Mad Max — Borrowed Mechanics & Missed Opportunities
[This review has some light spoilers throughout with one section at the dedicated to the game’s plot, avoid that if you don’t want spoilers. This review presupposes that you are familiar with the Mad Max series and are nominally familiar with the game. If you’re unfamiliar with the game here is a more general review — Wot I Think: Mad Max (RPS)]
Mad Max is a fun game. I recommend it. You get to drive around the Great White smashing stuff, hitting people, and gunning your engine. The game looks great while it does it. Tearing through the desert as (Mad) Max in your customized Magnum Opus feels great, as well it should.
But for all that, Mad Max is not a very good game. The developers set their sights very low, borrowing mechanics, ticking off boxes, and in doing that forgetting to add a soul to the game. Many of the systems that made it into the game feel half baked. Countless times the game teased me with a neat concept only to never go back to it.
All By My Self
The developers made the smart decision to include a sidekick. Mad Max would have been a big, lonely world by your lonesome. Like in last year’s excellent Shadow of Mordor the developers found a way to stick in a sidekick. Chumbucket rides in the back of your car shooting your harpoon gun, repairing the Magnum Opus, and offering constant praise to that mighty goddess, combustion.
I like Chumbucket! I do, I think he grates on some people or grows stale but I think the game would be much weaker without him. Now he’s a very shallow, one-dimensional character but he makes one great decision late game that sets up some of the most important parts of the plot. More on this below.
However I’d have liked more. Chum is great but you are with him for 15–50 hours which can start to grate. At one point and only one point the game experiments with giving you a new companion. This is cool! You have a big RaceFight (totally a thing in the dystopian future) coming up so you need a fighter more then a mechanic. So you go recruit this cool fumehead (crack is hard to find after the apocalypse) Tenderloin and get to it. But that’s it. One RaceFight then back to Chum.
Here I need to introduce Hope. She’s the game’s female lead. I’ll talk about her more below but overall I think she works pretty well, at least better than I first expected. Which is not to say she always works. Oh god no. At one point she asks you to rescue her daughter. After some stoic stonewalling Max breaks down and agrees to help. At which point I sort of expected her to say “let’s go!” But no. She’s just going to stay where she is while you go out and look for her only child.
Show some fucking agency Hope! Just because you wear a bodice made of zippers doesn’t mean you have to sit in strongholds doing nothing.
Punching People When You Don’t Know What Else to Do
The game’s on-foot combat is okay. It’s ripped from the Arkham games so it has a solid baseline. However there are two problems with appropriating that game’s fight mechanics. First, I think we’re all starting to get tired of them. They were great in Arkham Asylum! But they’ve lost that freshness, it now just feels like another brawler where you press Y to counter.
The other, larger problem is that the combat system is not done very well. You just need to look at Arkham City or Shadow of Mordor to see far superior implementations. Mad Max in comparison feels leaden, limited, and boring.
Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the boss battles. Outside of the final battle of the story each boss battle is just a big guy swinging his hammer at you. You dodge away then come in to hit him, then dodge again.
Attempts to make things more interesting with the shotgun and shivs end up being held back by the game’s stingy ammo system. There is also a moderately large upgrade system but much of it feels hollow, a bunch of variations to pre-canned combos, an extra 10% damage, none of it is particularly exciting.
The biggest slap in the player’s face is the boss battles. You fight “top dogs” which are all the same model, with the same tactics, and painfully repetitive. Shadow of Mordor managed to make much more interesting bosses and they were proceduraly generated! The fact that Mad Max can’t make have a dozen interesting boss fights when another open world game from the same publisher offers a limitless number leaves me livid.
Let’s Get Wrecked
The game handles driving well, as well it needs to. Whipping around the wasteland is fun. The Magnum Opus doesn’t drive smoothly across the wasteland. That makes sense! It is sand and rocks, not Daytona. Going over a bump at high speed might send you off course, slow down or take the risk, it’s up to the player. The boost is also fun and charges up pretty quickly. Not everyone likes the game’s driving. And I can understand complaints, the it’s not “tight”, your car is all over the place. As you get upgrades you can see this is intentional, at the end of the game your car is both much faster and handles much better.
The vehicle upgrade system has everything the hand-to-hand upgrades lack. You can change everything about your car, the upgrades feel substantial, and most importantly, a feeling of choice. One of my favorite parts of the entire game is the fact that a number of the upgrades increase the weight of your car. The highest level armor will greatly impact your car’s handing and speed. And this is the type of choice we get so rarely in games.
Now, like most of the game, there are some problems with driving. My core complaint is the combat. Car-based combat feels a lot fresher than the game’s derivative foot-based combat. But it doesn’t work as well. Ramming works okay at first but becomes less effective as enemy vehicles become better armored. Eventually your upgrades unlock a powerful ‘Thunderpoon’ changing car combat from difficult to trivial.
While the foot-based boss battles are limited and repetitive they don’t have them with car-based combat. There are convoy battles, these are the best car combat in the game. However I can’t help feel let down that the “boss” of these battles is an unarmed car.
Why This Game Isn’t Particularly Good
It’s very easy to be let down by this game because of Fury Road. Fury Road came out several months before Mad Max. These were the first major Mad Max projects in three decades. It’s impossible to not compare the two.
And Mad Max doesn’t hold up. Fury Road is one of the best action movies ever made, a masterclass in editing and pacing, one long car chase that gives just enough time for the audience to catch their breath. Mad Max on the other hand is a big, open, uneven game. The game’s content is in large part open-world busywork. The story is uneven and far from compelling.
