Rage: After The Impact s/c back

From the creator of REX MUNDI, this introduces the forthcoming console game from the developers of Doom and Quake, both of which I grew so addicted to that my dreams became one long obsession with pressing everything in sight in order to reveal secret areas. Tombraider's effect on my Mum was even worse: we spent a whole holiday in Venice in full philistinic throttle determining which rooftops where single jumps and which were "running jumps". Unfortunately when we moved on to Florence my mother took a running jump off a curb and promptly broke her wrist.

Anyway, the joy of Doom some twenty years ago (warning: memory fail) was the sheer, lurid spectacle of it all with red and green and blue amped up to the max and fighting each other inside your eyeballs. You weren't even on an alien planet, but a series of demonic realms bridged by teleporting flashes, surrounded by toxic seas and patrolled by creatures so foul that you've rarely encountered the likes outside the '80s Tory government. Pants-wettingly terrifying and fast. Oh, but you had to use your invisibility spheres wisely!

Quake's majesty lay in its arsenal, with weapons that could melt through enemies like a white-hot samurai sword through butter - and at a distance. Then when I found my first BFG (Big Fucking Gun), oh how I cackled as it crackled before going nova. The environments were more industrial and the beasts this time round were increasingly well armed and preposterous cyborgs of sorts - but it was still all very exotic and certainly not the sort of holiday destination you'd let small children run around unsupervised.

Clearly, then, Rage will be no Shangri-La but if this comic is anything to go by it's hardly going to be worse than Mansfield city centre on a Saturday night. Things have moved on in console games: mere mutations of human beings aren't going to cut it anymore, and that's all I see here.

Earth has been hit by an asteroid. Five billion people died within 24 hours. In preparation the military elite bundled the science bods up in safety pods then thrust them underground. They sequestered themselves similarly but made sure they would awake from cryogenic suspension first. Now the scientists are resurfacing too to find the military in charge of a broken world roamed by mutations catalysed by Feltrite found in the alien debris. I've seen it all before.

Of course the gaming experience could prove far more thrilling; in which case authorising this comic as advance publicity is a severe miscalculation. You might want to try DEAD SPACE: SALVAGE instead by Antony Johnston and Christopher Shy, an artist perfect for maximum fear. I'll read it when I've finished making myself cry playing Dead Space II.