Movie tie-in games are some of the most derided games ever to grace our presence and with good reason. Often they’re given a woefully insufficient amount of time to come up with a playable product and quality is the first thing that hits the chopping block, leaving them bug ridden messes of half finished dreck. The last few years have seen a few titles rise above the filth however and whilst none of them have been game of the year material they have been pleasurable surprises. Mad Max is one such gem, taking the essence of the movie and distilling it down into a very playable experience.
The world lies barren, scorched by an intense nuclear war. Those that survived the collapse struggle to survive, scavenging what they could from the remnants of society that lie scattered about. This world now belongs to the ruthless and violent with gangs and war bands patrolling the sandy dunes looking for people and places to pillage. You are Max, a survivor who has lost everything since the collapse and wants nothing to do with this world any more. So he has resigned himself to cross the Plains of Silence in his Black on Black, an Interceptor capable of making the long journey. However his plans are foiled by Scabrous Scrotus, son of the warlord Immortan Joe who steals everything from him. You are not so easily beaten however and you turn your eyes to recovering your Black on Black and making Scrotus pay for what he did.
The wasteland setting for Mad Max is quite beautiful with the plains stretching out to the horizon in every direction. It’s the definition of an open world game with nearly every bit of scenery that you can see being accessible and part of the game. There’s definitely been a lot of effort put into crafting certain aspects of the scenery, like the dust you kick up when going offroad and the slight changes in the howls that each engine emits. It’s also got enough visual variety that you don’t feel like you’re driving through the same place all the time as each area has its own distinct theme. Thankfully this all comes to you fully optimized, something which games with lots of open space like this often get wrong.
On first blush Mad Max is your typical open worlder, with all the standard trimmings of campaign missions, side missions and a lack of direction of which one you should do when. If I was to compare it to recent open world titles it’d be somewhere in the middle between Far Cry 4 and Batman: Arkham Knight. You’ve got your typical progression in the form of skills and equipment, both for your vehicle (the Magnum Opus) and Max himself, some of which are locked behind story missions whilst others through open world objectives. There’s camps for you to capture, places for you to explore and hordes of enemies bounding around for you to take out or avoid. Combat comes in two flavours: the stylized beat ’em up hand to hand combat while on foot as Max as well as some in-car combat which is a little more rudimentary. Suffice to say I was surprised at just how much was crammed into this game given its origins as a movie tie-in.
If you’re a fan of the Arkham series of combat then Mad Max is right up your alley with the controls and style being instantly familiar. There’s not as much variety in moves and finishers however it’s still quite a challenge to rack up long combo streaks without getting interrupted. There’s a few rough edges on the combat though which really start to show in the later stages of the game. Essentially you can get yourself into a situation where there’s no way for you to block or counter an incoming move, ruining your chain (and potentially losing you an upgrade point). Usually this happens when you’re doing a finisher which triggers a mini-cutscene which, when interrupted, feels unfair. There’s also a heavy reliance on consumables which aren’t readily available or farmable in the world for a lot of the big finisher moves so they often go unused. Overall it’s a good emulation of Rocksteady’s combat style, just in need of a little more tuning.
The car combat is pretty simplistic by comparison, usually involving you ramming the other car into submission. As you progress through the story missions there are weapon upgrades that allow you to more effectively dispatch your enemies, like a harpoon that can rip wheels off, but the heavy investment requirement means you’ll have to forgo quite a few other upgrades to get them. Additionally for the most part you don’t really need all the bells and whistles, just having the fastest car (both in terms of top speed and acceleration) is all that’s needed for most encounters. The final boss battle is the only exception to this as you’ll struggle to finish it in a timely manner if you don’t have at least a Level 4 harpoon and another similarly upgraded weapon. It’d probably be made a lot better if the driving controls were a little more refined as the slightly janky steering, even on cars with the top handling, makes things more difficult than they should be.
As you’d expect from an open world game there’s numerous activities for you to do most of which will provide you some form of benefit. Clearing out camps for instance will net you a periodic amount of scrap, the currency that underpins the economy of Mad Max. Doing “projects” in strongholds will unlock certain benefits like giving you a full water canteen or opening up new types of missions for you to complete. Winning races will unlock a permanent location where you can fuel up your car whenever you want. For people who like to meander through games, picking and choosing whichever mission takes their fancy, this kind of thing is probably what they’re after. For me though these little side distractions just didn’t feel rewarding enough for me to bother with them for long. In the end I’d only go on scrap hunting missions if I needed it to unlock the next campaign mission which I only had to do a couple times.
It’s not a perfect experience by any stretch of the imagination as the above screenshot will attest to. You see there’s no jumping in Mad Max but there are multiple heights and in some instances you’ll find yourself trapped in a place you can’t get out of. Some of them aren’t even as obvious as the one pictured above. In one particular mission I managed to roll over some pipes which I couldn’t roll back out of. It’s clear what’s missing here, the movement system isn’t coded to deal with situations where the difference in terrain height is above a certain threshold. Whilst not every game needs to have the parkour stylings of Assassin’s Creed a more robust move system would be key in alleviating the unfortunately frequent problems that arise from the current simplistic implementation.
The story, if it were standing on its own, is fairly rudimentary although since it serves as a kind of prequel to the world of the movie it’s a little more interesting. Strictly speaking it’s a separate story in terms of canon and indeed Max’s character is quite different to the one portrayed in the cinema. However it does give you a little bit more insight into the reasons why Max ends up the way he is in the movie. Still it’s not much more than your typical action script, albeit it bereft of some of the more common components in favour of more talk of cars as a religion and all the craziness that the movie demonstrated.
Mad Max is an example of what tie-in games can achieve if they have more than a token effort put into them. The barren wasteland world is beautifully realised with the landscapes reaching out from horizon to horizon. The core game mechanics are mostly well realised, often getting close to their more mature brethren from which they draw inspiration. For fans of the open world genre there’s more than enough activities to keep you going for numerous hours on end. For people like me though who aren’t so interested in the distractions the game is still readily playable if you do pretty much campaign missions only, you’ll just have to use your skill rather than your scrap to win fights. Suffice to say I was surprised by just how playable Mad Max was, especially given its tie in origins. If you’re one of the many raving fans of Fury Road then Mad Max is probably worth a look in.
Rating: 8.0/10
Mad Max is available on PC, XboxOne and PlayStation4 right now for $59.99, $99.95 and $99.95 respectively. Game was played on the PC with approximately 13 hours of total playtime and 29% of the achievements unlocked.
