Mad Max: Fury Road is a film I’ve mentioned on this site numerous times with ecstatic reverence. As someone who thoroughly enjoys that movie, it’s taken me a long time to finally play the game that came out within a year or so of its release in theaters. It’s an eight-year-old game that I played for the first time only a few weeks ago, and I think the time I waited helped improve my overall experience, as there were plenty of reviews that commented on how derivative it felt as a video game of that era. Having given it room to breathe, I could relate to the criticisms while still managing to have fun. However, there are still a few key reasons why I didn’t finish it.

The Short of It

What I’ve Played

20 Hours played
Three HQ locations unlocked

Pros

Car combat is satisfying
Batman-style combat feels good with high-impact
Fair amount of customization options to the vehicle
Look and aesthetic is very akin to Fury Road

Cons

Is there a story?
Map is bloated with busy work
Music is barely noticeable
Fist combat is rather simplistic in comparison to Batman games
Gameplay loop is weak and repetitive

The Rest of It

Story

The game opens with Max losing his car to some minions who work for the warlord Scrotus. A truly horrific name, obviously, but he’s apparently supposed to be a son of Immortan Joe, from Mad Max: Fury Road. So, we can assume that the events of the game take place almost immediately after the film ends. While Max, in his attempts to reclaim his property, manages to “kill” Scrotus in an intense battle, he ends up abandoned on the side of the road with the dog that formerly belonged to the deceased warlord. He comes across a hunchback named Chumbucket who is able to bring Max up to speed on the area and provide a temporary vehicle, with an offer to help him get a new car with a V8 engine and assist as his little hunchback mechanic. Unfortunately for Max, he won’t be able to get a new car without heading into the fortified Bullet Town, which is surrounded by a wasteland that is still mostly controlled by Scrotus loyalists.

As is pretty much the same in the Mad Max films, the plot centers around Max needing the help of some weird, psychotic survivors of the desolate world in order to achieve his goal. However, when it comes down to how the plot progresses and the story missions that push it along, Mad Max loses the thread pretty quickly. In terms of core story missions I completed, I can count them on two hands and none of them were interesting or beyond the level of a tutorial mission. By the time I decided to call it quits, I didn’t feel like the game was introducing enough new mechanics or interesting characters and story missions to make the game feel like it was progressing in a meaningful way. If you compare it to the Batman: Arkham Games—which I will again later—those games introduce new characters and mechanics at a smooth pace that allows you to explore the world but still feel like there are plenty of new story beats on the way that will change your experience. At no point beyond getting introduced to the second ally did I feel like I was going to get anything new or interesting enough to get me to the last act of the story.

The character designs do enough to at least capture your attention. However, none of the characters other than Max and Chumbucket are capable of moving the plot along and keeping things interesting, and Max is not that interesting of a character to begin with. He’s a driven individual with a bit of sympathy hidden under his rage, but he’s still not that compelling. Considering the fact that a primary antagonist is somewhat removed from the game in the opening minutes, I think Mad Max actively undercuts its own story in a way. Compare the game to films, and you’ll see that those movies put a lot of emphasis and focus on the antagonists and side characters right away. The game is lacking in that respect. Even though I think the game does a good job of capturing the look and feel of the universe, and it’s fun to play with some music from the movies playing in the background, the game’s story was not enough to keep me interested. I was really only enjoying it by escaping to the Fury Road in my own mind, not by continuing the story that had been set out within the game.

Gameplay

I recall when the Mad Max game was released, it got a fair amount of flack for being rather unoriginal in its design. It took a lot of inspiration in its hand-to-hand combat from the Batman Arkham games. It also had the same issue as the Assassin's Creed games in which your map would explode with icons of mini-missions to do. While I don’t have too many issues with the combat, I can certainly say the uninspired choices had a profound effect on whether or not I would finish the game.

For those who don’t know about the Batman-style combat, I’m sure there are plenty of other reviews that go into greater detail you can look up, but I’ll try to summarize quickly. Essentially, when you enter a combat scenario, you’ll face off against multiple enemies at once. You can mash the attack button to pummel enemies, but other opponents in the group will attack you in those moments while you’re open. Thus, you have the option to counter-attack or dodge the incoming strike. Some attacks from enemies can’t be countered and some will have weapons, which you can acquire yourself to fend off the group. Where the combat differentiates from Batman more is in the use of the environment to cause more damage in which you can slam enemies up against the wall, for instance. It’s not a significant enough replacement for all the tools Batman has to make the combat more involved and complex, but it’s still competent enough to have some strategy involved. The other big difference is in the Rage meter and this is what I will say makes the combat more satisfying. While enraged, Max’s attacks do more damage and have a big impact with each hit. He also gets access to more powerful counter moves and instant-kill strikes to weed out the mob quickly. The core combat may not be that new, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have fun with it and watching Max crack skulls and suplex fools into the ground.

