You’re told only that you and your fellow Ark survivors are “special.” You’re never quite told how, besides the fact that your body is coursing with nanotechnology that allows you to defibrillate yourself back to life if you die. But by the end of Rage, we’d figured it out. See, the post-apocalyptic Wasteland — a place overrun by mutants and the last vestiges of humanity that survived a world-decimating meteor impact while you were safely buried inside a life-preserving Ark — lacks a mail-delivery system.

You are…the postman!

Yes, Rage — from renowned first-person action game developer id Software — tries mightily to break out of the studio’s Doom- and Quake-powered corridor-shooter shell. And in many ways, it succeeds. Disc 1 of this two-DVD, 12-hour semi–non-linear adventure introduces a world that, while populated with the same ol’ shotguns, machineguns, pistols, and rocket launchers that’ve been a staple of the genre since id’s own Wolfenstein 3D, spices them all up with light RPG elements that let you discover and build new ammo types and modifications. This engineering aspect extends to certain handy items, too, such as a spider bot that helps soften your targets with its own automatic weapon.

And the combat itself — like that in all id games — feels immeasurably satisfying. The weapons all have a grin-inducing kick, the wingstick (a sharp-edged boomerang) is our favorite FPS death-dealer this year, and the controls are immaculate. Few shooters outside of the Halo series have felt this good on a gamepad, making it that much more fun to exterminate savage mutants, acrobatic Ghosts, thuggish Wasted, and other enemy types.

Also giving Rage a unique flavor is its racing element. Owning, upgrading, and competing in your own Mad Max–ish dune buggy is a central part of Disc 1, and your victories allow you to do everything from beef up the armor, turbo, and suspension to tweaking the paintjob — all of which will be necessary not only for the races themselves, but also for random encounters like “Waste X number of pursuing bandits” who take potshots at you while you’re streaking across the desert.

Unfortunately, all these interesting aspects circle back to Rage’s unavoidable, grind-y reality: it’s too dangerous for normal citizens to venture out into the Wasteland, so the overwhelming majority of the quests consist of you playing UPS guy, fetching or delivering items for people back in town. Only the occasional clever mission — such as a side job that tasks you with protecting two townsfolk from Wasteland bandits while you’re perched high above them with a sniper rifle, or, later, ziplining around Jackal City — breaks the repetition.

That’s the most general of Rage’s transgressions, but there’s more. For as gorgeous as this game is, it suffers from eye-bleeding texture pop-in issues, where it takes a few seconds for the proper level of detail to draw in. (We tried playing off of both the disc and the hard drive. In addition, we also switched our Xbox 360 console with another one to see if that would help. Sadly, it didn’t.) Furthermore, the loading times are downright horrific — and frequent. Many of the aforementioned fetch quests go like this: Take quest / Load for 30 seconds from town to Wasteland / Drive 60 seconds across barren expanse / Load for 30 seconds into destination area / Get or give quest item / Load for 30 seconds back into Wasteland / Drive another minute back to town / Load for 30 seconds into town / Talk to original quest-giver to end quest. It’s about as fun as it sounds…which is to say, not much.

Finally, the Disc 2 portion — a four-hour chunk set in and around the Subway Town hub area — feels exceedingly rushed. The dune-buggy racing elements so delicately intertwined in the first part of the game are completely abandoned, the final mission sneaks up on you without much buildup, and the finale itself is extremely underwhelming, story-wise and gameplay-wise. It offers no big boss fight, despite the game having a couple of great ones earlier in the campaign, and the end cutscene resolves precisely nothing.

Puzzlingly, Rage even lacks a competitive FPS multiplayer mode — the very thing id Software is best known for. Instead, you get nine two-player co-op side stories (they’re decent 20-minute missions worth rolling through once) and a suite of lackluster six-player buggy-racing modes in which you shoot at someone for a while before someone else swoops in and steals the kill at the last second.

Like your nameless Ark-survivor hero, Rage has the potential to be special. It just never fully lives up to it.

[Addendum 10/4/11: Bethesda informs us that the DLC sewer area mentioned in the Verdict Box below is actually free to those who purchase a new copy of the game via a download code included in the box. We wanted to pass along the clarification, though it does not change our review score.]

On Xbox 360

+ Gorgeous graphics.

+ Satisfying weapons, combat, and controls.

– Ludicrously grindy; long, frequent load times; 22GB install recommended.

? When you click on some sewer areas in the Wasteland, you’re told to buy DLC to unlock them?!? Screw that!

7.5