Revisiting Mad Max (Five Year Anniversary)

There isn’t really a game quite like Mad Max. It’s an outlier and an oddball in so many ways. It’s a movie tie-in game that is decidedly not awful. It’s an open world game that discourages fast travel. It’s also a post-apocalyptic game that manages to not look uglier than sin (sorry, Fallout: New Vegas). So, as the game was also released five years ago this month, I thought it would be worth a look into one of the most underrated open world games of this generation.

Mad Max was developed by Avalanche Studios, a company who had already proved their merit with enjoyable open world games such as Just Cause 2. Truthfully, when I said the game was a movie tie-in, that was only really partly true. Whilst major aspects of Mad Max: Fury Road and the rest of the series were incorporated into the game’s world, Mad Max had its own story to tell. George Miller (the director of the film series) was consulted during pre-production but Avalanche were mostly free to draw up their own take on Australia’s hazardous wasteland.

The big gamble during development of Mad Max was vehicular combat. After all, having a Mad Max game without cars is like eating a sandwich without bread. Avalanche Studios had no experience in this field, and the bad reputation that movie tie-in games (based purely on initial perception) had meant that the odds were stacked heavily against the game’s success. The game was originally slated for release in 2014, but it was pushed to 2015 to coincide with Mad Max: Fury Road’s release that year (and also because the game’s development went through a heavy retooling during 2014).

When Mad Max emerged in the Fall, I wasn’t initially there to play it. I lacked both the hardware and a significant interest in the series at the time. It was only during 2018 when the Steam Summer Sale came around that I purchased the game and became hooked. I expended a total of 30 hours or so in the span of a month or less (which for me is quite a lot) and found myself enthralled with the game’s atmosphere and high-octane gameplay.

There’s a few key components that make the game so excellent, in my opinion. The first is your car, called “The Magnum Opus” by your mechanic, Chumbucket. Not only is the driving miraculously fun and surprisingly deep in variables (such as different tyres being better for sand vs. road and the amount of armour on the car affecting the vehicle’s speed and weight) but the progression that allows you to customise “The Magnum Opus” is well executed. Players are actually encouraged to explore with the incentive of scrap being found in certain locations, as well as stealing enemy cars and driving them back to scrap them. Certain upgrades can only be achieved by lowering a region’s threat level, however, which might be a turn off for people that simply want to drive around without a care (I didn’t find it too much of a bother, however). Your car’s customisation is what kept me playing the game for so long, as it was satisfying to grind for the best engine I could get. The vehicle combat is also pretty simple but addictive and honestly feels like you’re recreating a scene from one of the movies.

The second element is the game’s environment and atmosphere. The game has a day and night cycle and weather system and this can lead to some absolutely excellent moments in game. Driving through the desert during a sandstorm to try to recover a cache of scrap will never not be visually breathtaking. In addition to this, there’s a surprising variation in the different types of wasteland you can traverse. The Dunes, for example, are almost entirely sand. It’s difficult to drive here unless you have tyres that can weather the difficult terrain. The Great White is littered with old shipwrecks and the like that signal that it used to be a large and vast ocean, and the Fuel Veins within show the old fuel lines that used to be connected to the seabound oil rigs. The Dead Barrens, by contrast, is rocky and arid and has a more orange palette littered with grand vistas and mesas, only interrupted by the Rot ‘N’ Rusties blackened and sickly landscape. Gastown is a hellish oilpunk city which is by far the most intimidating and dangerous location to visit. Some form of civilisation apparently thrives here, but the orange flames that blast out from the long exhausts of the city is representative of the brutal leadership that governs it.

The big point of contention that might ruin the game for some, however, is the other large slice of gameplay that is largely ripped from the Arkham series of games. Whilst the intense car chases will keep you playing for hours, for large chunks of the game you’re forced out of the car and into a far more simple and repetitive system in which you have to beat up a fortress of enemies in order to progress the game further. Whilst the addition of melee weapons sometimes makes the combat more fun, at the end of the day it does not feel particularly engaging and the on foot segments absolutely break the flow of any session. It’s not awful, as the excellent sound design and rage mode element puts something of a band-aid on the affair, but it ultimately is far less fun than anything you’d be doing in a car and it comes off as a chore you have to do in order to get to the good part again.

Unfortunately, the story is something of a similar affair. Whilst the worldbuilding aspects are much appreciated, I didn’t really ever feel any interest in the narrative or characters past concern over what it would mean for my upgrade options (the only reason I probably beat the game’s main story was so I could continue in the open world untethered). For a franchise that is famous for being able to make an engaging experience out of very little story, this is pretty disappointing. Nevertheless, someone else might be able to get more out of it than me. I don’t think it’s poorly written as much as subjectively uninteresting.

The downsides were not enough to stop me from playing the game a tonne, however. The interesting world and fun driving kept me playing for more time than I’d usually spend on an open world game, and it was definitely one of my favourite games that I’d played that year. If the game’s ever on a sale, maybe check it out. It might have something you like, as well.