Warning: Contains very minor spoilers.

An odd thing happened within the first 10 minutes of Rage: The game asked me to kill.

I was taken aback. This wasn't a morality issue, mind you. Rage is a first-person shooter from the developer who gave us Doom and Quake. I'm supposed to put bullets into things. And this wasn't some Modern Warfare 2 "No Russian" civilian-slaughtering conundrum, either. My would-be victims were mutants: nasty little buggers of the wasteland who jumped me the minute I exited the 100-year-old, pre-apocalyptic Ark. I didn't mind having a chance at some payback.

The mission-giver (played by John Goodman) was even cordial with his not-so-unusual request.

My problem? The timing just wasn't right.

The opening of Rage set up a pretty epic, if not quite original, tale: Right before a giant asteroid crashed into the earth, threatening to extinct-ify all life, scientists buried a handful of technologically enhanced men in cryogenic hibernation inside the Ark, named for obvious reasons (though I didn’t notice any females in my 12-man pod...curious). Our character woke up alone more than 100 years later in the midst of decay and ruins -- a near-barren Mad Max of a world, peppered with spots of civilization that had already lived through a few generations in this new age.

I was taking my first tentative steps out of the Ark when a strange mutant suddenly attacked. Just in time, local Dan Hager (Goodman) shot it off of me, then hurried me into his dune buggy to take me to safety, back at a nearby outpost.

Hager acknowledged that I was a rare and sought-after Ark survivor and that I was probably very confused and would have a lot of questions. So what was the very next thing he did? He handed me a gun and gave me my first in-game job: Kill all the local mutants.

I understood why this was a mission. First-person shooter. Shoot stuff. Got it. But even more disorienting than waking up 100 years in the future was this lack of flow and consistency, going from an intriguing backstory and setup straight to “don’t worry about all that -- just kill shit!”

And it’s this recurring inconsistency that really bothers me about Rage, because I think it could be a great game otherwise. It’s a solid enough FPS with great development pedigree. It has some light RPG and open-world elements. It even has a fleshed-out collectible-card game...with the cards literally being the collectibles that you find around the world.

But then look at these other examples of things that don’t quite fit together:

1. The A.I. is brilliant at times. Enemies may duck under your fire while charging at you, or they may retreat into another section of the level if they feel like they’re losing ground in the skirmish.
   
   The A.I is old-school dopey at times. Foes may repeatedly pop out from behind cover in the same predictable manner that we’ve seen for years now. Just aim at where the head was just at a moment ago -- it’ll come right back out in the exact same spot in a sec.
    
2. Rage has a legit collectible-card game, as I stated above. It’s no Magic: The Gathering of course, but it’s no weak attempt at a minigame like Pazaak in Knights of the Old Republic, either. You build up your deck with cards that you find scattered about, and you have to play them properly against your opponent, balancing between offense and defense.
   
   Rage has a completely mindless and stupid gambling activity as well -- a hologram-based street game that provides the same amount of strategic depth as hitting the “spin reels” button on a Vegas slot machine. Why not offer a coin-flipping minigame as well?
    
3. The mood can be creepy. When you reach the first major town of Wellspring, the front-gate guard thoroughly warns you to keep your head down and to mind your own business, as the citizens are mighty suspicious of everyone. Cool...some role-playing in this shooter -- and if I don’t watch what I do, the locals might shoot me, jail me, or even reenact Deliverance for me.
   
   The mood doesn’t matter. For example, the game doesn’t follow through with the above threat at all. I decided to take a risk and get in everyone’s face after that pep talk from the guard. Well, it turns out the people in Wellspring are some of the friendliest, most accommodating folks around. What the heck was the point of that warning-dialog scene? It set up one façade of a mood that the game utterly destroyed with the very first person whom I talked to (he was kind enough to give this stranger directions to the next objective, by the way).

Rage is that crazy-ass significant other who can flip a switch on you without a moment’s notice. Sure, it’s not going to make for a harmonious long-term relationship, but if you set your expectations accordingly and mentally prepare yourself for the occasional Jekyll and Hyde act, you can still have a good time while it lasts.

Forget that it has RPG elements. Forget that it's partially open-world. Just treat it like the shooter it really is.

I said forget this!