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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...

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...

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.

It's fairly rare that movie games catch us by surprise. It's even rarer that they keep surprising us, level after level. Rango manages to pull do that as one of the few movie tie-ins to offer a variety of environments and gameplay...

The CG animated Rango is still three months away but EA was more than eager to bring their game tie-in to our attention at a recent closed-door unveiling of the Xbox 360 version. In case you haven't heard, the movie reunites Johnny Depp (in the title role) with Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski. It is also the first full-length animated film by the visual effects company, Industrial Light & Magic...