Directed by Frank Rooke

Developed by Avalanche Studios

Video games based on movie properties are not exactly known for being especially amazing games. Mad Max sought to break the mold, largely by not breaking the mold at all. It borrows heavily from other, better franchises without actually bothering to pin them down the controls and mechanics and do them well. In the end, it’s a mad, mixed bag that shows an incredible amount of promise while being incredibly frustrating.

The thing that becomes almost immediately apparent is that players will likely spend a fair amount of time competing with the controls. Suffice it to say, some of the mapping is relatively unique (L2 to jump, circle to fire your shotgun, for example). On top of that, Max moves a bit like the drunk guy at the corner of the bar. His car controls just fine eventually, though it obviously feels at its best when it’s completely leveled up. The absolute worst problem throughout the entire game is the X-button does everything. Everything you interact with – picking up loot, grabbing weapons, climbing ladders, talking to people – requires pressing X. Other developers have found solutions to this problem, mostly by having some actions needing to just tap the button while other actions require holding it. Avalanche Studios opted to have nearly everything require holding X, which innately just creates the same problem, only now your thumb hurts more from having to hold the button all the time.

The core gameplay is essentially just Arkham Asylum. Controlling the titular character of Max Rockatansky, players roam the arid wasteland beating up hordes of mindless dudes. Combat is fine and fun enough, but the lack of gadgets means it often feels shallow. Rapidly press square to punch enemies until you see the prompt to press triangle show up over an attacking goon. Then press that button and you perform a parry. There are a very few number of combo moves to pull off, as well as additional combat perks to unlock through level-ups. On the most part, it’s a totally fine and adequate system. However, as with everything regarding the controls, at times it feels unresponsive. Certain unlocked abilities allow you to perform special finishing moves by press X when you see the prompt, but often you have you press it three or four times even when right on top of them for it to feel like the game is registering your input. The Arkham style of combat has become popular in these third-person action beat-em-up games, but you get more depth with the ones that include gadgets and gear to use as well. Spider-Man is a great example of how to expand on the style, as well as tighten up the controls themselves to make it even more fun.

Driving is what it is. The car handles well enough even at the start, though improves dramatically by the end after numerous level-ups. Car combat is a frequent occurrence, and it, too, can get frustrating. Sometimes you can plow through a boulder without missing a bit. Other times the slightest tap from an enemy or rock can send you spinning out. Without doubt, the most tedious and physically painful missions (given how much you have to grip the controls as you’ll have to hold down the acceleration button with R2, control the car with L3, try to aim weapons with R3, and then shooting with the circle button) are the vehicular battles. On the most part, one can avoid these, as most missions are optional. On the other hand, the game frequently throws enemy cars at you while you are on your way to the next objective. On top of that, two of the last missions require car battling.

Up until this point, the main issues have been about imperfect controls. It’s clunky, not as responsive as it should be, and a bit physically awkward or painful in the mapping. It’s not so much “bad” as much as it is sloppy. However, that’s hardly where the flaws with the game end. Without question, the biggest drag on the game stems from its open-world sandbox environment. While it makes sense given the inclusion of the car – an important aspect of a Mad Max game, to be sure – the world is literally just one giant desert. There’s nothing to really see and not really any variety from base to base. Worse, though, is the complete lack of engaging things to do in this bland world.

It’s not that there’s nothing to do, of course! Lord knows, there’s hours and hours and hours of mindless chores to knock off the checklist. It doesn’t help that they mark up your map and don’t give you the option to filter things, so it is constantly rubbing your nose in the content you’re missing whenever you check your location. Mad Max is a textbook example of tedium in video games, however.

Thing is: there are some ideas in the game that are frustratingly close to being worthwhile and interesting! Doing the mindless tasks taking out enemy weapons and camps decreases the threat level of that particular region. This means fewer enemies to interrupt you on your path. Taking out camps even results in allies moving in to routinely deposit “scrap” into your account at certain intervals throughout the game. (Scrap being effectively this game’s version of money.) Yet in the end, reducing the threat level to zero does not actually mean that there are no more threats in that region. And the amount of scrap you get doesn’t increase noticeably each time you free up another camp. At least, it doesn’t until late in the game.

One aspect that had so much potential was the idea of strongholds. These bases were scattered in regions around the map and housed key ally characters. They’d serve as a base for the player, too. Collect all the upgrades and then returning to the base would have benefits like restore your health, refuel your car, or reload your ammo belt. Narratively, the leaders of these strongholds would offer help or somehow point you in the right direction for taking out the main big bad. They all had incentive to defeat the villain, Scabrous Scrotus. It feels like the game is building towards this epic conclusion where all these forces you’ve helped would join you in a big raid on Gastown. And in the end, they drop off and do not matter at all once you get there. In fact, the game largely abandons everything you’ve done by the final stretch.

Strongholds are a cool idea with a lot of potential, but wind up becoming a perfect example of everything wrong with side quests and the structure of open world games. They do not matter when all is said and done. Though they are the story missions, they barely even matter to that end, either! Mostly, they just give you insight on where to find a particular item you need to upgrade your car so you can get to the next place. All this build up for a massive, cooperative effort boils down to just a generic one v. one fight with Scrotus.

Mad Max is full of little things that are a neat idea, but poorly executed. Perhaps the most hilarious is the storm dynamic. Every once in a while, a gigantic storm (like the one prominently featured in the Fury Road trailer) strikes. Players must endure by driving back to a stronghold or camp, or seeking cover behind something. The catch is that visibility is incredibly poor and the wind will often knock you off course. It makes it difficult to find your way back to a camp or base if you’re not already near it. If you do happen to find a good place to hunker down, well, the storm can last between five and ten minutes. That’s not an exaggeration, either. The last storm I encountered last six full minutes. (I literally booted up my XBox One to play some Mass Effect 2 while this was happening. You know your mechanic is broken when players can play something else while they wait for your game to let them play it again.)

The healing mechanic borrows its core from other, better games like Dark Souls or Horizon Zero Dawn, but makes it clunkier. After filling your canteen at designated water traps, players can press the up directional key to drink and heal. It’s a slow animation like with Dark Souls with the main difference being that you only heal for as long as you hold it down. If you’re at half health, it can take up to three or four full seconds to heal near completion. Functionally, it’s just not possible to heal during combat as a result. Fortunately, however, they do allow you to regain some live while you take out enemies in Fury Mode. Its lack of commitment to a single preferable healing mechanism is emblematic of just how messy the game ultimately is.

The game also borrows from Dark Souls in that it wants you to seek a specific destination in order to level up. By accomplishing certain objectives or challenges, players are rewarded with “Griffa Tokens.” After acquiring them, they can then seek out the character Griffa, whose location varies depending on where on the map you are. Find him, run up to him, get a little cutscene of meaningless, cryptic dialogue, and then you can level up! On the surface, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this. It’s kind of annoying to have to drive out to him in order to level up, but it’s far from the worst thing. On the other hand, Griffa Tokens are a dime a dozen. Players acquire them so easily that odds are, their character is fully maxed out before they even get close to Gastown.

With a lot of open world games like this, there is a fine line between lack of focus and freedom for the player. Here, it doesn’t feel like they found it. Here’s the thing: I understand that the game likely didn’t expect me to do all the side quests or optional objectives first. I get that they probably anticipated that I as a player would pace myself and find the balance between following the story’s focused direction while also veering off to do optional missions nearby. Given that you never know when these games might close off certain side quests after certain story missions, I always do everything I can before doing the next story mission.

And I understand the common response is, “That’s on you, not the developer.” I understand the counter-argument is that I somehow played the game wrong by doing all the content that was in the game and available for me to do before advancing to the next story mission. However, my retort would simply be: why did they let me do that, though?

