Although I don't understand the reason for it, Acclaim has followed the unwritten rule that every game has to have a story for whatever reason. In Rage Wars' case, the Turok line of warriors have kept the balance between the fine line of good and evil. The Lost World, the place that Turok and other inhabit, was created by an immensely powerful energy source, with the last of it remaining in a 'Light Burden' ship. Fierce battles, called Rage Wars (the name makes sense now, eh?), are fought to see who controls the power source, and now another one of these Rage Wars are about to begin with you as the main player.

There were more than a couple of problems with Turok 2: Seeds of Evil, one that ranks up as near the most significant was the fact that the frame rate had trouble keeping up with the rest of the action. The visuals were otherwise excellent and looked incredible, but once some major activity began the frame rate took a severe dip in the wrong direction. Surprisingly, the developers have gone back to the drawing board and tweaked the Turok 2 engine so that it runs amazingly smooth on the Nintendo 64. Without the Expansion Pak thrown in the machine Rage Wars it still looks very nice, but throw in that puppy and watch the graphics be pushed even further. The added power allows the resolution to be bumped up to 640x480 and hardly affects the frame rate to a noticeable amount, and it helps make the game even sharper and even more enjoyable to look at.

Rage Wars is centered around the total multiplayer deathmatch experience, and even the lacking single player mode keeps this in mind. At the start there are four characters available that can be chosen from, and after one is picked the branching mission path will open up. There is not a lot that you have to do in the single player mode, but depending from character to character, there will be certain levels that can be played and others that cannot. In the end, though, it all comes down to the same basic thing and everyone ends up facing the same end boss that ends up opening a secret character. It takes less than a half an hour to beat the single player game with any given character, and you will find quickly how annoying and tedious it can be to unlock all the characters. It probably would have been better if more than few of the main players were opened up from the start, and others, more secret ones could be unlocked through single player.

Once you are past the drab single player, in steps where the real action is at, the multiplayer. There are a nice variety of game modes available, including Bloodlust, Frag Tag, Team Bloodlust and Capture the Flag. Bloodlust and Team Bloodlust are simply normal deathmatch, where in the former it is an all out blast-a-thon and every man for himself type of match, while Team Bloodlust is where you can get together with another human player or computer AI bot. I was looking forward to the Capture the Flag aspect of Rage Wars, but the way it is handled wasn't as good as I thought it could be. Instead of having a flag for each individual team, there is one flag located usually in the center of the level that you have to grab and bring to a designated spot that will score a point. I didn't enjoy this as much as the Capture the Flag I as used to more so on the PC side of things. Frag Tag is probably one of the most enjoyable modes out of all of them, and it deals with having one player who is picked as 'it' and is turned into a small monkey who is unable to use weapons. It's up to the other players to 'tag' the monkey by shooting at him with their arsenal, but if the monkey is able to make it to a pad that turns him back into his normal self another player will be randomly selected to be 'it' that time around.

Chances are that if you are used to playing first person shooters on the PC with a keyboard and a mouse combination, you will not like the switch that has to be made when playing Rage Wars. The analog stick in the middle controls the viewing, and the yellow C buttons control the up, down, left and right movements, with the back Z button for firing and the R button for jumping. At first it can be a bit difficult and disorienting to get accustomed, but within a few matches I found myself aiming and fragging almost as good as I was with a mouse.

Thankfully, there is a lot of variety in the levels in Rage Wars, but there are a couple in particular that just don't seem to work very well. My main complaint was with one entitled 'The Matrix'. This particular stage has a color scheme and design that is especially difficult to navigate through when there are four split-screened players, and I found myself - and my friends - getting more frustrated here than actually having fun. Other than that, however, Rage Wars has a tight design that works very well in the game.