Too Long; Didn't Play: Mad Max

Drive Time: 90 Minutes

Sponsored By: my understanding wife.

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Mad Max starts out by setting the bar high. In the opening cutscene Max is carjacked, beaten and left for dead as his car is loaded into a giant transport truck. Max gets up, catches the transport truck on foot, climbs up it and proceeds to put a chainsaw through the face of the game’s primary villain, who then throws you off the truck and leaves you for dead again.

I can only assume that having your head cleaved in twain with a rusty chainsaw affects your short-term memory, otherwise he’d have remembered how well that leaving-for-dead tactic went ten minutes ago.

With his car gone, Max stumbles on the comic relief, who offers to build him a new car if Max will bring him the parts. What follows is a whole lot of driving through barren wastelands looking for fuel, water and car parts.

You’d think they would have tried to make the driving controls enjoyable. As it stands ninety minutes in, the driving controls can only be described as "squirrely." Perhaps this is one of those games where you have to upgrade yourself to a steering wheel that won’t send you veering off a cliff when you nudge it.

The car-combat mechanics are certainly interesting. You have a shotgun for taking out boarders and shooting out gas-tanks. After the first story missions you’ll also get a harpoon gun operated by the comic relief, which is useful for spearing snipers that are too high to simply drive over. There’s an upgrade path for the harpoon that will allow you to pull parts off enemy cars while you’re driving, but I haven’t gotten there yet.

Indeed, everything is upgradeable. As in all of the Batman games or Shadow of Mordor (or as I like to call it: Arkham: New Zealand), every bit of your gear has an upgrade path that you spend in-game collectibles on. In Mad Max, the in-game collectible is scrap metal and I have to say, Max has some impressively deep pockets. At one point he put two magnesium rims and a muffler into his back pocket before walking to another location where he also pocketed an entire fuel tank. As a fan of cargo pants, I am duly impressed.

Sometimes your car breaks down or runs out of fuel. Australia does, in fact, have a branch of AAA, but cell phone reception is terrible out in the wastelands, so you’re on your own. Fortunately the comic relief sits in the back seat and will automatically repair the car when you stop it – no extra parts required.

For gas, you have to leave the car and loot enemy base camps. This is done by wandering into an enemy base while pretending the game supports stealth, and then attacking a group of enemies with the Batman combat that we all know and love. The only problem is that parrying seems less effective than in Batman or Shadow of Mordor. There were times when I clearly hit the counter button in the specified window and still found myself taking the hit anyway. I’m not sure if that’s a bug or if the window actually closes before I think it does.

Speaking of bugs, I am surprised and delighted to say that I haven’t found any. It looks like WB used all of them up when they released the PC port of Arkham Knight and didn’t have any left to put into Mad Max. The only thing I noticed was that I had to turn a bunch of settings down to make it run acceptably on my PC, which I didn’t have to do with Shadow of Mordor or with Metal Gear Solid 5. That may be an optimization issue, or it may be that they rendered all of the grains of sand in the wasteland unless you turn that setting off. You have to love the settings menu, too. It says things like “Volumetric shadows: Turn this down to slightly improve performance.” While I appreciate the use of language to properly set expectations, this still feels like a weaselly way to explain something that didn’t really need explaining. If you’re just going to hedge, don’t add the descriptor at all.

Mad Max tries to differentiate itself with survival/scarcity mechanics. Your health is replenished by a canteen that you have to find water for. Any given source of water will fill maybe half of your canteen before running dry, which makes me wonder two things: How did the world get this bad less than a generation after the war, and how does anyone survive when any supply of water dries up after one person drinks from it?

The other scarce resource, as I mentioned earlier, is gasoline. However, this isn’t all that scarce. When you find a jerry can and take it, a new one materializes in its place before you can even turn around. It’s not like they even do the set-design work to make it look like there was a stack of gas cans, either. It’s just one gas can, alone in a shed, that respawns infinitely.

