Mad Max (2015)

This title is an open-world action game that immerses you in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The game excels in vehicular combat, allowing you to customize Max’s car, the Magnum Opus, with weapons and upgrades to engage in intense chases and battles against enemy convoys. The car combat feels dynamic and satisfying, making each encounter a thrilling experience. To me, it's biggest standout is the "gamefeel", you can really feel the intensity it is trying to convey, and this is a very hard task for gaming nowadays.

From the melee combat to the vehicular combat, everything has weight and feeling to it, making all this very satisfying to experience. The game’s open world is expansive and carefully designed, offering a variety of regions, each with its own challenges, landmarks, and activities. You can attack fortresses, take down convoys, and explore the desolate landscapes, which are brought to life with impressive environmental storytelling and a haunting soundtrack that captures the gritty atmosphere of the Mad Max universe.

On-foot combat, however, is less polished in comparison to the vehicular one. Melee encounters can become repetitive and lack the depth seen in other action titles, and while the narrative provides some context and motivation, it does not deeply develop its characters. Despite these shortcomings, this game delivers a unique and engaging experience for fans of vehicular combat and open-world games. Its thrilling car battles, immersive environments, and post-apocalyptic aesthetic make it a standout action-adventure title.

Mad Max is another sandbox game (ArkhamCreed style) with the usual mass of side missions that have become so worryingly familiar. On the whole, these become repetitive quickly and you’ll eventually give up on them if you’re anything like me. The third person combat is also less fluid than its competitors.

However, the game excels in its vehicle combat, which is fun, exciting and will remind you of the movies, only you’re the one in control of the scene (video games are the best).

The game has a wonderful visual style and looks great even on a low end PC. Any game that makes you think of Mad Max: Fury Road’s gorgeous colour palette, is doing something right. There are a couple of interesting characters too, and the story has some emotional gut punches which work more often than they don’t (although I hated the ending). Definitely worth checking out.

As an open-world game set in a vast, dry, wasteland, Mad Max doesn't thread any new ground. It's mechanics are firmly set in other game's. Combat, for example, is lifted almost directly from the Arkham games. But even if there's nothing new, everything is implemented with attention to detail and cohesively put together into a polished whole.

Most of the game is fast-paced car combat. You can crash into enemies, shoot out their wheels and use a grappling hook peel off their armour or to snatch the driver from his seat. There's plenty of driving to do thanks to the expansive desert, but also lots of small chores that keep you occupied. Yes, they could be characterised as "busy-work" but they are sufficiently varied that I didn't get bored.

This is thanks to the fact that no two locations are alike. From the layout of the four main Strongholds to the small scavenging locations with no story purpose whatsoever, every single place is unique.

You've got big crazy structures made up of crashed planes, Repurposed sunken boats made into small shelters, multilevel bases stuck in the middle of the ruins of a bridge. Some of them even tell small personal stories or give character to the wasteland. Imagine a game filled with hundreds of small locations as interesting as Fallout 3's Megaton and you get the idea.

There's a fast-travel system, but it's not just the usual "go to a place and now you can automatically fast-travel to it". It's much more deliberate. There's a whole rigmarole that forces you to access a balloon, go up into the air and surveying the field with your binoculars. Not only it adds variety and immersion to the world, but it also servers as a much-needed respite from the frenetic driving and killing. Up there in the balloon the wasteland seems almost peaceful, and you can stand there for as long as you want, relaxing, taking it all in. Everything sounds muted, the sounds of the wasteland feel distant.

This impecable sound design also helps to create a more immersive experience. Depending on where you are, you can hear character's shouts echo in the surrounding cliffs. Far away car noises alert you that a war-party is approaching, and during ground combat. Each area of the game sounds different.

And being a meteorologist, I cannot help to mention the wonderful skies. Not many games pay so much attention to a feature that covers half of the screen. Mad Max's sky is dynamic, ever changing, beautiful and BIG. Clouds feel volumetric and change colours as the day goes by. I could be trying to take down a caravan at top speed with multiple cars ramming mine from the sides and suddenly look up and be amazed.

The one mechanic that is an absolute zero and, should it be complete excised from the game would not be missed at all, is the minefields. The less spoken about that horrible design decision, the better, but let's just say that it is boring, annoying, completely nonsensical chore.

