a new NPC known as Sarah. I finished this add-on sooner than expected. It probably took me two hours tops. One minor technical improvement I might suggest is binding the selection of the new weapon to the "0" key, since that one's unoccupied. Also, The Scorchers add-on job path might be better pursued from the start of a new game, rather than at the end like I did.

Rage was fun as a basic FPS once you get past the pointless driving and flat NPCs. Yes, the levels were extremely linear and often repeated but the action itself was OK. I was looking forward to this DLC to see what they would do to redeem the game and in particular the graphics. Unfortunately this DLC is a wasted opportunity. As a side note, I do not normally care about the sexist portrayal of women in games but Rage The Scorchers does push it a bit too far. To be fair the sheer unoriginality of the new character is more insulting.

Very unimaginative and short. What a disappointment. I wanted Loosum Hagar to be my sidekick, not that dreadlocked pretender. They probably couldn't get the voice actress back. There are no new enemies, just reskins and the final boss fight is insultingly bad. The graphics seem to look even worse than I remember. I do feel sorry for Carmack but if he bothered to do a proper test of his megatexture technology he would have seen it was not feasible before wasting millions of dollars on making a game using it.

The word "insulting" seems to crop up a lot when people talk about Rage. This is throw-away trash that was created for contractual reasons. Like the original Rage, it will not make a profit. The textures look like badly compressed JPEG images which, hilariously, they are.