Rage is not a bad game, but it's not a great game either. Carmack recognized that they screwed up the release on the PC and promised a texture update / patch, and it has yet to arrive after all these months. If this isn't incompetence I don't know what is. That has probably something to do with the layoffs. The engine also needs perfecting as it still has texture pop-in problems.
I'm running at a constant 60 fps on my GTX 480 at 1680x1050, everything maxed out with 4x AA and the game uses around half the VRAM. It should use the whole of it. As it is, it is too quick to unnecessarily remove textures from VRAM and then not quick enough to put them back. This is visible throughout the game if you move fast, and is especially noticeable in big outside areas.
Also, as has been pointed out, the story is not very interesting, the characters don't have enough depth, some tasks are repetitive and the music (which loops in many cases, breaking immersion) is generally forgettable and tends to be used too much to create atmosphere (when they could have also created it with ambient sounds), and it is not very sucessful at it, which means that the game looks more like a failed tech demo more than anything else. I mean, static sky ? Crysis, which came out in 2007 has a dynamic sky, the only way to get a static sky in Crysis is to put eveything in Low. And even then, if you raise the shaders to medium you get the dynamic sky back.
I mean, they advertise the game like this:
Graphics that have to be seen to be believed – Powered by id’s cutting-edge new id Tech® 5 engine, new Megatexture technology brings the vast wasteland to life in never-before- possible detail with action running at an astounding 60 frames per second.
Yet you still have, to this day, a static sky, low resolution textures and texture pop-in. I'm still waiting on the second promised patch. I have long finisehd the game, but hey, I want to see if the engine can deliver or not.