Becoming The Road Warrior: Hands On With Mad Max

Max’s world is not one for the sane, the rational or the intellectual. With resources becoming ever more scarce, the mad and the ruthless have risen up to rule, ceaselessly battering the few remaining bastions of humanity within the world. Mad Max might not be directly tied to the latest film, Fury Road, but this is just about the best possible time to dive into this post-apocalyptic universe and tell another story, with the game releasing at the start of September.

It’s only natural within this dystopian future for vehicular combat to come to the fore, as Max roams the open world trying to create the ultimate car to replace his beloved Interceptor, but there’s also compromises made in the name of accessibility. You’ve got several attacking options, depending on how you’ve built up your car, from spikes coming out of your wheel hub or “sideburners” that belch flames from your car’s flanks, to a better front bumper with which to ram into enemy vehicles, but as you dance around and crash into each other, spraying sand into the air in your wake, there are a few mainstays to the combat which are important to learn to use to their best.

Max’s trademark sawn-off shotgun makes an appearance, giving you a lethal option with which to take out any of the War Boys foolish enough to leap or clamber onto your car – though violently weaving and boosting will shake them off – or there’s explosive laden thundersticks that can be thrown to cause glorious explosions. But it often comes back down to the harpoon that is under the control of Chumbucket – who rides in the open back of your car and repairs it for you while you’re not behind the wheel – allowing you to tear wheels off vehicles to leave them stranded, rip apart armour plating and pull down certain buildings or obstacles within the world.

In a nod to keeping the action manageable, aiming your chosen weapon slows the game to a crawl and highlights the various potential target points on other vehicles. Though there is a small degree of auto-aim, it’s far from a snap to target system, but it gives you time to decide what you want to target without as much worry of crashing, before dismantling or blowing up your enemy’s vehicles in a satisfying fashion. When there’s a cooldown timer on the harpoon and a strictly limited amount of ammunition for your shotgun and other weapons, being precise with each shot can be all important.

Having said that, I was particularly clumsy as I took on the main mission within this demonstration area. I could have ventured off the beaten path, to tackle a few side missions or dismantle the War Boys’ towers and lower their presence within the region and earn more parts for the extensive vehicle customisation, but instead decided to break through the forces besieging Pink Eye’s stronghold. That meant destroying the trio of catapults pelting the big dome structure with explosives by first tearing off a panel and then blowing up their fuel tanks for more gorgeous explosions – and Avalanche know how to good explosions.

Of course, it also meant stepping out of the Magnum Opus for more than a spot of resource gathering – you’ll want to grab bullets off fallen foes, as well as keep an eye out for health-restoring water – and venturing into the ruinous building. The gameplay extends well beyond the car-based combat that will likely be the initial hook, but I feel it’s also where the game might lose a few people’s favour. We’ll have to wait and see how it fares in the context of the final game, but venturing forth on foot in this instance brought me to some simplistic environmental puzzles that had me turning valves to shut off a roaring fire generator and throwing thundersticks to release a drawbridge, as well as some hand-to-hand combat.

It takes its cues from the Batman: Arkham games, whose combat system is very much in vogue, with an emphasis on free flowing fisticuffs and the need to time your blocking and countering to the visual prompts above an enemy’s head. Or you can resort Max’s sawn-off on the fly, able to use some of your precious bullets to blast through a handful of War Boys at once. There are some quirks to the system though, like how I could pick up a rudimentary weapon an enemy had dropped, only to see it clatter to the floor as soon as I tried to interact with world objects, fire Max’s gun or do anything that wasn’t hitting people with it.

It’s clear that bare-fisted brawling is meant to be the bread and butter of the combat though, and Max enters a frenzied state if you string together a decent length combo, during which each of his punches deal a lot more damage than usual. At first glance there’s not as much depth to the fighting as in Batman: Arkham, but with that said, it’s tricky to get a feel for the true scope of the game in a brief 25 minute hands on session.

Perhaps the melee combat won’t set a new high water mark then, but it’s the appealing vehicular combat which is at the game’s heart. There’s a whole wasteland to explore out there, filled with factions and characters at odds with one another, and a story that will see Max trying to stay afloat in the middle of all the chaos around him.