1. The marketing materials for this have such a focus on vehicular customization that it had me believing it was going to be Skyrim w/ a bitchen hot rod. Really, it is an action game set in an open world sandbox--which is fine too, I guess.
2. Honestly--and just to get it out of the way--the main reason this game is worth playing is because tearing down a sandy highway after an enemy vehicle, harpooning the driver and ripping his flailing body from the soon to be wreckage of his car just never gets old.
3. Obviously, this is set in the Mad Max universe, which has some qualities which are advantageous for a game world. Specifically, it is populated by a breed of murderous subhumans that can be beaten to death by the titular protagonist w/o regard to troublesome and tedious thoughts of morality and necessity. You will invade the shelter of six dudes and kill them all so that you can steal a small amount of scrap metal and dog food that are the sum total of their material possessions. In the world of Mad Max, you look at the gray vs. gray morality of this situation, shrug you shoulders and shoot these guys' brothers w/ a harpoon when they come after you.
4. As far as doing the actual killing, combat is solid, esp. when you are in your car. Driving has a pretty standard arcade feel to it, along the lines of GTA games or similar. You have a host of weapons you can use while driving and when you go to aim, time slows which enables you to both aim and drive reasonably well at the same time. You can also just quickfire at whatever the game guesses you want to shoot, which is often good enough. These sequences seem so cool that I found myself wishing I could go back and replay them in real time just to see what a hardcore badass I am behind the wheel.
5. Combat on foot is mashing one button to attack and occasionally dodging, parrying or hitting another button for a finisher. The combat looks awesome on screen but I found myself dying because I was trying to rush through the boring fights more than I did because they were actually difficult.
6. Every boss fight in Mad Max is dodging the well telegraphed attack and coming back and beat on them for a minute. Sometimes they throw enemy mobs at you as a distraction.
7. The setup for the story here is Mad Max shows up in a particular section of wasteland, well on his way to reaching some probably imaginary paradise, and he is in search of gasoline. This dude, Scrotus, who has a very bad temper due to being picked on because of his name, runs this little section of wasteland takes issue w/ Max. An altercation ensues leaving Scrotus almost dead and Max w/o his beloved automobile. They become mortal enemies at this point because why not. Max runs into a helpful hunchback named Chumbucket--because people are always named after fishing terms in the endless desert--and together they seek to build Max a new automobile. Along the way, Max runs into the one other person in this vast stretch of desert who is not a degenerate mutant or otherwise horribly decrepit and it just so happens she's an attractive woman who just so happens to have a daughter who just so happens to get kidnapped. *Spoilers* This whole business plays out about how you expect for the most part.
8. The desert setting here is really remarkably good looking. Plains spread endlessly in all directions at the start but you eventually run into plateaus and more mountainous regions which provide a decent diversity of terrain--you know, for a desert. Structures are unfortunately not as diverse. These are all from the same school of architecture used in every post-apocalyptic game world, which is to say they are either half fallen old buildings or randomly thrown together circles of shipping containers, broken down school buses and sheet metal. Either way, the floorplans were made after careful, post-apocalyptic study of Doom 2 WADs and the resulting structures resemble neither functional abodes nor practical defensive works in the least.
9. The various friendly encampments, called strongholds, are inhabited by nameless and long suffering humans who never move anywhere at all. In one, there is a woman vomiting against the wall in a hallway. If you come back at night time, she is still there vomiting in the hallway. After you've helped the stronghold and improved their access to resources, she eventually gets better and thanks you the next time you pass her in the hallway... Just kidding! She will vomit against the wall for all time and nothing you do matters. I presume this is because Mad Max is meant to be allegorical to a real-life existential crisis but maybe the developers, Avalanche Studios, overshot their budget on high-paced harpoon gun action before they got to making realistic NPCs. Who knows for sure.
10. The various characters you run into are all visually alluring and then more or less completely flat. Everyone is either sociopathically self interested or some hot woman who had her daughter kidnapped. It bears pointing out that Max is not in the latter category. The voice acting for these unfortunate folks seems pretty uneven to put it mildly but I really blame the script and the characters themselves over the actors for this.
11. There is a lot to do in Mad Max and the world is pretty expansive. Fast travel isn't enabled until later in the game (and not necessarily at all) and you will spend a good chunk of time just driving from one end of the map to the other, which isn't really a bad thing. Any trip will inevitably be punctuated by a few violent run-ins w/ enemy vehicles and, at least when you are new to an area, diversions to take down enemy defensive structures w/ your handy harpoon gun. This is incredibly fun at first but wears thin as the endless repetitive combat and detours to search for small amounts of resources for upgrades grows tiresome. Most of the sidequesting you do is simply traveling to a particular location, killing everyone and maybe picking up a needed item. It doesn't really add any depth to overall gameplay.
12. The customization much lauded by the marketing materials is the main reason you travel around this endless expanse of samey enemy camps and encounters and it's fairly well done. Many new vehicle components are strictly upgrades from previous versions but there are a good deal of choices that improve one stat while harming another. You can build up a tank that can batter its way through large caravans of enemies or put together an agile car to leave them in the dust. Ultimately, some stats become obviously more important than others and I have a feeling most players w/ similar resources collected will end up w/ similar vehicles. In some places, the game actually forces you to build a particular car and use it, which I feel is basically an admission by the developers that some builds are worthless and you'd never use them if left to your druthers.
13. Despite how my previous twelve points have read, I can honestly whole-heartedly recommend Mad Max to anyone who wants a fun and bombastic game to screw around w/ for a dozen or so hours. I said car combat is awesome and I'm not kidding. Check it out. My advice for the best experience is just resolve to build up a car, whoop some ass and put the game down when that gets boring. Finishing out story mode ultimately proves unsatisfying and is deeply frustrating due to a few racing sections toward that just feel tacked on. This is a 100% completionist's nightmare but a weekend (road) warrior can sure have a good time.
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