Now, if I've just spent more than 400 words talking about the game without touching on the story is because, similarly to Fury Road, story and characters are mostly hinted at. What little characterisation there is, though, is hit-or-miss.

The big breakaway character is Max's sidekick and blackfinger, Chumbucket. This deranged hunchback is one of the most mad-maxy character of the whole game. Both his mind and body, twisted by the decrepit wasteland, contrasts with the relatively normal-looking models and normal-sounding speech of the rest of the cast. He is also kind of endearing and superbly useful and knowledgeable.

In fact, even though Max drives the car, it is Chumbucket who drives the narrative. He is the one telling Max where to go and who to meet, and most of the time he is the one doing the talking. He even nags Max to get on with the main mission when he spends too much time fooling around doing side-tasks. In those moments, Max is less of a protagonist and more of Chumbucket's personal driver.

On the other hand, Max himself is a bit of a wash. Even though Max can speak and does at times, he's almost a silent protagonist. We get no backstory (although people who saw the first movie know it pretty well) and his only stated goal is to go to the Plains of Silence, where he thinks he'll find respite from his demons. To that end, he will use and abuse whoever gets on his way. Which raises two problems.

The first problem is that Max's cynical and egotistical attitude is not consistent with the player's actions and most of the mechanics of the game. During your journey, you will help multiple communities grow and rescue people for little if any material gain to Max. The fact that you can destroy enemy bases which then ate taken over by your "allies" who will periodically give you scrap (the game's currency) makes absolutely no sense for a character that doesn't do "allies".

Fortunately, the minimalistic nature of the narrative makes this a non-issue; at least until the very end, when story missions start to get very story-heavy and the second problem arises. When Max's use and abuse of people in service of his self-absorbed path of self-destruction takes front stage you realise that you are actually playing the bad guy, which is not a comfortable situation to be in as a player.

Mad Max is the uncommon move tie-in that is actually very good and holds up as a stand alone adventure. This is probably due to the fact that it merely takes inspiration from the movies instead of being an adaptation, and it's thorough attention to detail.

Oh, another observation that has nothing to do with game-play.

The story is basically non-existent, which is fine and actually captures the feel of the movie. Max wants to go o some play for some reason, but who cares, really? However, how the game handles the relationship between Max and Chumbucket is most interesting. At a first glance it looks like Chumbucket is merely Max's sidekick, following him around, but I actually feel that in some sense, it's the other way around. While Max drives the car, Chumbucket drives the narrative. He tells Max where to go and who to meet, and sometimes he is the one doing the talking. He even tells Max to get on with the main mission when he spends too much time fooling around doing side-tasks.

In those moments, Max is Chumbucket's personal driver and I don't know if I'm reading too much into it but I find that whole dynamic fascinating.

It's amazing how I keep finding small little details and smart design choices. Today's two tidbits are:

1. The sound design is off the charts. There's a myriad of quick sounds that gives the player feedback of what's happening around them, but also a lot of sounds that makes everything so immersive. When Chumbucket or Max shout, sometimes, depending on the geography, their words will echo in the surrounding cliffs. chef's kiss

2. The fast travel system is very good! Instead of just automatically activating new fast-travel areas when discovering it, there's this whole rigmarole that forces you to access a balloon, going up into the air and surveying the field with your binoculars. Not only it adds variety and immersion to the world, but it also servers as a much-needed respite from the frenetic driving and killing. Up there in the balloon the wasteland seems almost peaceful. The sound design here is also paramount. Up in the sky everything sounds muted, the sounds of the wasteland feel distant. And you can stand there for as long as you want, relaxing, taking it all in.

I read a few reviews of this game and was sceptical that what felt essentially a movie tie-in was any good. But, boy, was I mistaken. I'm a few hours in and is surprisingly good. The wasteland feels a bit empty, but that is intentional to serve the main mechanic of racing and driving.

Some small details that felt polished:

1. your deformed friend (Chumbucket) can fix your car only when standing still, but he automatically starts fixing stuff when you get out of the car to loot for stuff. This saves a lot of annoyance and I could easily imagine a game that forces you to manually give the "repair" order every time.

2. you have a flare with which to signal Chumbucket to bring your car. But if he's not far away, instead of using a flare, Max just shouts. Again, this is a rather neat attention to detail. I could easily imagine a game that mindlessly shoots a flare every time regardless of your distance to the car.