But that isn’t even the the game’s core problem. The game’s problem is the core mechanics. The game I keep coming back to is Shadow of Mordor. Shadow of Mordor is a Lord of the Rings game that makes little sense in the canon, has no connection to the story, and is set in a very grimdark world. But it was one of the most fun games of 2014! Why? The mechanics. Shadow of Mordor offers great mechanics both at the micro and the macro level. It’s one of the most fun Arkham-style fighting games, the combat isn’t too difficult but it feels great. The nemesis system benefits players while following the story and allows people to put dozens and dozens of hours into the game. Mad Max has nothing like that.
The game would have greatly benefited from larger and more elaborate motorized battles. A couple set-pieces while driving or even punching your away across some rigs would have been great. And that’s a bizarre failing. All the vehicles are cars. I like the Magnum Opus, I really do! But why aren’t there trucks and bikes? I want rigs!
I feel that all of this is not entirely the fault of the developer. In large part I think this is a game brought low by expectations. Released two years ago I’d have loved this game without reservation. This game was made by the Just Cause 2 team. Just Cause 2 was released in 2010 and at the time it was one of the most fun open world games made. It was a tropical playground and I and many others loved it. Mad Max on the other hand is coming out when we’re fatigued by open world games, not excited for them. Compared to games like The Witcher 3 or Metal Gear Solid 5 it can’t help but disappoint.
There are many mechanics which seem half-baked. Some car upgrades like paint, hood ornaments, and bodies need to be found. These are all really neat to collect. They make the rote +20% top speed upgrades paid for in scrap seem lame by comparison. The game also hints at Metroidvania-style unlocks. When you first start you discovered something locked and you need a crowbar. I open my character screen and see that I can unlock the crowbar right now and it’s very cheap. And that’s it. This was maybe 30 minutes into the game, why not start with a crowbar?
And all that is a little unfair to the game. I put in 35 hours and loved about 25 of them. That is pretty good for a game.
The Story (Spoilers)
So Mad Max has two stories. As the game starts out you’re put on the quest for a big engine. Why do you need a big engine? What a stupid question to ask, of course you need a big engine. In your quest for that big engine you run into the second plot, Hope and Faith.
As I alluded to before Hope seems like she’ll be an absolutely terrible character. I mean, look at her.
But I think she actually does a half decent job of being that damsel in distress. She’s a captive for much of the game and my only real objections to her come with her still doing nothing after you free her. You’re sent to rescue her daughter, Glory, while she waits and pines.
However once you’ve rescued Hope and Glory things get more interesting. Hope wants you to stay with them as her husband and a father for Glory. The player knows this won’t happen and that actually helps build some genuine tension. This ties the game into Max lore pretty well with Max at once wanting a family back and being unwilling to join a new family.
Meanwhile Chumbucket makes one of my favorite decisions a video game NPC has ever made. He runs off with your car. He knows what Hope wants and not knowing how stupid (tortured) Max is assumes that Max will take Hope up on her offer and settle down. Chumbucket feels betrayed and wants the Magnum Opus to roar free and unencumbered across the wasteland. I mean come on, it’s not a minivan. This decision by Chum shows a level of self-interest and awareness of the narrative all too rarely seen in game writing.
Max races across the desert to find his car and of course finds that the Big Bad has tracked Chum down and tortured him. This of course revealed where Max was while the torture was going on. Max then races back the way he came. Like Chum’s decision, this is a great moment of the kind rarely seen in gaming. We were a step being the Big Bad and when we get back to the camp we find that Hope and Faith have been brutally murdered.
I wasn’t expecting that. For being a Mad Max game it wasn’t very grim and the story line none too dark. But there, right before the end of the story your would-be lover and potential daughter are killed while you were racing after a car. It’s great. The set-piece for the final battle is great. First you get this shot.
I know I said there are not any rigs in the game. I lied. Scrotus (the Big Bad) has one. And it’s awesome! This fight feels like something out of Fury Road. If the game had three or four of these vehicle set pieces instead of one it’d have been much richer for it. The final on-foot battle is something of a let down but I was still riding the high from attacking a war rig.
The end of the story has one really odd moment. Scrotus is killed, Chumbucket killed, Hope and Glory dead, the Magnum Opus destroyed, and Max is alone again. He’s set to drive off into the sunset as he is wont to do. And then a message pops up “Congratulations, you beat the game, everyone is alive again, feel free to keep exploring the wasteland.”
It’s fucking weird. On one hand I’m happy to see an open world game kill off its cast. I’m also happy that devs have learned from Fallout 3, we want to keep exploring. On the other hand… what am I to think? Everything that just happened was meaningless? It was all a dream? I don’t know what the answer is here. Resetting the game world to “not hopelessly fucked” wasn’t a good answer but it beats ending the game. I’m not sure what they should have done here and I’ll be interested to see how other developers deal with this kind of thing.
Lastly, I’d highly recommend watching this video which has a different take and goes a little more in-depth. Noah Caldwell-Gervais hasn’t played Shadow of Mordor or the Arkham games which gives him a really different point of view on the game’s mechanics.
Thanks to anyone who stuck it out this long, this is my first game review so I hope people enjoyed it and welcome any feedback. Despite all my complaints I liked the game. There is a lot I didn’t cover, it’s a big game with a lot to see.
Thanks for reading and good luck on the dunes.
