Rage 2 May Be the Prettiest Post-Apocalypse We’ve Ever Seen

Rage 2 dares to render the post-apocalypse in full color. Pink-mohawked bandits chase after you with shotguns. Rockets gleam impossibly red as they hurtle past your head. You chuck a handful of grenades at your enemies and the screen fills with tangerine explosions. This isn’t the familiar trek through a sea of grays and browns. The world is marred and broken down, but very much alive. Its bright palette reflects that.

“We wanted to show what a wasteland would be like as it evolved,” says Tim Willits, Studio Director at id Software, who collaborated with Avalanche Studios to make Rage 2. “How it would change and grow over time.” The game takes place 30 years after the events of its prequel, and people are no longer struggling for basics like food and shelter. The murder-happy weirdos who populate its world have begun to rebuild civilization, which means pockets of the game’s sizable map have been terraformed deep green, repurposed warehouses bathed in nightclub neon. This makes specific locations memorable and easy to differentiate from each other. It also provides some gorgeous locales for the player to completely destroy.

You’ll spend a lot of time in Rage 2 lighting up enemies and leveling their hideouts, and it’s a joy in large part because the game encourages you to play aggressively. As you carve your way through a horde of bad guys, they drop Feltrite, which fills up your Overdrive meter. Maxing out your Overdrive meter allows you to heal faster and unleash more powerful attacks, plus it makes Feltrite drop even faster. This turns combat into a wild ballet in which you’re constantly pushing forward. There are no hiding places, no stealth sections, no sniping your adversaries from a distance. Rage 2 wants you to run and gun like a lunatic, and it gives you the tools to do so.

“All of the abilities and weapons encourage you to get into the action by moving as close to the enemies as you can,” Willits explains. The guns range from old standbys like shotguns and assault rifles to the Grav-Dart, which launches enemies into the air and dismembers them, but the abilities are what make Rage 2 special, because they allow you to chain kills in exhilarating and inventive ways.

The Slam, for instance, is a highly useful crowd-control mechanism that works a lot like a ground pound. You leap off a rooftop or simply launch yourself high into the air with a double-jump and come down hard, emitting a shockwave that eviscerates nearby combatants and sends others stumbling backwards. This buys you some space and time to fire off a few rounds at the survivors — or vault onto a stack of shipping crates and do it again.

The improvisatory mayhem you can create in Rage 2 is its main draw. In between gunfights, you traverse the wasteland in the Phoenix, your trusty assault vehicle that looks like a cross between a tank and a fire truck. Or you can just jack someone else’s motorcycle or hover-boat — that works, too. “If it has wheels, you can drive it,” Willits says. “Any vehicle you steal and return to a city will then appear in your garage, which then allows you to spawn it anywhere in the wasteland and cruise around in it.”

Driving in an open-world game can sometimes feel like a necessary evil, merely getting you to your next objective. Rage 2 gets around this problem by making driving roughly as treacherous as storming a den of mutants. Your fellow travelers are often hostile, threatening to run you off the road or pump lead into your ride until it explodes.

The player will also occasionally be given the opportunity to save an innocent driver from an awful fate, wrecking their pursuers’ vehicles in exchange for gratitude and a cash reward. “We wanted to make getting from point A to point B as much fun as possible,” Willits says. The developers have succeeded in doing that by imbuing travel with as much immediacy and danger as any encounter you have on foot.

The entire game is a relentlessly thrilling experience. Rage 2, like a lot of the best first-person shooters, plays like a rapid, intense puzzle with a vast array of solutions. It throws waves and waves of enemies at the player, and you dispose of them in whatever way you can dream up while narrowly avoiding death yourself. That this doesn’t get old is a testament to how creatively destructive the game allows you to be. Wreaking havoc becomes art, and it’s beautiful to behold.

Rage 2 launches on May 14th and is available for pre-order now on Green Man Gaming.