Beat during free trial of xbox game pass. I went for a very tanky car with heavy armor and spikes, often skipping upgrades to save up for the best in slot when the game allowed. At first, I methodically cleared every area and location 100% but this became tedious quite quickly. At that point I started evaluating the cost benefit ratios of doing an activity based on how much scrap I would get and whether I needed it to unlock something I wanted. I still ended up doing most things in the game, only skipping some towers and scrap locations. I enjoyed the story missions, enemy bases and anything relating to the buzzards. The buzzards were fascinating and the airport mission was masterful; I would have liked to be able to find out more about them. The entire setting is fascinating.

Most of the gameplay was good though I felt there was not really a sense of scarcity and danger with respect to fuel and water. I would not want to play the game through again because of the nature of the open world grind and it is unlikely that I will buy the game just to finish the little bit that I did not complete.

7.5/10

This game is such a lost potential. It has many good things going for it but in all aspects seems like it they could have been so much more.

The game puts you in a post-apocalyptic world very well known from Mad Max series. I do must say that I enjoyed the original movie more then the new one so I'm not so thrilled by the environment. What's outstanding is the fact that it's very similar all across the board. It makes sense giving the setting but seeing the constant desert like background is a bit dull. Though given the setting of the game it is to be expected and this is not a genuine critique.

You start our by driving and encountering a gang of cars that take away your car. You then meet a repair guy who helps you with rebuilding a brand new car in a quest to put a V8 in it.

So the game introduces pretty cool mechanics at start - your fuel is limited and you must refill it from time to time to keep going. The ammo is really scarce - you count every shot - especially when it comes to the sniper rifle. Water put in a canteen is used to replenish your health. And at first the game is quite challenging but things change when you reach the first stronghold. All you need to do is finish some projects that on each stronghold visit will replenish your ammo, fuel and health. Combine that with quick travel and I have never needed any additional fuel or felt a need to look for ammo.

Apart from main missions which progress the story pretty far you have a number of things to do. Either upgrade strongholds by acquiring different parts, lower terror level by destroying scarecrows or fighting different camps. You need to collect scrap along the way to purchase different upgrades to your car. There is a ton to do, but it all seems either repetitive or just gets boring pretty fast.

Starting with the small camp locations. It's cool that each of them and there are quite a few is looking different. But in each you do the same damn thing. You drive up, a bunch of people come out screaming - you fight them off and collect some loot, move on. In every each one of it.

The bigger camps - this looked so promising. Each one has a scout sitting somewhere near giving tips like 'there is a secret way on the right'. And you think - cool I can approach this in different way. Wrong. There is no stealth in this game. If you manage to pass external defences and somehow get in unnoticed you enter same area as you would enter gun blazing. Even worse when the enemies come out as they would normally the external defences start firing inside which is quite frustrating. So the only way to approach bigger camps is to:

- drive around destroying external towers

- snipe what you can

- enter gun blazing

- kill a number of waves of enemies

- complete objective (i.e. destroy fuel barrels etc)

- go to next camp

And bosses are so easy it's just boring fighting them.

The strongest part of the game is car combat. And that indeed is fun. Taking out enemy convoy is challenging and fun. You can harpoon a door out and pull the driver. You can pull out tires. You can ram the other car or throw an exploding spear at them. Although final car driving bosses do feel a bit easy in my opinion.

In summary - this is a quite bland game that misses the potential it could have achieved. The story is not compelling to play - at one point of the game I just decided to rush through it to have it completed. Not really interested in getting all upgrades or defeating all camps. Fun for an hour or four but outstays it's welcome.

Mad Max is a decent open world game born into a year of many exceptionally made open world games. Combined with the critical acclaim of the Fury Road movie released this year, the expectations leveled against this game were just too much. In a vacuum, Mad Max is a competent enough game with a lot of pieces that are good, but almost nothing great. It's well worth your time, but with tempered expectations.

The world of Mad Max is the world as imagined by 7-year-old boys playing in the sandbox. Rather, it's what the world would look like if civilization came crashing down and those same boys got to decide how the rest of human history would play out. Everyone has silly, gross-sounding names. Everyone hangs out in little clubs that each have their own bitchin' fort. Most importantly though, the entire social hierarchy is determined by how cool your car is, how much cool stuff you've stuck on it, and how big its flamethrower is.

In short, the Mad Max universe is pretty much the perfect setting for an open world sandbox.

Everyone put rusty spikes on their Hotwheels.......right?

