Click to enlarge Driving In The Wasteland

New to the wastelands of Rage? Want to find out the best tips and tricks to shooting, racing and surviving? Read on the find out! Note these may contain minor spoilers so reader beware.

• Always have plenty of shotgun ammo on hand for missions involving mutants. Its easily your most trusty gun when fighting them given how melee and close ranged oriented mutants are.

• You can acquire an upgrade to your sniper rifle by taking on a side quest from the mission board in Wellspring to provide sniper cover.

• Crafting your own ammo, rather than buying it is not only cheaper, but often provides a perk such as increased damage or quantity.

• Be sure to have Feltrite rounds for your AK or AV rounds for your Authority machine gun when fighting Authority units or the heavily armored Gearheads. Without armor piercing rounds they will soak up a lot of bullets.

• Dynamite bolts from the crossbow will one shot just about any enemy in the game. Besides being incredibly entertaining they are the most efficient for fighting the authority and Gearheads who are otherwise more difficult to kill. Don't try to use them on mutants, you will usually just end up hurting yourself in the explosion.

• Don't forget your wingsticks! These are easy to use while shooting and great in a fight up close or even mid range. Especially useful on a charging foe while you are trying to reload. Crafting your own wingsticks will provide a damage boost.

• Carry lots of grenades. If you have time to cook them before throwing do so. Otherwise they provide great distractions to enemies, or using them to flush foes out of cover for easy shooting. Especially important towards the end of the game.

• Don't forget you have a melee key, or even better pull out your Fists of Rage and put on the hurt!

• If you want to try a stealthy approach you can use the crossbow or wingsticks to quietly take out enemies. Its not possible to ghost an entire level this way, but you can get a head start on some groups and avoid alerting everyone at once.

• Annoying you can't assign the double barreled shotgun to a weapon slot for easier access, but you can pull it out anytime with the 0 key. (the other weapons being 1-9.)

• You can pick 4 different armor types near the beginning of the game, but obviously you want to choose the Crimson armor which gives you the bonuses of all the other armors. It will give you a boost to your crafting, store discounts and damage.

• Craft and Engineer items as much as possible. Its much cheaper than buying items or ammo outright. You can also make these at anytime so you don't have to be near a vendor to supply yourself with what you need whether it be wingsticks, EMP grenades or more pop rockets.

• Be sure to scavenge around and pick up odd junk and items in the world to fuel your supplies and to sell to vendors for extra money. You will need it to buy ammo.

• Be sure to assign and hotkey your favorite weapons and items for quick use from the inventory and F1-F4 keys. Personally I like Bandages, Wingsticks, Grenades and Spider Bots assigned to my item keys.

• Mutant Bash TV is easily the single most profitable source of money within the game world. As long as you are willing to spend the time and ammo you can acquire a significant amount of money to spend on weapon and armor upgrades.

• The only way to get vehicle upgrades is to compete in races. You can get a maximum of 15 certificates per race and will need to do just about all the races to get all the upgrades you need for 2 or 3 vehicles.

• What the game doesn't tell you or indicate is that you get several vehicles throughout the game. Your first impulse will be to max out your buggy or hotrod but you are better off waiting to get your Cuprino before you start spending a lot of race certificates. Of course if you are the type who wants to upgrade everything possible you can also earn extra certificates from the bars in Wellspring and Subway Town by killing bandits.

• Rocket Races are easy, just hang in the back of the pack until the 3rd lap then blow everyone up and zip by them to the finish line. Trying to stay in front the whole race will just get you repeatedly blown up.

• Rally point races can be very challenging, especially in the Eastern Wasteland which features some very devious race courses and aggressive AI drivers. Its generally easier to win the straight up races until you get better engines, tires and armor before attempting the more difficult rally events.

• Bandit towers out in the wasteland can be rammed into with your vehicle to destroy, saving you vehicle ammo. Curiously they always respawn but aren't that dangerous.

• Make sure to always carry vehicle shields and armor repair, it can be easy to get overwhelmed by several bandit vehicles and killed.

• If you explore around you can find extra Feltrite to sell or special ingredients to make items than permanently increase your health or temporarily increase your health and health regeneration. There isn't too much off the beaten path, but worth a look if you have time.

• Destroying the Authority drones floating around the wasteland is not only a fun challenge, they also give you some electrical parts and wiring kits when you destroy them, both useful crafting items.

• Don't like un-skippable intro screens and logos? Neither do I! Right click on your Rage application and select "Show Package Contents." Then navigate to Contents/Assets/base/video/ and delete everything but rage_intro.bik and rage_outro.bik files. This way when you start the game it will go directly to the game's menu without all those pesky screens first.

• Be sure to save often, the game occasionally has a corrupted save file. Safest bet is to make a new save every time you do. There is also a quick save and an autosave so between them all its unlikely you will lose much, if any progress.

• If you have the RAM make sure the Texture Cache is set to "Large" on the Video options screen. This will reduce or remove streaming texture lag in-game. It will probably default to it should your machine be capable, but it never hurts to check.

Related Links

id Software

Aspyr Media

Rage: Campaign Edition