Computer Game Summary XXXI (Mad Max)


Let's look at this from two angles. 1. It's a video game tie-in to a movie. That Bring Mad Max Fury Road.
And it's a fairly decent property in that case.
The game is relatively fun, the mechanics are enjoyable and it's functional. That puts it in the higher echelons of property games.

2. If we look at the game from an individual point of view. It's okay.
Once again it's still functional but it's lacking a coherence story and overall disconnection with a continuing plot makes the game feel a bit empty.
Which I could hear some people say is the point.
After all you're in the middle of the Australian Outback and everything has been turned into a horrible desert.
But I think about games like 'Fallout' or 'Stalker' they to possess a bleak and horrid Outlook. Being composed of draft colours and disgusting visuals. In the case of Fallout it looks a hell of a lot worse than Mad Max. But the world's were more fleshed-out and they felt like they had more to do. Mad Max the video game much like so many other games that have come out in the last 10 years falls into that monotonous sandbox trap.
You spend your time completing the same types of objectives. Destroy the Fortress, collect the scrapped, eliminate enemies possessions and so on. And it just doesn't provide anything that unique that you couldn't find an another game.

Now despite my lackluster appraisal of the game I don't think it's bad. If you're just looking for an excuse to be Mad Max and drive around the desert; smashing into other cars and attacking forts pretending as if you're in the Road Warrior trying to get into Gastown an the game will provide you with that.
I just feel as if you have to make up a bit of your own fun. If you're not a fan of the Mad Max films that I don't think you're going to get that much out of this. My favourite thing in this whole game was running from point-to-point looking for historical relics. I've been watching Max's response to them usually something incredibly Bleak and depressing.
Oh, and attacking the convoys.
That's easily the funnest thing in the whole game. Taking your one car, driving it a hundred kilometres an hour and chasing down a monster truck containing some mystical artifact to put on your vehicle. All while fighting a bunch of other vehicles as your trying to destroy that one car.
it's the one part of the game that truly feels like it belongs in the Mad Max world. It's got the excitement of the movies The Thrill of the Chase and it can be relatively difficult to achieve if you don't know what you're doing.

What bothers me most about this game; Is that if it was given just a little bit more work, it could have been a fantastic property.
A really exciting and intriguing take on the Mad Max formula. After all it works so well for a video game.
One man fighting against the world possessed with nothing more than a single car and a will and determination to survive*. And there's so many secondary things in this game that help to give it that little bit of intrigue that makes you just want to keep on playing. Like your little sidekick humpback man who repairs your car or the strange Spanky car people who drive out in the dead of night to try and kill you.
(They're spiky cars remind me of the vehicle from the Cars Who Ate Paris. I guarantee the vehicles in this game are based off of that one car.)
There's also this one wackjob you meet later on in the game who runs the Temple dedicated to the Eternal Flame powered by oil. I was determined to help that guy build his Temple back up to the greatest it could be. And really that's the best thing about the game. There's little tiny details all around that help the flesh out this kind of simplistic world.

And I think it all could have culminated in a truly Majestic game if only the people making it but given the opportunity to go a little off the rail. It's kind of weird to think the video game based off of a film franchise that's known for going in different directions every time, is made too play It so safe and basic.

Max doesn't make any sense in his own universe. He's shown to be in his mid-30s at earliest or his mid-forties at latest. And he speaks of the world as it was before the age of the deserts and the psychos who drive around and overly spiky cars.
But he's the only one that seems to know it. Everyone else in this world lives as if their entire existence has always been the desert and the the Chaos.
Even the people who are clearly older than Max. Does no one else remember the before times?
Because Max seems to know them quite well and if this game is supposedly linked with the first movie that everybody else should know it too. After all civilisation by the timestamp of that film only collapsed five to 10 years ago.

Oh God I'm trying to question the continuity of Mad Max films.
That's the stupidest thing you can ever do.
None of these movies were ever designed with the other ones in mind. Maybe there's a reference to one or characters that come back. But everytime you see the Road Warrior pop back up on screen, he's meant to be entering the same world but through a different lens. Never get stuck on the timeline of Mad Max. Or any movie for that matter.
It's Entertainment after all, not history or geography.

If you play a lot of video games especially stuff like Far Cry, Assassin's Creed, Sleeping Dogs** or any number of open World sandbox games that I wouldn't bother with this one. You'll just have a mediocre experience.
However if you don't play video games all that often, you avoid sandbox games or you're just a big Mad Max fan then it's worth of pick up. At this point is relatively cheap and it shouldn't be that big a deal to find.

Oh and finally this game gets one big negative points for having in-game tie-ins with real life merchandise. There's some stupid soda energy drink company that decided they wanted to stick their crap into this game. So when your customising your little car you can put on these hood ornaments that have pictures of the actual bottles of soda on them.
Every time I saw a reference to it in the game, it would take me out of the experience and then my eyes would roll into the back of my head out of sheer frustration.
Something something late-stage capitalism B.S. Screw in game tie-ins especially when you're a triple A game that doesn't need the extra Finance.

*I say survive but maybe it's just a stubbornness not to die. As every Mad Max movie (after the first one) is just the story of this one man's tragic background as his family has been lost him over time and now he wanders from one place to the other, kind of a shadow of humanity who fails to die in this desolate hellhole.

** I always like to imagine that Sleeping Dogs was predecessor to Mad Max. That's the film Sleeping Dogs not the video game.

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