We play as Max, who is the very definition of your prototypical video game protagonist. He's a tough guy loner with a tough outer shell that may or may not have a soft inner spot. The real flavour comes from the setting, the other characters, and the cars. Cars are a huge part of this game. In the very beginning Max's Car, The Black on Black, is stolen from him by ultimate bad guy Scrotus (seriously, that's his name). After wandering stranded in the desert for a while he joins up with a dog named Dinki-Di (yup) and a hunchback mechanic called Chumbucket (mmhmm).

Whereas Max is a simple man with a simple name for his simple car, Chumbucket takes the whole thing as a major religion, and he's not the only one. He wears a spark plug necklace, he sees Max as the chosen one, and he offers to build you the ultimate vehicle of destiny, which he aptly names The Magnum Opus. The vast majority of the game's mechanics and story revolve around preparing and upgrading both Max and the Magnum Opus in preparation for the final battle against Scrotus.

Cue generic open world gameplay here. You run around climbing towers to unlock new parts of the map, except instead of running you're driving and instead of towers they're hot air balloons. There are small camps to take over, large camps to take over, boss vehicles to take out, convoys to hijack, races, etc. All the normal stuff you expect in an open world game is here, and it's all done.....fine I guess. It's absolutely not bad at all, there's just nothing exceptional about it either. There were times I just wanted to advance the story and skip all the side stuff, and there were times I found some relaxation in aimlessly knocking over towers and clearing out camps.

And chilling with my buddy, the beetle man.

The melee combat is a pretty big part of the game, and in a word, it's Batman-esque. Unfortunately it's not very well done. The Batman (and Sleeping Dogs, and Shadow of Mordor, etc.) combat is all based on timing and counters. I personally found the counter timing in Mad Max to be not very responsive. I frequently would get locked into an animation and be unable to counter an attack I could easily see coming. I eventually negated this by upgrading Max enough that I had a good health cushion and just overall trying not to get surrounded, but the controls felt sort of....muddy.

Car combat is the other big pillar, and I had similar issues with it. It feels very clunky and you feel pretty helpless and incapable at first. Eventually you just upgrade your way out of that issue by brute force and everything is fine. It's not that the upgrades made things more dynamic, it just made you more able to weather the clunky systems. Getting more armor and upgrading the harpoon you use to spear enemy vehicles is a must. To upgrade your car, and also to upgrade Max, you need scrap.

Scrap suffers yet again from the same issues. Getting enough scrap to buy all the upgrades you need is agonizing at first, but much of this pain can be negated by power-upgrading your way through it. My style in games is to always spend currency early on upgrades that will yield me more currency. I did that here as well, boosting Max's scrap-finding as much as I could. I can't imagine how rough the game would have been had I not done that, because even with the upgrades I still found myself strapped for scrap almost constantly. There are so many different upgrades in this game you couldn't possibly dream up ulocking all of them during the main course of playing. If you really wanted to take your sweet time going through the game and clearing out everything you might have enough scrap to to a ton of upgrades, but I didn't do that. I didn't exactly blast through the game either, I put a solid 18-20 hours into it.

There's a mission to get this guy more lights for his vest. Seriously.

Max Max picked up a lot of steam for me when I realized that I'd upgraded my car enough and decided to go straight through the main story. There are quite a few cutscenes in the game, and many of them are actually pretty good. I like a lot of the side characters like Chumbucket, Gutgash (seriously, with these names!) and the main female character, Hope and her daughter Glory. The character work around Max is pretty nice, and I thought the story was actually going some pretty good places. The ending, however, was duuuuuummmmbbb.

I'm not going to give it away, but I'll just say a character dies right at the end of the game, and then once the credits roll they dump you back into the open world and there that character is, alive and well. Literally like 10 seconds after you saw them die they're back. I never go back and clear things out after I've finished the main story anyway, but it was so jarring and utterly dismissive of the dramatic ending it was striving for I couldn't help but laugh at how absurd it was.

In fact, that's a great headspace to be in while playing Mad Max altogether. There's definitely some good fun to be had here, but don't fall for any indications they're giving you that this is supposed to be a serious, well thought out story. Just sit back and laugh at the line Mad Max consistently balances between being self-serious and absolutely ridiculous.

Recommend for fans of: Mad Max films (obviously), Fallout series, & Fist of the North Star.

