It’s been more than ten years since id, the creators of Wolfenstein 3D, Quake and Doom (the inventors of the first-person shooter), have released a new intellectual property. Rage will break that drought.

At E3 this year producer Jason Kim invited us to inspect their progress.

Most importantly, the game introduces the next generation of id’s proprietary engine, the id tech 5. Running at a constant 60 Hz, Rage is without a doubt a deep and satisfying potato sack of eye candy.

The game takes place in a world devastated by the impact of an asteroid. Having foreknowledge of this disaster, humanity created the Eden Project and thousands of humans burrowed beneath the earth in Arks to avoid the destruction.

You play as the sole survivor of your Ark, returning to the surface for the first time. It’s a very different place, populated by gangs of mutants and small harassed pockets of post-apocalyptic civilisation.

 

These are very familiar themes in videogaming, circa 2010. In fact it’s strongly reminiscent of another Bethesda franchise, Fallout.

Our first glimpse at the game also called to mind Gearbox’s Borderlands: In a twisted, arid and craggy wasteland, our unseen protagonist made for a shanty while on a quest to build a dune buggy. The eccentric tenant gave us our orders and when we left, lunatic mutant midgets descended on us.

Then the game swung into life: Using a kind of bladed boomerang we decapitated the closest, before dispatching the rest with a firearm. The mutants themselves responded particularly to each wound they received, seizing and crippling around the location of their wounds.

Thereafter we climbed into our buggy (fully customisable) to make the journey to the town of Wellspring. En route, we were accosted by other buggies driven by still more deranged surfacers (did we mention Borderlands yet?), which we destroyed with mounted machine guns. Among the collateral damage: A tower that collapsed on itself like a house of cards. It’s hard to know just how much of Rage’s environment is destructible, but the tower’s effortless destruction was intensely satisfying.

 

Jason assured us that all of the environments have been created with a ruthless attention to detail. Each asset has been placed individually to ensure that all locales are unique and distinct.

id call their project a first-person shooter with action elements. We’d throw RPG elements into the mix as well – something increasingly common and not especially unwelcome in more and more genres: Beyond accepting “quests” you can “level up” an engineering skill that will allow you to create mechanical spider turrets that will stalk through hideouts with you, remote control bombs and other nefarious pieces of technology that provide various and pleasing advantages. Further to RPG elements, NPCs you encounter will “grow” and respond to you in varying ways depending on your actions and interactions within the game.

They introduce minigames and side quests, and you’ll overhear them chatting about events large and small, stolen parcels of information that you’ll be able to put to use.

 

Wellspring’s essential feature is (as the name already suggests) its spring. By the time we’d arrived, something had gone wrong, and within the bowels of the water pumping station we met a new clan of mutants. These especially agile enemies swung towards us and jumped off the walls of corridors for greater leverage as if they were actors in a kung fu flick. The water effects are worthy of special note: Not only are they an intractable part of the environment – we electrocuted clan members standing in puddles – as we trail long corridors beneath leaking pipes, droplets run down the camera. It creates the most realistic water refractions we’ve seen to date.

By skipping forward (or back, as the case could be), id was able to show us a third mutant clan, these ones heavily inspired by the English punk movement of yesteryear. They’re also petrol heads, and we’re here to steal components for a buggy. This small sequence showed off enemy AI and highlighted some of the more rudimentary aspects of player control.

Using a spider turret, we assaulted the clan’s base. Our enemies were particularly clever about how they used cover, and, more importantly, how they worked together to dissemble our mechanical assistant. We, on the other hand, played like a different game. No lean mechanic was demonstrated while our foes leaned so much, you’d swear they were construction site teamsters in a previous life.

 

The final location shown to us was Dead City, an abandoned metropolis that “no one comes back from alive.” Within, there’s rumour that an organisation is performing cruel experiments. We move down the silent and empty streets before being attacked by jabbering ghoulish creatures and and a mutant standing at perhaps 50 feet. He was half of it, leaning around and over a building with an expression of mixed confusion and anger was his much larger counterpart.

Both these gargantuan mutants felt as much a part of the environment as the smaller (and as a rule less cumbersome) enemies. It’s a coup for id: So often, oversized models struggle to navigate game environments in a way that feels natural and this adds significant realism to them.

In spite of easy comparisons to other contemporary games, Rage well and truly won us over. By the presentation’s close, we had come to the conclusion that it will fly from shelves as quickly as it goes up next year. Moreover, we can only speculate with animated anticipation as to what other developers might do with the id Tech 5 engine.

Rage is in development for PC, Mac, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.