There's just not a lot of "there" there - my first playthrough, which included every side-mission and several job board assignments, took me 9 hours and 15 minutes. My second, where I completed every side-mission, every job board assignment, every courier mission, and most of the races, took eight hours and 50 minutes. RAGE ends so abruptly that I didn't realize it was over until the final cutscene began. I was left wondering what had happened.

And that's the thing. The aspects of RAGE that seem interesting and different at first never grow or expand. The enemy reactions, the clutching, the begging for their lives, it's repeated identically so often over the course of the game that it loses any impact or meaning. The town that initially holds the promise of a big, wide, asteroid-murdered world is a facade for a few fetch quests down some of the most guided, narrow shooter levels this side of a Call of Duty title. RAGE is pretty at times, but it's not enough to paint over the truth - that Id's labor feels like a scaffolding for a game of bolder ideas, ideas which, for whatever reason, aren't realized. And the game that is there just isn't enough to compete with other, better shooters we've seen this year.