That’s not the only place where it feels like this game maybe has cut some corners. A major part of Rage 2 is supposedly Overdrive, where after chaining together enough kills your character enters a kind of berserker mode where weapons gain new powers, and you regenerate health and do more damage. Except, funny thing: it didn’t work for me. The mechanic was never introduced in-game, and when I went to check on what the hell was going on with it, I noticed that triggering the ability didn’t have a key-binding. I added one… and it still didn’t work. I could be fighting for extended periods at the max kill-combo, and overdrive never became available. There wasn’t even an icon for it on the screen. It just didn’t exist in my game, and since restarting the campaign would wipe my progress, it wasn’t really in the cards. I’m unique in having had this happen, as far as I know, but it does mean I haven’t seen everything Rage 2 can do.

Which makes it particularly disappointing that I still finished the campaign so easily: unlike Doom, Rage 2 doesn’t really demand much from you. The enemy variety doesn’t effectively neutralize favorite tactics like circle strafing, dodging, and ducking behind cover for a quick reload. If you want to just play this game with the assault rifle, you can. You won’t have those battles, so common in Doom, where you needed to master different weapon combinations to handle different varieties of enemies. Doom may have offered a ridiculous power fantasy, but the challenges escalated with that power, and demanded that you raise your game even as it gave you more tools. Here, Rage 2 doesn’t seem to care if you unlock all your weapons and powers or create a build for your character. You can collect a variety of currencies that let you upgrade your character, certain abilities, and weapon effects, but the differences are small and you can still breeze through the game without them, or without particularly leveraging them. I finished the game without ever using two of the major Ranger powers, and having unlocked only four weapons. That’s mostly because Rage 2 demands next to nothing. It confronts you with waves of enemy grunts and the occasional boss character who is so huge and slow as to behave more like a stationary turret, complete with an enormous weak spot to shoot.