A great FPS marred by open world nonsense.

Rage starts to wear out its welcome about 3 to 4 hours in. That's the point where it started to feel like the promise of an open world shooter was more of an illusion than reality. Sure, you can drive around the Wastelands of Rage with little restriction, but you'll find that the name Wasteland is pretty apt. There's literally nothing out there to do. Instead, the game is restricted to the scant few mission hubs when searching for side quests, and the shooting portions of Rage involve going into a door that essentially loads up a level just like most FPS titles.

All the stuff in between, which involves you driving around and destroying enemy vehicles on the way to your next mission, begins to feel tedious pretty quick because the types of encounters rarely change. You'll learn when and where vehicles will spawn, and the vehicle types themselves aren't varied enough to remain interesting for 14 hours. The small rewards you get for destroying them are laughable, and hardly worth your time. And you'll soon find it quicker and more advantageous to just dodge the encounters altogether. When you're talking about the ability to mount guns and rockets on top of a dune buggy in a future world gone mad, bored isn't a word that should creep into your description of the game, but for Rage it certainly does.

Rage is absolutely fantastic when it's only a shooter. It clearly shows that iD hasn't lost their touch when it comes to crafting awesome FPS experiences. And on consoles the game is downright amazing for both its incredible visuals and damn near consistent 60 frames per second. It's easily one of the best-looking - if not the best-looking - Xbox 360 games on the market, and while you might encounter some slight texture pop-in, it's remarkably minor and quick. You can tell there are a few shortcuts taken with some objects, I'd encounter low-res looking pictures on desks and other minor details that didn't get the full coat of paint when it comes to texture work, but I'm being pretty nitpicky there.

And the combat side of the game is a lot of fun, at least on foot. The weapon design is great, and extremely varied. It fits the standard load-out of most shooters, with pistols, shotguns, assault rifles and so on. But there's enough of a futuristic edge to make them standout, in both design and use. The animations given when you first gain a weapon are pretty awesome, and even the reload animations are great. The guns sound solid as hell, and the impact noise given by bullets bouncing off of armor or tearing through flesh is satisfying. The only real complaint I have is the lack of environment destructibility, which a lot of modern shooters have adopted to different degrees, but seems to be missing in Rage.

It's just that everything else about Rage brings the game down. At first, when you exit the opening area of the game, you get this sense of scale that makes you think you're in for an experience that will reward you by exploring this fairly open setting. But you quickly realize there are only three places in the game that actually offer up quests, whether they're tied into the main story or not. After driving around the Wastelands on both the 1st and 2nd disc, I found just a few NPC's scattered outside of the major hubs, and no additional side quests to partake in. It's entirely possible I missed something, but it seemed odd to have all this space and nothing to do with it.

The only thing of note outside of the hub locations is the various jump points you can find, and the occasional hidden material or collectible card that doubles as a mini-game item. The jump points can be challenging to figure out, and are kind of fun, but hardly enough to warrant the amount of open space here.

And then the hub towns themselves are disappointing. The second one, in particular, is shown initially through a scene that implies it's pretty big, but you quickly find that's not the case. The first hub location is a small outpost filled with about 5 or 6 people, and meant to be a starting zone. The second is larger, called Wellspring, but again it's only about 20 NPC's large, and of those characters, only half or so actually give out missions. And then the side missions you end up taking sometimes involve going back to locations you tackled for the story, but just running through the level backwards. The whole design feels a little cheap to me.

The other maddening aspect is that you see all these closed doors in the hubs, which lead into buildings or dwellings that you are always locked out of. This leaves the hub towns feeling even smaller, in that you can't explore much outside of the one weapon shop located in each town, the racing section, and the occasional quest giver dwelling. There's so much restriction on what you can explore that you're literally confined to the streets and alleys, interacting with NPC's that occasionally give out a line or two of dialogue, or make mention of your current actions as you walk by. There's little here that feels exciting, new, or innovative.

You can participate in a series of mini-games at the two major hub towns, which can be used to increase your funds through gambling. But as far as mini-games go, only one of them is noteworthy. This is the one that involves all the collectible cards you find scattered about the world of Rage, which can then be used to build a deck of cards for a game akin to Magic: The Gathering, if Magic only involved creature battles. It's fun in passing, but with only two NPC's to play against there's not much you can do with it.

Part of me feels like Rage is just sitting around for DLC to be released. There's a lot of open space, but not much to do within it. The number of quests you can uncover seems to be surprisingly small, and the number of quests that require you to run through stages you just recently finished is disappointing. The racing element is underutilized, and it's confined to the hub locations as structured 3 lap events or capture the flag competitions. The vehicular combat could have been exciting if it featured more variety from your opponents, and gave you a larger selection of vehicles to outfit. As it currently stands, you've got four vehicles you can gain, starting with two and adding in two more as the story progresses.

Don't get me wrong, I certainly think Rage is a technically impressive experience. And the whole shooting side of Rage is absolutely great. But all the other content left me pretty cold on the experience, and just feels half-finished to me. Hopefully there will be some interesting DLC that comes along soon, but as it stands right now, I'd definitely suggest trying before you buy with Rage.