Mad Max gamescom Preview

“I Live! I Die! I Live Again!”

Aside from being the obligatory reference, it’s not a bad description for the upcoming Mad Max game, which has been kicking around in idea form since at least 2008 before making the leap to current gen consoles and 2015 release.

At gamescom, I finally got the chance to get my hands on some sweet, sweet post-apocalyptic action.

Despite spending a fair bit of time in development purgatory, Mad Max does actually seem to have come out stronger for it. The game, which isn’t a tie-in to Fury Road by the way, gives fans a new adventure for Max Rockatansky who is looking for the legendary V8 engine Big Chief to use in his car, the Magnum Opus. Mad Max has clear ties to the cinematic universe, unsurprisingly. During the developers’ demonstration, I caught a glimpse of several familiar places like The Citadel on the world map.

But Avalanche, the game’s developers, have also added in a fair bit of their own new content; during my hands-on time with the game, I was in Pink Eye’s territory, a new character created for the game. Max also gets help from Chumbucket, who repairs the Magnum Opus and generally helps to keep you from getting caught by a Gastown raiding party.

Unsurprisingly, driving and vehicular combat is a huge part of Mad Max. Avalanche has given players a huge range of customisation for the Magnum Opus: armor, tires, spikes, engines, paint jobs...the list goes on. This gives players a lot of room to make their car work for them, and as I worked my way through customising my own (with chrome skull decals, obviously), one of the devs walked me through some of the pros and cons of various options. Things like armor, for example, gave you more damage protection, but added more weight, which slowed you down and curbed your maneuverability.

Once my car was shiny and chrome and ready to kick ass, the real fun began. Mad Max is, in a word, fun. Aside from being able to ram and push other cars off the road, Max has three weapons at his disposal: the long-range thunderstick, the mid-range harpoon gun, and the short-range shotgun. Both the thunderstick and shotgun have limited ammo, however, meaning I spent a fair bit of my time with the harpoon gun.

And, you know, ramming cars into each other.

But while only three weapons seemed pretty restrictive to me at first, it quickly became clear that combat in Mad Max rewards a little cleverness every now and then. Shooting out the wheels of an enemy’s car, for example, could cause it to crash into another enemy. Or using my harpoon gun to pull down objects (or people off the backs of cars), could create just enough mayhem in a raiding party to gain the advantage.

The other thing I appreciated about Mad Max was the sense of weight to the vehicle; the gameplay lacked any of the “floaty” feeling people sometimes talk about with Just Cause 2, and it was easy to see how picking lighter armor might have made me more agile, for example. But this weight really shone when I got stuck in one of the game’s dynamic weather events: a sandstorm.

The storms in Mad Max are truly impressive: in what felt like an instant, I went from a clear line of sight out to the horizon to the kind of visibility where you can’t see three feet in front of you. Driving blind while heavy winds buffeted my car, I was suddenly glad I hadn’t opted for a lighter build on my vehicle; avoiding the boulders and debris that seemed to come out of nowhere was already hard enough.

Mad Max features fully dynamic weather, including ‘superstorms’--think the lightning sandstorm from Fury Road -- and it gives Avalanche’s beautifully crafted map a stunning sense of location.

After getting a chance to see it in action, I for one am very excited to see Mad Max in all it’s road warrior-y glory (last one, I promise) when it hits shelves and digital retailers.

Mad Max is out 4th September for the EU for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC.