REVIEW: Mad Max

Full disclosure, I have never driven any sort of automobile through a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Nor have I eaten maggots from a corpse, introduced a chainsaw to a person’s skull, or ridden a hot air balloon to scout out snipers, metal scarecrows, or other deadly contraptions.

So, I am unable to compare the above events with real life. I, however, do believe I can cover how to not do some of them in Mad Max.

Also, the Mad Max game has nothing to do with the Tom Hardy film, Fury Road. So, those wanting a tie-in, it isn’t this. Let’s begin, shall we?

I had semi-high hopes going into Mad Max, mainly due to the pedigree behind the game. Avalanche Studios, the minds behind ever-popular game, Just Cause 2, know how to make an open world game. They know how to do vehicle combat, gunplay, explosions, and they have the backing of Warner Bros. who provided Avalanche with the impressive Arkham engine to work off of. The melee combat is sublime in both Arkham Knight and Shadow of Mordor, not to mention the framework for a more grounded style of vehicle combat with the Batmobile.

Now, whilst Mad Max doesn’t live up to the DNA that it’s born from, it does gel well together a lot of pieces in the puzzle that is Mad Max.

Vehicle usage is a must. You’ll struggle to achieve most things in Mad Max without your trusty Magnum Opus, or any other vehicle you decide to hijack and store in your garage. As I said, I’ve never driven across a post-apocalyptic wasteland before–though I am sure if I did, the car wouldn’t handle as awkwardly as it does in Mad Max. The brakes barely works. Even with upgraded tires and suspension, you’re bouncing around like the car was tuned to the beat of a Beyoncé track. That tiny pebble in the road? The Opus will go flippy-flappy in any direction but forward.

Vehicle combat is better than the general navigation, and has several nice mechanics associated with it. You can use your car as a pure mobile weapon of crash destruction, level up the ram, armour, and wheel trim spikes for maximum sparks. You could instead, level up the weapons–namely a harpoon, which can rip off doors, wheels, and enemies–seriously, sending gang members flying over your head at high-speed, then watching them hit a pebble.

It can actually get rather intense when you’re chasing down a convoy, with the aim to rip the mantle from the hood of the lead car, to then place it on the Opus, which in-turn provides a buff. Sadly, the game likes to instantly repair and respawn said convoy when you either get too far behind, or have to stop so Chumbucket (your mechanic) can repair the Opus. That is very frustrating, as you’ve taken down 5 cars, gotten the lead car down to a scrap of health, then you hit a pebble and you have to repair. A. Pebble.

How about the close range combat? Fists, shotguns, flaming oil cans, and melee weapons. Again, with the DNA of Just Cause, Arkham, and Mordor around, you’d expect a great experience. Sorry to say, you’d be wrong.

The melee combat is three steps behind Arkham Asylum, yes, Asylum. The motions are sluggish, and you can’t counter more than one enemy at a time, nor can you counter mid animation. This has provided many a health loss, even death, for me. I know I am not a billionaire tech wizard, nor a reborn Ranger of Gondor, but I am a hardened fighter of the wasteland. Is it too much to ask to have agile added to my list of transferable skills? According to Avalanche, it is.

There are some great (uninterruptible) animations, though. Delivering a German Suplex to an enemy, well, it’d make Brock Lesnar proud. The execution style finishers are varied, from shiv attacks to straight up twisting necks. Placing a shotgun to the gut of an enemy, well, it’s as brutal as you would expect. Effective, but brutal.

How about the world of Mad Max? Well it’s beautiful, the sand dunes roll on for miles, the smoke stacks of Gas Town are like a warning beacon in the distance. Stay away. You really do feel that this was once a world that was lived in, gas stations, power plants, apartment blocks, and pebbles scatter the wasteland. Most can be explored, with a lot of the larger complexes being make-shift bases for gangs. You can capture these, making them your own. The benefit is that you’ll receive a steady stream of scrap, the in-game currency, from each. What is sparse is the enemy numbers–sometimes you can go several miles, dozens of buildings, with no encounter of enemies. Yes, it’s a wasteland, but there is no consistency. A common theme.

The mission structure of Mad Max is pretty simple: Go here, kill this, and shoot a flare. Drive there, kill this, and shoot a flare. There are a few diamonds in the rough, though. There are wasteland missions, the sub-plot missions, which send you to discover an old church. You do shoot some flares, you do some driving, it’s true. However, once you get inside the church, the game takes a more survival horror approach. There are bumps in the dark, bloodstains in cages, and a harrowing story of the inhabitants. It was a highlight.

Another diamond was a main-story mission, where you head to an airport. It’s a place of horror to those of the wasteland, and you’re sent in to get some lightbulbs. I am not kidding you. Again, there are bumps in the dark, this time however they have red eyes, and can dig through the sand. You don’t actually encounter the enemies until you have completed your objective. By the time you do, your palms will be sweaty. The atmosphere on this mission was absolutely top-notch, and the following encounters with the enemies within…well, I’d like some more of that.

The world of Mad Max is populated with a large cast of unique and crazy characters. You have your hunchback mechanic, Chumbucket. He acts as the guiding light for Max, both in story and gameplay. He’ll point in the direction of an enemy pack, a potential treasure trove, and of course, pebbles. Chumbucket is also your gunner, for the most part. He’ll pull down towers with the harpoon gun and blow up friendly targets by the side of the road (when you didn’t mean to hit quick fire) with the Thunderpoon. He can, with decent speed, repair the Magnum Opus. All around good guy. Also, there is a dog. Dinki-di, he sniffs out landmines. What a champ!

Briefly, I’d like to touch upon Griffa. He is strange wanderer that you meet upon completing challenges. This guy blows dust in your face, then leaves you on all fours. He has a great little story to tell, he is just strange. I mean, he basically drugs you. Say no to Griffa if you encounter him in that dark alley behind your house.

You also meet a wide array of ‘friendly’ characters, which will help you out. Not out of the goodness of the hearts, no, no. You must go shoot some flares for them, naturally. Each of the friendlies has their own hideout, you can use this to rest up, and if you have invested the time in upgrading it for them, you’ll also get auto-filled on weapons, oil, and health. It’s a nice feature, though it sadly is a grind when you do it all for the fourth time. I can’t help but feel I’d have been better just investing in one hideout to the max, than spreading my time so thin across them all. Hey ho.

The tone of Mad Max is what I wanted, it’s dark, brutal, and brings some edgy content in a faux-reality setting. There are no Orcs here, so when you see someone beheaded–which happens–you see a person. It adds a little more weight to the experience. The attention to detail on decay of the wasteland, from vehicle’s to the sand filled church, shows that the art department of Avalanche had eaten their Weetabix. It’s immersive and stands out from other open world games, in a good way.

What isn’t in a good way, however, is the performance of the package. UI elements randomly disappear, some of them crucial parts–like the health of your car. Others, not so much, the combo counter. You couple this with the out of sync dialogue, which happened rarely–yet it still takes your out of the experience, the archaic combat design, and the, oh my goodness, awful frame rate performance. You get an experience that is best left not played on Xbox One, at least in the current state.

Now, there was a patch that came out late during my review process. This improved the FPS in the open world, but it still tanks during camp and hideout encounters, it’s most bizarre. The game runs at 1080p, yet I’d have taken a resolution dip to keep a steady 30 FPS.

Overall, Mad Max just feels like a B-team product of an A-team studio. It had amazing DNA to play with, but ultimately just left most of it in the dish. Mad Max is Danny Devito, when they could have made Arnold Schwarzenegger.