Nearly 20 years after it popularised the genre with Doom, developer id Software returns with another first-person shooter. This time, a clumsy asteroid, rather than a teleportation device linked to Hell, is the cause of all the bother, though the result is much the same: firing steadily more powerful guns at mutated men and beasts until everything is OK.
Actually, there's a little more to Rage than that, aside from two decades of visual upgrades. Emerging from an apocalypse-proof ark into a sandy wilderness, our hero takes missions from friendly, Mad Max-style settlers, some bringing him into contact with the hostile desert clans, others driving the core story surrounding the mysterious "authority".
It could scarcely sound more generic, yet Rage succeeds, thanks to tidy design and incisive combat. The game works wonders with a challenging palette of endless browns, the distinctive character of enemy clans a testament to the imagination lurking beneath all that beige (a favourite is the Wasted, a 2000 AD-tinged crew of British thugs). And crucially, while the shooting can be relentless (not even headshots are guaranteed to bring down Armageddon-bred thugs), working up the weapons from pistol to pulse cannon has the same big-grin-inducing draw that Doom introduced to the world.
