Developer: Avalanche Studios
Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Rrp: £24.99 (Steam) and £24.99 (Humblebundle)
Released: 1st September 2015
Available on: Steam and Humblebundle
Played Using: An Xbox 360, Control Pad
The world ended. The how and the why of it doesn’t matter, not any more. Concern yourself with survival, take what you need and do what you must. Have no friends, only allies, and even then keep them distant. Rely on your car and keep her fuelled. Lastly eat and drink what you can when you can, it may be your last chance. That is how to survive in this broken new world.
Mad Max is an third person open world game in which you play the titular Mad Max or Max Rockatansky if you want to be all formal and non-post apocalyptic, and it’s a prequel to the most recent Mad Max film ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’.
The game opens up to an FMV of Max doing one of the things he’s rather good at, fighting. In this case he’s somehow managed to piss off a Warlord who goes by the moniker of (I kid you not) Scabrous Scrotus and Max suffers a severe beat down. You spend the game driving, fighting, shooting, ramming, destroying and building your way through the regions so that Max can try to achieve his goal of traversing the Plains of Silence.
At the start of the game you meet Chumbucket, a crazed mechanic who believes you are a saint of the Angel of Combustion. He’ll start you off on your first mission to create the car you’ll be spending most of the rest of the game in, the Magnus Opus. He’ll also be accompanying you, or more precisely the Magnum Opus, throughout your adventure and will repair it if it takes damage (once you’ve stopped).
The down side to your main car is that it drives like arse, at least at first. When you start, the car is pretty much a piece of crap, but its a good base to work off of. It doesn’t take too long to start modifying it, making it handle better, go faster, take more of a beating etc. Most of these mods aren’t objectively better. Some will increase top speed but lower the handling and so on.
There are actually quite a few cars to use other than the Magnum Opus. You just need to get the driver out of the car first. Once you control the car you can take it to a stronghold and it’ll be added to a library of cars you can drive. Each of these cars handles and reacts differently, they also can’t be modified. They also come with the benefit of giving you a limited disguise as other members of whatever faction the car is from may not attack, not right away anyway.
Cars need to be kept fuelled up, this is as true in the game as it is in real life.
Thankfully unlike real life you’ll find gas cans scattered about the world making keeping the car fuelled pretty easy. The fuel consumption of the Magum Opus isn’t too high so you won’t have to refuel often although it does vary from car to car and certain weapons actually use the fuel to work which can have a huge impact on your fuel level.
One can’t speak of Mad Max without mentioning the car combat especially given that this game is a prequel to the most recent film. Well it’s excellent and I found it very gratifying, especially when you see your opponents car violently explode. You can ram, grind, shoot and impale you enemies. Yes, I said impale… With a harpoon gun. Using a mounted harpoon gun you can spear right into the driver a car and drag them out of the car.
Once its upgraded you can pull tires, fuels tanks and doors off too.
You can access the garage from the pause menu at any time. Once in that screen the Magnum Opus can be upgraded by spending scrap which is the currency of the game. Scrap can be found scattered around the wastes, but it also is created by say, oh I don’t know, smashing up your enemies cars and structures.
As you install mods to the car, it will start to handle differently. You can also customise it for specific needs. Perhaps you need more armour but a lower top speed or less armour but more ramming damage. All of that is do-able because, as I mentioned before, the mods generally aren’t straight up upgrades, some are better suited for certain tasks or playstyles.
The Magnum Opus isn’t the only thing that can be upgraded using scrap, Max can too. As his Legend rank increases more upgrades & skills become available for purchase. These upgrades are purchased using scrap and generally improve Max’s combat abilities and survivability.
The game issues optional challenges for the player to complete. Every challenge that’s completed earns the player a Griffa token. When taken to Griffa (the character) these tokens allow you to improve Max in a few ways like increasing his maximum health, lowering fuel consumption and increasing his Legend level, which as mentioned above unlocks upgrades for Max.
Car combat isn’t the only
form of course, there are plenty of fist fights going on in the world
of Mad Max. Melee combat uses an Arkham style system, its not quite
as refined as that of the Batman games but it definitely holds its
own. While in ground combat Max will build up Fury, once enough Fury
has accumulated Max’s attack become more powerful. Each successfully
landed hit by Max or against him helps add to his Fury, you have to
be quick though as it only lasts for a limited time.
Some of the attacks that Max has, especially once they are unlocked, are contextual depending on the environment or state of your enemy. If you you manage to daze an enemy near a wall you can kill him off by smacking his head off the wall for example. What’s quite amusing is when Max fights in Fury mode some of his finishing moves are ripped straight from a wrestling match. It never gets old watching him suplex a war boy.
The game world is separated into five regions with each region having its own hub. These regions are also separated into smaller zones. In order to progress and unlock new mods for your car and upgrades for yourself you need to lower the threat level in each region. This is done by destroying scarecrows, killing snipers, destroying convoys and capturing camps.
Eventually you ally yourself with a group and start being given optional missions to help out. Some of these missions are called ‘projects’ and each one that’s completed yields a real benefit such as having your car automatically refuelled when you visit that stronghold. Most of them are timed though and will only refuel the car once every half hour.
Those same allies also repopulate any camp capture and will automatically bring a little scrap to you on a regular basis.
Most open world games have their towers. Assassins Creed has tall buildings, Far Cry has radio towers and Mad Max has balloons. When up in the balloon, the world isn’t simply revealed to you. Instead you have to look around with your binoculars and find the locations around you which will then be added to the map.
Since I’ve now gotten on to the subject of the open world here is as good a place as any to bring up my own bugbear with Mad Max’s open world, or rather open world games as a whole. This game suffers from two of the problems every open world game I’ve ever played has. The first is that after a while (your mileage may vary here) it becomes repetitive. Liberate this, destroy that, gather X etc. The second is that the story is very simplistic. Although I suspect that that is a necessary evil of open world games. Make the plot too intrusive and you remove the sense of freedom. But at the same time the plot for these always has to sound urgent because if its anything less than that you’d be left wondering why its part of the plot at all.
Ok, rant over.
As you may have already guessed the world of Mad Max isn’t an easy one to live in. There’s Scrotus’s war boy hordes, his snipers, nightly attacks by the Buzzard faction, the Roadkill faction generally being a pain in the butt and minefields. But that isn’t all oh no, the world itself has its own very nasty surprises and one of those is the storms.
They don’t appear often but when they do it’s out of no where, with little warning and even less time to actually react. These storms are violent, cause a lot of damage to you if you get hit by lightning or flying debris, lower visibility greatly and the winds can even lower the speed of your car substantially. When a storm comes you can escape it by running to a friendly camp or if you feel brave you could try to weather it out which can come with a nice reward in the form of lots of high value scrap.
Mad Max also comes with a few nice little extra’s that I have to say I really like such as the bio page within the pause menu. This page gives background detail on the world for those that seek it and every major character has a voiced flavour text.
It has with its own ‘Capture Mode’ too, allowing you to take screenshots and video, as well as apply filters without extra software. A pretty nice feature even though I never really used it myself.
I think its obvious that I like this game. Sure it has its faults, no game is perfect, but this one does the open world thing better than most that share its genre. If you want a slice of post apocalypse but don’t feel like playing a Fallout game again then I can heartily recommend to you.
If this appeals to you perhaps try;
Tomb Raider
Middle Earth: Shadows of
Mordor
Rage