If the developers of Mad Max truly did not want me to be overpowered for more than half the game, they could have taken the Far Cry approach and simply block off stretches of the map until I completed a certain story mission. They even do that for a few side quests! Quite frankly: you cannot give me free rein to go anywhere and do everything before I do the first story mission outside the tutorial, then say that I played the game wrong. You designed it so that I can do that! In fact, this game is so backwards that there were multiple story missions in which I had to “upgrade my car,” but I had already maxed out the upgrades. So the game literally made me downgrade my vehicle so that it would be tricked into thinking I was upgrading it. Clearly, they anticipated that you would not have done anything to your car by the story mission, which is truly wild since you can pretty much do everything you want first.

Conversely, that makes it so strange when you go to loot a location and it turns out you can’t access it since that is part of a side quest only obtainable after a certain story quest. Why give players access to everything except these two or three incredibly minor missions?

A lot of developers want to make open world games with dozens of hours of content because that’s the trend right now. And this helps artificially inflate the feeling of value. How can you say you didn’t get your money’s worth if you dumped sixty hours into it? Yet there needs to be some constraints, or else you risk the game becoming imbalanced. No exaggeration: my Max was maxed out for the last fifteen hours of the game. My car had all the upgrades for at least five hours, until the V8 engine was unlocked in a story mission. And that was able to be upgraded fully because I had acquired massive amounts of scrap (since there was nothing for me to spend it on for the last five to ten hours).

This feeling of imbalance or poor structure also seeps into the story. By no means the most compelling of tales, it is pretty much what you expect from the franchise. Max is reluctantly pulled into remembering he is human while trying to regain or save his car. Most people around him he feels connected to wind up dead or suffering. It’s certainly not the draw of the game. On the most part, its serviceable.

Once you finally get to Gastown – the imposing location constantly seen off in the distance that the game is building to – it just turns into something else entirely. You are required to do a race, even though you could feasibly spend the entire game never doing one (since they’re all optional, except this one late in the story). There’s then a big, multi-stage boss fight with tons of enemies. You take out one of the main bosses, then face Scrotus himself. Everything about this feels like the end. The sudden ramping up of scale; the feeling of finality; the fact that you just did all this stuff working with these strongholds to get to this moment. And then, the secondary boss comes back because it was a psych out moment. Scrotus beats you up and discards you in a cutscene. And the game keeps going.

What’s even worse is that after this moment, there’s really only a couple of story missions left. Two missions after this psych out situation, where you think you finally defeated Scrotus’s main henchman, you fight him yet again. That’s immediately followed by one of the worst and most tiresome mission types in the game: caravan routes. That then draws you into yet another psych out moment, before getting a clunky final boss.

This happens a lot in movies and in television, but Mad Max features one of the best examples of a video game not knowing where to end it. They had a perfect ending! It should have ended once you get to Gastown and go through that rigamarole! The entire game was building to that moment, and it’s a pretty solid series of fights (after the initial, incredibly infuriating race, which is garbage). But they gotta pad those hours! The end result is a conclusion that doesn’t ultimately feel earned, and actually winds being more of a relief that it’s over than a feeling of satisfaction.

All this kind of makes it sound like Mad Max is a really bad game, when in reality it’s just a pretty standard, C-level action/adventure game. Though elements are pretty bad, and the gameplay can be clunky, and the pacing is poor, it’s by no means the worst thing you could play. However, with so many substantially better open world games out there, this one offers little, even for fans of the franchise. It sounds like an open world Mad Max game should be really cool! That series is as much about cars and whatnot as anything. Of course set it in an open world environment! Unfortunately, the game offers nothing actually fun to do in that sandbox. On top of that, the vast wasteland of desert upon desert is not even that visually engaging. It’s accurate to the fictional world, but that does not innately mean that it is good for a video game.

For that reason, it’s hard to recommend Mad Max to anyone who isn’t interested in game design. And even then, the main reason is to witness all the ways the game misuses popular mechanics. Its entire design philosophy is as clunky as most of the mechanics. Frankly, Borderlands turned out to be a much better Mad Max game. And honestly? Why do anything other than rewatch Fury Road for your Mad Max fixings?

Reductive Rating: Bland.

Available On: Linux, macOS, Windows, XBox One, PS4