In addition to the in-person combat is the main aspect of the game that feels well-thought-out and inspired: car combat. Mad Max as a franchise has always had a focus on the vehicles and the game took a similar approach by making it the primary goal of the story, and the primary focus of the gameplay. It’s far from perfect and doesn’t feel as good as something like a Forza game, but the car combat I found to be very satisfying. Slamming into enemies on the road, using the harpoon to yank tires off or the drivers out of their vehicles, and speeding down the roads to attack caravans were the parts of Mad Max in which I was having the most fun. Making cars blow up while riding down the road at high speeds and seeing the wreckage spin and fly through the air is always a fantastic spectacle. There are a few common missions that involve car combat, like taking out roaming caravans, and you need your car to take out different obstacles like sniper towers, scarecrow towers, and fortress defenses. However, a majority of the extra missions you do around the area mostly require you out of the car. It’s possible I didn’t get far enough into the game to experience the better car-combat missions, but when so much of the game’s content seems centered around the less interesting combat, I didn’t hold out hope that the game would get much more involved or engaging.

This brings me to the big part of the process that held me back from staying with Mad Max. I think, given enough time, I’ll return to the game at some point, but I might turn away again if I pull up the in-game map. Immediately after getting the first version of your car, you have the ability to roam the absolutely massive map. When the game’s focus is on the use of the car to travel and fight, you want a big map to explore the landscape, barren as it might be. However, in being almost a chip off the Assassin’s Creed block, there are a ton of side-missions to do, with even more small locations to scavenge for the scrap that acts as your currency/experience points. You can earn these points without having to scavenge, but if you want to upgrade Max, your car, or the various safe zones you encounter, you’ll want everything you can get. There are specific parts that need to be scavenged from these locations in order to improve the home bases you can access which make the process of traversing the wasteland more convenient.

In games in which the gameplay has a fair amount of complexity to their traversal and combat, having a map bloated with icons of different activities isn’t an inherently bad thing. However, since Mad Max doesn’t really have enough variety in its combat and missions, the utter excess of icons on the map of different locations is dauntingly depressing. It’s difficult to find the motivation to clear out the different locales, especially when it rewards you for finding 100% of the location’s secrets and forcing you to linger in each spot longer. While I was riding high on the experience for a while, gathering tons of scrap and improving Max’s abilities with each region of the map, I was already starting to get burned out on the experience by the sixth essential story mission. It just feels like the game is designed to make you consume content and stick with it for as long as physically possible without providing you with enough mechanics or story beats to keep it interesting.

Presentation

Mad Max was released relatively early into the 8th generation of video games (PlayStation 4/Xbox ONE) and it shows a little. The art design is certainly there, as it manages to capture the same look and style of Mad Max: Fury Road. However, in terms of graphical fidelity, the game is certainly showing its age. Facial and walk animations are stiff. The way the environment responds to your actions is decent, but not a spectacle. The explosions look good, but mostly because of the stylistic filters. I’m certainly not knocking against the graphical presentation of Mad Max, as I think it is still good, but that’s mostly due to the art design.

As for the sound and music, it’s a hit-and-miss. The various sound effects of Mad Max work to the benefit of the experience, especially when it comes to those visceral impact moments. Hearing the crunches when Max floors a warboy with his fists, along with the scraping metal and explosions during car impacts was almost enough to keep me going through the slog of the overall experience. The music, however, was entirely forgettable if it was ever playing. It took me only a couple of hours to decide that I was better off putting the Mad Max: Fury Road soundtrack on in the background. Having the soundtrack add to the in-game drama did a fair amount to keep me interested in the grind, but only for so long.

TL;DR

Despite the fact that I did enjoy what I played of Mad Max, I still uninstalled it after a few hours of playing it before my opinion of it shifted into the negative. If you enjoy the Mad Max movies, and if you have the right music to play behind it, I think you can have a lot of fun with the game. The fist combat may be a little simplistic and uninspired, but the car combat was genuinely fun for what it was. The main problem is the bloated map of repetitive tasks and the gameplay loop that eventually feels exhausting, without an interesting story or villain to maintain your interest. If you play the game in doses, you might be okay, but it’s difficult to recommend Mad Max when there are so many other open-world games out there with more variety.

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