Road Rage (PS4) Review

ay back in the day a wonderful and fun title called Road Rash hit the humble Sega Megadrive. It amused a delighted many a teen with its simple racing and brutal on bike brawling. Team6’s modern day homage, Road Rage, manages to not be delightful or fun in any way… it does manage to be brutal and unintentionally amusing though….

The future sucks! Nobody wants to put up with “The Man” telling them what to do or the fat cats taking all the money and glory for themselves… So the citizens of Ashen decide to rise up, take over the streets in revolt. The solution? Why the police erected 8ft walls, guard outposts and sectioned the city off. So what were the citizens to do other than form roving leather-clad bike gangs and start brutalising each other with sticks?

The premise and story are the worst kind of terrible (and at times borderline racist and misogynistic) …. It could be a reasonable parody but it’s not written or played as such… or if it IS then Road Rage has not even managed to get that right. Your character receives missions via mobile phone conversations whilst roaming the streets on his bike in this open-world game. You get tasks to undertake based on these interactions with your fellow gang members like courier jobs, races etc. Think about all the small time filler missions in a PS 2 era GTA title and you’re on the right track.

The missions are all pretty much cookie cutter, rinse and repeat affairs but that’s not even Road Rage’s main crimes. The whole crux of the game is the motorbike racing, handling and the bike based combat and all three are completely underwhelming – in fact at some points I’m flabbergasted this title made it past Team6’s QA process (they have a sizeable QA department I checked the credits… which didn’t scroll properly btw) but more on that later.

The handling of your rider is cumbersome at best. Forget the janky animation or weirdly stick-thin look of the bike and rider. This is more about the fact that this fast paced biker action game has a vehicle that has the same turning circle as a barge! You’ll spend a lot of your time hammering on the brakes (which are not animated on the rear of the bike with a light btw) and creeping around corners rather than taking them at great speed and sliding around, knee to the road.

Whilst we’re talking about taking corners I found it optional at times as you could, with enough speed and seemingly at random, just plough through the buildings and out the other side as the collision model totally loses the plot. This is also true during riding into objects on the road which can sometimes leave you bouncing around like a pinball and other time you’ll burst into gasoline fuelled flames just for going over a bump in the road too fast. Add to this that when you try and hit someone with a weapon it can turn into a game of chance to see if it takes out you, them or both of you. That said death/being busted by the cops in Road Rage literally just causes you to respawn immediately – often facing a weird direction or, on one occasion, upside down.

The open world nature of the game has been moderately well implemented for a small studio with limited finances but it feels empty and poorly conceived. There’s not fun areas to ride in and very little cohesion in look and feel. It does, however, seem to maintain a reasonable frame rate and not suffer from much pop-in. Animation is poor, as are the character models in fact, the best part of the game graphically is the road surface which at least looks like it was ripped from Burnout Paradise on the PS3/X360.

Even if they manage to patch the poor handling, dodgy physics and ludicrous detection model there’s still the fact that the actual missions are either too boring or too easily broken to be fun. For example, the AI riders are no better at handling the games bike physics than you are as you’ll often see them go ploughing into objects or bounce through dwellings. Funny as this might seems to start with it soon gets annoying. It messes with placement in races and makes the elimination missions frustrating, for instance when crashed AI riders appear at a random location nowhere near where you were just about to whack them when they crashed.

Final Thoughts

Now, I mentioned fun earlier, and there IS some fun to be had from just how broken the many areas of Road Rage are. It’s likely Youtube gold for a streamer who wants to rip the pee out of something on camera for half an hour. Though when the price of entry for this “so bad it’s ALMOST fun” game is £20/$30 the joke is very much at the consumer’s expense. The only thing that does achieve “OK” status is the soundtrack but even that is very generic and contains a lawsuit inducingly accurate rip off of a Prodigy track.

Road Rage is, by far, the worst game I have played in quite some time in every area of its production. I’m not trying to rag on it for the sake of it either as I know that Team6 will have put many hours of blood and sweat into the game but the bottom line is it looks mediocre and plays like an alpha release.

Ultimately Road Rage is an open-world motorcycle action brawler that fails on almost every single level to deliver even a remotely consistent experience and it really should be avoided at all costs.