By all accounts, Rage is the very definition of "mid".
And honestly? That's not a bad thing.
Rage is one of those games I've been eternally cursed to play the opening hours of over and over again. I always quit at one of two points: a mission or two after you hit Wellspring, the first major hub town, or shortly before that point, when you earn your first car. I never make it to the racing portions of the game, one of the major selling points, nor the much hyped Mutant Bash TV in that time.
Some of this comes down to first impressions. I remember feeling like the world was static, sterile, and non-interactive, and while the shooter portions were engaging, they didn't hold my interesting long enough to continue playing. It also suffered from performance issues and odd bugs which I wasn't - and in some cases, still can't - resolve. Three strikes and you're out, as they say, and thus I put Rage back onto the digital shelf it originally came from.
I'm not sure what possessed me to reinstall it a few days ago. I had been binging on fighting games before that point, and needed a breather after getting comboo'd endlessly in BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle. Searching through my Steam library, I noticed Rage sitting there in my pile of unbeaten games. I remembered it being slower paced than most other FPS games, and it was certainly much slower paced than the fighting games I was being obliterated in.
25 gigs later, and it was installed on the primary NVME of my long in the tooth gaming laptop. Unsurprisingly, my first impressions were wrong! The game was a lot less sterile than I remembered. For example, the hyper emotive animations a lot of the characters and enemies have lends a surreal, theatrical quality to Rage that is missing in other titles. Everything has just the right amount of grime and grit to it as well, which gives the post apoc wasteland you find yourself in just the right amount of character.
What sold me on Rage this time around is how combat feels contrary to other shooters, including Doom 2016, the first post Carmack id FPS. Every battle feels like a desperate struggle against a foe that simply refuses to give up, a foe that always seems one step ahead of you but is still beatable. I can't tell you how many times I thought I had killed a dude, only to find him crawling around behind cover, ready to shoot me. Rage isn't a hard game, far from it, but it certainly tricks you into believing it is.
All that said, Rage is very much a game that is weaker than the sum of its parts. While the world is beautiful to look at, the car combat and racing well handled, and the shooty bits stronger than any previous id game to date, it feels "like a video game" in the worst sense of that phrase. There's not a lot to keep you going other than tenuous plot strands ending in cash which you immediately dump into your car or arsenal, and the racing never quite gels with the on foot portions. I realized why I felt like the world was so sterile when I first played it, too: the towns you visit are very much the kind you'd find in a 16-bit RPG, where NPCs only exist to give you quests or useless gossip.
And you know what? That's fine.
"Mid" is often thrown around as meaning a game isn't worth playing or devoid of value, and I feel like that's missing the point. Many modern games try to be so exciting that it feels like virtual euphoria from which you can never escape, which is exhausting. Sometimes what you need isn't something that delivers endless excitement like a fighting game or modern AAA title, but a slower paced experience that gives you something to chill out and vibe to. More importantly, maybe you want that greasy ballpark hotdog that doesn't quite come together instead of a nice steak dinner, and Rage very much delivers the former experience.
That's a lot of silly words to say that Rage 's cool. While it may never be the pinnacle of the genre, I'm enjoying my time with it, so much so that I've found it almost meditative racing around the badlands blowing bandits away with miniguns. If you're looking for a solid if not exceptional game that calls to mind the best parts of titles like Kingpin, Strife, or Powerslide, Rage might be the game for you.