Rage 2 tips: 8 pieces of advice to make conquering the wasteland a breeze

If you're just jumping in for the first time, we'd recommend following these Rage 2 tips to make your experience smoother. Whether you want to hunt for Arks or progress with the story in Rage 2, we've got eight crucial Rage 2 tips to help you out. From the best guns and abilities to perks and vehicles, read on for all of our vital Rage 2 tips.

1. The Assault Rifle starts and stays the best all round weapon so upgrade it as quickly as you can

While Rage 2 throws all sorts of wonderful tools in your face that encourage all sorts of experimental fun, you basically starts the game with all the tools you need. Namely the Ranger Assault rifle. It’s got good damage, high accuracy with minimal recoil or spread and there's plenty of ammo around. Even without touching any upgrades it’s extremely powerful whether you’re toe to toe with enemies at close range, chipping them away from distance, or taking on one of the game’s lumbering giant bosses. For that reason while there’s are some insanely fun weapons to use, they only really add colour for the most part. Upgrading the Assault Rifle will do things like increase reload times, fire rate and magazine capacity, add armour breaking rounds and even feed ammo back into the clip on kills. All of which enhances a weapon that can already take you through the whole game.

2. Enemy difficulty is more or less meaningless

Often when you enter a bandit camp or any other location on the map you’ll see an ‘Enemy Difficulty’ flash up, rating the danger level out of 10. Ignore it. While the game presents the idea of area having a level that indicates a threat via the skull icon on the meter you’ll never really encounter anything you can’t deal with - from hulking giant mutants to camps swarming with goons, you can pretty much deal with anything easily using just the dodging Dash ability and assault rifle, both of which you unlock by default. Anything else you get on top of that only further renders the idea of a difficulty level a moot point.

3. Don’t forget to craft it if you need it

There’s crafting materials all over Rage 2’s map, but there’s also a ton of ammo, grenades, Wingsticks and other usable items so it’s easy to forget you can actually make stuff. You’ll rarely actually need to though as a rule, but if on occasion you do find yourself short of something, you can go into your inventory and craft it. Specifically that’s Wingsticks, Grenades, Health Infusions, Overdrive Infusions, Ability Infusions and Turret Drones. All can be made with a combination of the mechanical, electrical, chemical and explosive components you pick up as you play. You can also level things up with schematics bought from vendors, although, much like the weapons choice, you start as powerful as you ever really need to be and will just be adding colour, rather than meaning to these options.

4. Get the Icarus Gyrocopter fast

The Icarus Arc Gyrocopter is basically a cross between a giant drone and a motorbike that makes getting around Rage 2’s map incredibly easy. You can control the altitude and it lets you just make a direct beeline to anywhere you need to go by flying over anything and everything. It’s automatically unlocked when you reach level 7 with Dr Kvasir, who’s Search and Recover map markers mainly deal with Nanotrites - the science flavoured doohickies that give you all your powers. That means ticking off anything blue on the map will level up your affinity with him. This includes opening Arcs, locating Fentrite meteorites and finding Ranger Echos. However, opening Arc Chests also count, so check the Items of Interest for all the other activities like Bandit Dens as they can contain Arc chests almost at random. As soon as you get Kvasir up to level 7 the Gyrocopter will unlock in your inventory and you can call it in from the Vehicle menu.

5. The best Rage 2 perks will make life easier

While picking some perks will depend on your taste and playstyle, the best Rage 2 perks are clear cut advantages that everyone will benefit from. These are earned from the Projects menu that relate to the three main characters you work with in the game - John Marshall, Loosum Hager and Dr Kvasir. You unlock perk tiers by completing missions and map markers relating to each character’s specialty, which are, respectively, Kill & Destroy (pink), Capture & Control (yellow) and Search & Recover (blue). These are the perks that you need to make a priority from each:

John Marshall - Bullet Bag and Throwables Bag perks that increase what you can carry, as well as the Tactical Movement Boost that increases your movement speed while aiming down the sights.
Loosum Hager - Wingstick Lock On and Wingstick Redirect to better control your death frisbee, multiple Perks to use less items when crafting, and a Lucky Feltzer perk to gain more Feltrite from crates
Dr Kvasir - Multiple Tracking Perks to make things like Storage Crates and Feltrite easier to find. There’s also a Feltrite Drill perk that will extract more from the nodes you find around the world.

6. Get the Smart Rocket Launcher sooner rather than later

The arcs scattered around Rage 2 are full of useful weapons and abilities that make combat easier and more fun. None of them are more useful than the Smart Rocket launcher which fires swarms of homing missiles. Because it tracks targets and largely operates as a fire and forget weapon it makes larger enemies encounters, like bosses and the giant turret sentry Authority towers, much easier. Upgrading it lets you increase the amounts of targets you can acquire, as well as things like reload speed and magazine capacity. You’ll get it by opening the Strongbox Ark which you’ll find here on the map:

7. Look out for Mutant Bash balloons and speaker towers to earn free Mutant Bash cash

You’ll encounter Mutant Bash TV as part of the story and, after that, it’s up to you to decide whether you want to spend any extra time killing for cash. However, you can still earn MBTV tokens to spend with the MBTV vendors in one of two ways. Firstly you’ll occasionally find yellow balloons around the map that will explode when you shoot them and drop a MBTV crate full of the same goodies you’d earn by competing. There are also MBTV speakers making hard to miss announcements that also have chests you can grab.

8. Upgrade the Phoenix to take down convoys more easily

The Phoenix is your default car and a good general option even if you unlock other vehicles. If you’re going to go after the conveys that roam the world you’ll want to unlock its Cruise Missile and Blast abilities. These will make stripping away the armor, weak points and shielding on enemy vehicles much easier and blow things up quicker, avoiding any lengthy chases to the far end of the map.

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