This isn’t really a complaint, though. Gasoline can be used as fuel or as explosives. This shows the development team doesn’t understand the difference between explosives and accelerants, but let that go, because fire is fun. Occasionally you’ll find something that need to be blown up and the way to do that is to light an entire can of gasoline on fire and throw it at the target. An impressive fireball destroys whatever needed to be destroyed, and another can of allegedly precious gasoline is gone, at least until you wander back to the spawn point for another can.

Incidentally, one of the things you have to blow up in the first hour is an oil refinery. I’m wondering if this is a metaphor for how short-sighted it is to be driving hulking cars around a desert trying to destroy other hulking cars when you should be heading for the remains of Brisbane to see if there’s any city left to salvage and rebuild. But we already have games that let you build cities from scratch. This game is about how awesome Interstate 76 was, dammit!

Drive On?

Shadow of Mordor was my runaway game-of-the-year for 2014. By rights, Mad Max should be my Game of the Year for 2015, but it feels hollow. There’s no interesting hook like the Nemesis system to make the fights feel weighty. The car controls are a little loose for my tastes, and the idea of managing the shotgun and harpoon (which are both mapped to the same button and must be selected to use) while driving doesn’t sound fun to me, even though I haven’t had to do it a lot after ninety minutes. The on-foot combat is solid, but it’s really just reminding me of better games at this point.

I’ll probably keep playing a bit. I loves me some post-apocalyptic action. However, when Fallout 4 drops I’ll probably shelf this one and try again later. It’s not a bad game, but as a followup to Shadow of Mordor, it’s weak. This is, unfortunately, the problem of annualized franchises. Kudos to Warner Brothers for annualizing a system instead of an individual character, but it still counts as putting roughly the same game out every year, even if there’s no number after the title.

All in all, though, I’ll say that Mad Max is a competent open-world game with some interesting gearhead bait. It feels like one of those slow-burn games that would review better after ten hours than two. Sometimes I worry that the format I’ve chosen for myself will result in good games getting the shaft (I GET IT!), but should a game that costs sixty bucks really take more than an hour and a half to pull you in?

I'm willing to give it the chance. I just want to see what the car looks like with a V8.

Is it the Bloodborne of Licensed Movie Games?

Three out of ten blood vials. The combat is basic Batman combat with a few context-sensitive moves thrown in, but it’s not uniquely challenging. The driving isn’t exactly easy, but promises to get easier as the game progresses.

In short, it's a leisurely drive through a wasteland that you know is brutal mainly because everyone keeps telling you how brutal it is. For game tourists like me, that's just fine.

I'm about to make a very bad joke, but your mileage may vary.

Comments

Having played through the main plot, taking on roughly half of the tick boxes (calling them missions is a little generous), Mad Max is just solidly mediocre. The driving gets better when you get to the third rung of upgrades and it's decently balanced overall, but just doesn't have anything to place it above other open-world games, unless the setting really does it for you. Decent, not distinguished. I picked it up for under $20 from CDKeys so I didn't feel ripped off at all, but it's a hard sell at full price.

This is done by wandering into an enemy base while pretending the game supports stealth, and then attacking a group of enemies with the Batman combat that we all know and love.

I'm so tired of this combat system. I never much liked it because the janky sliding towards enemies is just so game breakingly ugly to me.

That said, I'll be looking at this come the holiday sales to see if I can snag a copy. I enjoy open world games enough that I'm curious if this'll hit the right spot for me.

I did everything there was to do in the game (aside from the driving challenges) and came away with the same impression as almost everyone else. It feels very Assassin's Creed 1. Some very good ideas and a fine start but needs to be fleshed out. The story was a missed opportunity and so were many of the incidental characters. It's very much a podcast game for me.

The upgrade system is completely screwed up. I had Max fully upgraded well before the end of the game. The story bit of this and getting him upgraded was rather underwhelming.

I do think it's one of the prettiest games I've ever played, even on lower settings. There are some truly great bits of story through setting in some of the later and side areas. On the whole, fairly shallow but good fun for those looking for a casual open world game.

This Shadow of Mordor teaser has convinced me: I need to play Shadow or Mordor. Can I make my character look like Max?

For a licensed property, its remarkably good. As an open-world game...solid 7 or 7.5. Not enough depth to keep you completely interested, but certainly better than most licensed games out there.