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This is running in real-time? On a 360? Right now? What? That’s not typical over-eager preview hyperbole – those were my actual thoughts while id’s Tim Willits and Matt Hooper walked me and a gaggle of press through some early moments in Rage.

I knew it was going to look spectacular. It’s id. It’s the developer that, as they put it, “invented first-person shooters,” and Rage is their Next Big Thing...

Despite our previous story about its multiplayer modes, RAGE is a single player game, through and through. But beyond the fact that it looked a lot like Borderlands with a more realistic art style (post-apocalyptic desert setting, buggies, lots of guns), we didn’t know a lot about how it would really play. Now we do, and sheer variety of things to do surprised us...

I got a chance recently to not only play Rage for over two hours, but also interview president of id Software, Todd Hollenshead. It was interesting to hear the thoughts of a guy who’s seen and been a part of the evolution of the first-person shooter, especially right after I played Rage, which clearly has learned from the very developers who id originally inspired with its own work. The difference between id’s last game, Doom 3, and Rage, shows a developer not afraid...

This is id Software’s first properly new game since 1996. Just think about that. Various versions of Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein have marched from id’s Texas offices over the past 12 years, yet the team’s creative muscles haven’t flexed on anything fresh for more than a decade.

The world is a post-apocalyptic dustbowl populated by mutants and proud retro-fitted scavengers with fast, growling cars, deadly makeshift crossbows and upturned woks for hats. You, the unwitting outsider, emerging prematurely from your Armageddon-proof panic room, find you’re somehow better at surviving in this hostile environment than those who’ve been living in it their whole lives.

A lone man struggles to the surface from a vault deep underground, wearing the garb of a long-dead civilization. Earth is an arid wasteland, packed with warring bandit tribes and mutants, as the survivors of a world-wide disaster struggle to stay alive day-to-day. Call us crazy if you like, but we’re sure we’ve been here before...

Let's just put a stop to all of the comparisons to Fallout 3 and Borderlands right now. Rage is a different beast. You're not earning XP by shooting ghouls after pausing gameplay in VATS and you're not making a combat shogun with acid-spewing shenanigans. No, id Software's Rage focuses less on gimmick and more on arming you with reliable weapons for your wasteland warfare. We just demoed Rage's Dead City mission here at E3 and came away blast happy...

There are certain things that everybody probably now knows about Rage. It's the first 'proper' game in seven years from Doom creator id Software. It's a post-apocalyptic shooter. It looks a lot like Borderlands. It's one of the most beautiful games ever to exist thus far. All that, you probably know. I knew it, going into my lengthy hands-on session the other day, but one simple piece of knowledge eluded me. I had one simple, but very important question. What the hell does Rage actually feel like to play?

You see up to this point it's remained a bit unclear as to exactly what Rage is. Is it an FPS? Is it an RPG? Is it an open-world game? Is it all of the above, and if so, why should we care if it's just a more brightly-coloured Fallout 3? Fortunately, this particular session comprised of me being given a near-finished copy of the game, two hours, and being allowed to play through unrestricted, from the very start, until the time ran out. I know all about Rage now. I know how it looks, I know how it feels, I know exactly how it plays. Hell, I could almost tell you how it smells. And I'd like to communicate all of that information to you right now, barring perhaps the last bit.

Here are the five big things you need to know.

Ever since we first laid eyes on developer id’s upcoming post-apocalyptic driver/shooter RAGE, we’ve just assumed there would be multiplayer modes. After all, even though we've just posted a hands-on with the single player questline, this is the developer who invented Quake – how could there not be multiplayer?  And we were right about that. What we were wrong about was to further assume what those multiplayer modes would be. Think of any multiplayer mode in any variant of Quake, be it original series, mod or spin-off. Got one? Yeah, that’s not in here...