I just wrapped up my time with Rage 2, and by that I mean I beat the main story campaign, and am now content to let the last handful of question marks on the map stay question marks as I move on. I was meticulously farming every little point of interest on the map for a while, but then I decided I was overpowered enough and decided to make some progress in the main story. And then suddenly, I was done.
People have been asking me how long Rage 2 is, and the “main” path is probably about 10-12 hours, though a good portion of that is farming random POIs because you need to be at least a little strong to take on some of the later campaign missions. If you want to 100% the map it’s maybe 20 hours or so.
I don’t mind short games, in fact, these days, I kind of relish them, but the way Rage 2 is short feels kind of strange.
This is an open world game, essentially, without sidequests, and maybe…11-12 missions total, when you really get down to it. After the brief intro, you are told to find three people in the wasteland to give you missions that will help you take on the Big Bad. You do 1-2 missions for them, then are tasked with solving wasteland problems until you get them all to “rank 5.” Then each of the three will give you 1-2 more mission and you’re headed for the final showdown.
The only mission I would truly consider a sidequest in the whole game was one that was given out apparently as a pre-order bonus where you have to invade a mutant hideout where you discover they’re worshipping the protagonist of Rage 1 as a “Death God.” But other than that? You can talk to people inside every town, and while many say nothing, others will give you something that seems like a quest, but isn’t actually a quest. It’s usually just them putting a bandit camp or crusher den on your map. You go and clear it like you’d clear anything, but that’s it, you don’t even have to go back to the person to get a reward, unless I’ve totally missed something.
And then there’s the map. I found an entire town in the south of the map that looked like the other three cities, and yet it was never part of the story, it never gave me any missions, I never had to go there for any reason. It felt like a piece of cut content that simply…exists, or perhaps will be utilized in DLC.
There’s the top region of the map which I was told to go two exactly twice in the final thirty minutes of the game, but was otherwise unused, and feels much more sparse than all the other zones. The southwest zone of the map is similar.
To Rage’s credit, you can find some interesting things if you simply explore. I found one bandit camp on the side of a cliff full of elevators and loads of chests that was really creatively designed. But I couldn’t help but wonder if I had accidentally stumbled on a zone meant for some story quest, a story quest which never actually arrived. The same goes for another area that had a bunch of enemy indicators on my radar behind the walls of a large warehouse building that was literally impossible to get into. I spent about 20 minutes trying to get in before figuring it must be part of some future quest I just couldn’t access yet. It wasn’t. I still don’t know what to make of that place.
Rage 2 very much feels like a game that wasn’t finished, or that carved out stuff to ensure they could sell a season pass. To be clear, this isn’t to say the game isn’t fun. It very much is, and I enjoyed my time with it thanks to its fantastic gunplay and crazy movement abilities that make you feel superheroic as you level up. All that works wonderfully.
And it’s not even that I care that Rage 2 is on the short side. It’s just that as you play you can pretty clearly feel where surgery was performed, which is not a great feeling. This feels like a game that could have at least been on the level of Far Cry in terms of scale, but was reduced to a much smaller, more focused version for one reason or another. So focused that it barely has actual missions at all, outside of the scarce handful that make up the main storyline. The world is plenty big enough, it’s just not filled with any actual storylines. It’s odd.
I don’t feel like this game will be worth $60 for most people. Not that it’s bad, but most people are simply going to expect more in this day and age, whether that’s fair or not. It’s kind of the definition of “wait for a sale.” $30-40 feels about right to me, $20 would be a steal. And whenever you pick it up, I think you’ll have fun, just don’t expect this to be the next Assassin’s Creed or Borderlands in terms of scope.
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