I’d been anticipating this games arrival for quite some time and was even more excited once I had seen “Mad Max: Fury Road”. This is the fairest outlook on the game I could muster. Here is the Good, the Bad, and the Neutral:

Bad:

*Framerate Issues- Framerate problems including lag and slowdown popped up often enough to be worth mentioning.

*Mostly Unremarkable Characters-I mentioned below in the “Good” that the game world’s design and tone was spot on. That being said almost all the characters except Chumbucket are either unremarkable because they have no distinct personality or are unremarkable for being pastiches of characters from “Mad Max: Fury Road”.

*Short Campaign-This complaint ties into the so so story but quite honestly the game doesn’t feel that long even if you do all the side quests because it doesn’t feel like a whole lot happens in the game story wise.

*Repetitive Side Quests-Whether its racing, collecting scrap, or destroying bases there isn’t a whole lot of variety and it becomes derivative quite quickly.

*Mostly repetitive and unimaginative bosses-In the game Scrotus has lieutenants called Top Dogs watch over certain bases that act as on foot bosses for Max; good idea flawed execution. In addition to all the bosses using the same attacks, they also almost look exactly alike. All of them wear the same leather gimp mask and body armor and swing a big mace around. There is an aversion to this however, once when raiding a camp I ran into a surprise Top Dog that was uniquely designed but later ran into a another surprise Top Dog that was flame acolyte that looked exactly the same. This is thankfully averted in the final boss battle which is done in the Magnum Opus chasing down Scrotus’s convoy.

Neutral:

*The Environment-The game nails the desert look of the films but no matter how good a desert looks it’s still just a desert. The only part of the game that looks unique is Gastown and the area around it that’s covered with garbage. But to be fair I’m not sure how the developers could have done a better job except by putting in the marsh area from “Mad Max: Fury Road”.

*The Story-Not much of story here besides Max trying to reach the Plains of Silence and running afoul of Scrotus along the way. But to be fair the Mad Max films don’t exactly have grand sweeping narratives either.

*The game as a Prequel-Once again neat idea but flawed execution. I’m very mixed about this one.

*Max himself-Max has always had dickish moments as a character but in this game the asshole side of his personality is cranked up considerably. Not enough to be unlikable mind you, but enough for you to get mad at the protagonist being a sullen dick most of the time.

*Too Little Griffa: An interesting mystic character that is introduced early in in the game and is hinted at as being important to the larger story. But once you fully upgrade Max you never see him again. A wasted opportunity if you ask me.

Good:

*The Hand to Hand Combat System-Let’s face it, if you’re going to steal from a series (Arkham for those who are wondering) you might as well steal from the best. The combat isn’t anything revolutionary but it has enough variety to never get boring.

*The World’s Design & Tone are Pitch Perfect-Originally this game was going to be an in name only adaptation (Max wasn’t even going to have an Australian accent) but luckily due to fan response George Miller got involved and laid down some ground rules for creating the game world. As a result I can honestly say nothing feels out of place

*The Vehicular Combat-Aside from the “Mad Max” brand name, this is what the entire game was sold on and thank goodness it was done well. There is so much variety from boosting into another vehicle, tearing off parts of another car with a harpoon, launching an exploding thunderpoon into another car, firing your sawed off shotgun, or using your side burners to light another car on fire. The highlight of the combat is chasing down enemy caravans, which the developer wisely decided to implement into the final boss battle. However once the Magnum Opus is fully customized some of the challenge and fun goes away.

*Car Customization-Buying and earning parts to customize the Magnum Opus with is a fairly fun gameplay feature.

*Chumbucket-The one notable character out of the entire game who is your constant companion. Despite his potential of being annoying hanging around with Chum never gets tiring for me. Partly because he is kind of endearing and his makeshift vehicular religion is kind of interesting to hear about.

*In game weather effects-Sandstorms with debris can whip up at any time and sometimes with lightning that adds another enjoying element to gameplay and ambience to the wasteland.

*The Thunderdome fight-This one barely make the list because I enjoy the shout out to “Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome” (a film I defend on occasion) more than I enjoy the actual fight which is not a lot better or worse than any of the Top Dog fights.

Am I disappointed that Mad Max’s second debut as a game turned out to be a pretty average but solid vehicular combat game? Yes. But I’m glad it was created and that I had the chance to play it. Here’s hoping we’ll all be graced with an even better Mad Max game in the future!