Mad Max: On The Fury Road To Review

Max never goes down without a fight, that’s for certain. The opening cinematic to Mad Max demonstrates that with aplomb, as he bashes and smashes War Boys off the road, left, right and centre. Survival in the desolate wasteland of the post-apocalyptic future is a constant struggle though, and it’s easy to be caught unawares. That’s how his beloved car is taken away from him by the warlord Scarbrous Scrotus, and how he’s left to rot in the desert.

But as I said, Max doesn’t go down without a fight. A stroke of good luck partners him with the talented hunchback named Chumbucket, whose oil-blackened fingers are most adept at building and repairing the vehicles he worships from scrap and spare parts, and who reveres Max and his abilities as a driver. They form a rather unlikely duo to resume Max’s quest to reach the Plains of Silence, and build Chum’s Magnum Opus into the greatest car in existence.

This is a game that’s all about driving – what else could it be about, really? – taking to the dusty trails that weave through the wasteland, and opening the throttle. As you roam the baking hot landscape, there’s very often something to draw you off the path you’re trying to beat. It could be a flaming territorial marker to tear down, a wrecked boat to scavenge scraps from, a hot air ballon from which you can scout the surrounding area or a sniper from a War Boy outpost taking pot shots at you.

It doesn’t take too long before you can take pot shots right back at them, and that’s because the Magnum Opus is constantly evolving and changing as you play. It might start off as junk, but over the course of the game’s opening few hours, you grab a body to put on the frame, add a harpoon, spikes to stop borders, and a V8 engine – Max has clearly had enough of the latest F1 regulations, given how angry he gets at the V6 the car starts off with. However, all of that can be changed and reconfigured to create one of the Archangel car blueprints, and tuned to have the specific stats that you desire.

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Combat on four wheels takes a little bit of getting used to, without some of the many offensive upgrades you’ll get later on in the game. Effectively, whichever car rams the other one takes no damage, so you want to be sure to be the one boosting into or side-swiping into the other. Beyond that, Max’s shotgun comes in handy, and aiming slows the game to a crawl so that you can pick out exactly the part of the car that you want to hit. Ammunition is incredibly scarce though, so upgrading the harpoon to the point where it can rip armour and tyres off feels like my most pressing aim. Then again, there’s something to be said for tearing a driver out of their car with a well-placed harpoon shot…

Though the entire game will play out in the desert wasteland, Avalanche have done rather well to avoid this being a one-note environment. Yes, you can head off in a single direction and completely lose your way amidst the rocks, canyons and sand dunes, but if you pay attention, you’ll spot a number of the landmarks that are on your map and the ruins of what went before. The natural greys, browns and yellows of the terrain shift as well, as the day-night cycle bathes the world in deep reds, purples and blues when the sun sets. It gives you a lot of fodder to make use of the game’s photo mode and, if you have a second pair of hands to help, the video capture mode with an independently controlled camera.

You really do appreciate them after you’ve been trudging through caves for a few minutes, in the sections on foot. You’re always trying to weaken the hold that the War Boys have over the region, which might mean attacking fort made from shipping containers and wrecked cars and getting into a few brawls between blowing up oil reserves and pumps.

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Avalanche have, as is only natural, borrowed from the best for the melee combat. Though Batman: Arkham’s influence is clear, it doesn’t come close to matching the nuance, depth and fluidity of that game. There are different enemy types, which need a heavy attack to break their guard, knife wielding enemies which you’ll need to dodge, and so on, but the only real stamp of individuality comes from the Fury mode, where stringing a chain of hits together sees you start to deal a lot more damage and automatically pull of audacious wrestling-style finishing moves as you beat the crap out of the enemies.

There are other oddities throughout, such as how drinking water to regain health takes so long, or how so many interactions fade to black on either side of an animation. It can make the game feel a little stilted, which isn’t helped by the loose grasp I currently have of what the next main mission to complete is. Though I’ve unlocked the second stronghold and its quest-giving leader, there are still plenty of things to do to upgrade and improve the first stronghold.

We knew it all along, but a game of Mad Max: Fury Road this is not. There are some good ideas at play, amidst the amalgam of various open world gameplay mechanics, but where the blockbuster film set of at an absolutely relentless pace, the game has a very different tone and has yet to hit its stride.

4 Comments

  1. It looks good visually from what I have and the gameplay looks similar to Shadow of mordor i.e. the unarmed combat system.

    Think the game though has not benefitted from the recent film which was just amazing.

    • Yeah, it has a lot in common with Batman: Arkham and Shadow of Mordor in the melee combat, but as I said, isn’t quite as nuanced. You don’t have lots of gadgets to use, you don’t leap across the map from one baddie to the next, and so on.

  2. Why no score?

    • It’s like a preview before the review.

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