Maximum Games sends Road Rage back to the shop

Remember nine months ago, just before E3 2016, when I posted about a potential Road Rash successor called Road Rage? At the time it was little more than concept renders and a feature list… and well, it isn’t much beyond that point today. I checked in with the official site (and that of publisher Maximum Games) throughout the year but I missed this one-and-only trailer of the game in motion from last September.

It has wonderfully extreme ragdoll physics when weapons collide with riders. There’s a bunch of environments from city to countryside (sadly, sparsely populated) and there’s even a couple of big jumps and shortcuts to be seen. But what’s most troubling is the final frame of the video that proudly touts “In Stores November 15, 2016”. Uhhh.

Thinking I might’ve missed a potential underdog favorite I checked Amazon to find the new date of “December 31, 2017”. That’s retail-talk for Unknown. Digging a little further I finally turned up some confirmation in this Facebook post from October.

“Since the beginning, our goal for Road Rage has been to create the highest quality motorcycle combat game possible. We’ve been hard at work to make this vision a reality, and while we’re incredibly proud of the work our team has done, we’ve come to the realization that the game needs more development time to ensure it lives up to our standards. Therefore, today we made the difficult decision to delay the release of Road Rage till next year. We’ll keep you updated on the progress, but in the meantime we appreciate your support and understanding!” – The Maximum Games team

I’m sure that was a gut-wrenching and heartbreaking decision to make a month after finally announcing a release date; my sympathies to all involved. Hopefully Maximum Games has much more to show at this year’s E3. I’m still holding out hope that Road Rage has stolen even a little of the secret sauce that made Road Rash so memorable.