that is not my beautiful son but that is definitely my beautiful car: Mad Max (2015)
I recently beat the Mad Max game after almost sixty hours of play. I think it has a lot of good parts and a lot of godawful parts. It's a really good vehicular upgrade to the basic Far Cry structure, and it's quite fun basically until it's not. It does the parts of Mad Max I don't care much about pretty well and the parts of Mad Max I care deeply about truly terribly. It's worth playing if you want to drive a car fast as fuck for a while!
It's a very weirdly paced game. You're given a huge map in multiple regions that encourages intense exploration and tons of collecting, and then a massive amount of the story is squished into a fractional part of that area, one that can easily be mistaken for the the endgame itself and unnecessarily avoided (I did this). You can clear the whole map before ever getting the V8 engine, which is nominally the point of the game and most of what Max cares about. It's comical how beefy my Magnum Opus was when I rolled into Gastown, a deeply uninteresting non-city that's got half the story onioned inside it despite being, as I previously mentioned, deeply uninteresting. I don't understand the motivation of making regions smaller as you progress — Jeet's territory feels fucking huge at the beginning of the game, and yet by the end you're showing up to meet Deep Friah and he just looks like a kid in a treehouse. Like, man, your territory fits in my trunk, why did it take thirty hours to get here?
There's also some absolutely incomprehensible UI design going on. Missions, encounters, and other minor bits of lore are stuck in the deepest possible menu, right by where you save and exit, so it took ages for me to find them in the first place — I was obviously looking for some sort of quest log, but instead they're keeping that information with the pause menu? Bizarre. There's a distinction between "story" and "wasteland" missions that doesn't make much sense until close to the endgame because there are so few of either to go around. Quest markers are tiny and get totally lost in the map, and if they update to a different location they often do it without telling you. There's one quest where it tells you to go through the Jaw, and then you go through the Jaw, and it's like ok now fuck you figure it out, and you only realize once you've gone through the Jaw and nothing has happened, no popup, no nothing, that you have to go into your map and comb the edges to find another dot and see where you're supposed to take the car. Dumb as hell. It's like the game doesn't want you to play it. It makes it hard to do the game things in the video game! Drive your car, sucker! You want to do anything else, fuck you!
Driving that car, though. Driving that car rocks. I am a hard sell on any sort of video game vehicle handling because mama is bad at pressing buttons but oh man I love this car. The careening emptiness of the wasteland is so enticing and you are in the center of it in the most intoxicating way. It's, imo, a really excellent instance of a game's mechanics properly balancing a feeling of power with a feeling of vulnerability. The hairpin turn you can take at a moment's notice from being the hunter to the hunted is just — chef's kiss! You're able to beef the Magnum Opus up a hell of a lot but you never really become indestructible in the way I'm used to becoming after reaching level 168 or wherever I was as at the end of this game; you get better at balancing your own reactions to the situations you find yourself in, maybe get quicker at catching the weak spots of other cars or get more used to how your own car handles in tight spaces, but you're never going to steamroll through enemies on the road no matter how far in the game you get. Vehicle battles never become easy; you just get better at them. There's also nothing to stop a couple other cars pouring into the fight right when you thought you had them cornered, and then you can keep taking damage or you can boost away from the scene and get the hell out of Dodge. Running away feels exhilarating in this game! It's really impressive.
The absolute best version of this is when you run into a convoy. Convoys are some of Scrotus' institutions in different territories that you have to shut down to give control of the area back to the stronghold leader. There are also camps, which are essentially dungeons that you've got to clear, and minefields which are a bit of a pain in the ass, but convoys are different — they're an oil-slick ring of road circling, usually, a decent part of the territory, and if you hang around for a while you'll find a tanker and its escort barreling past. I cannot express how much catching sight of a convoy feels like being a dog that just saw a squirrel. I was physically incapable of not dropping everything I was doing, ammo and fuel levels be damned, and tearing after that shit. Early in the game, when you've usually got limited shotgun shells and thunderpoons (bomb harpoons), taking down one of these convoys takes a while, and you get your ass beat in the process. Early on I'd usually get demolished once or twice and have to stand there antsy while Chumbucket fixed the car, then I'd leap back in and race after it, hoping to catch it before it despawned or grabbed more escorts (I don't know if either of these things actually happen? I've never lost track of a convoy entirely before, but I do feel like a couple acquired more buddy cars while I was in the middle of flattening their friend group.) Later in the game, once you get handy with your harpoon, you become the terror of the asphalt, picking off escort vehicles with murderous precision as the tanker desperately tries to keep ahead of you. It feels cool as hell. It's an excellent use of a map of this size. It serves to drag you away from quest markers and planned routes of attack, often dumping you quite literally in another region entirely when you've finally cornered your prey. It's an excellent use of the Magnum Opus as a vehicle and it's a delicious avenue to feel like yeah, fuck you, I'm Mad Max! I'm the maddest of all possible Maxes! Give me your hood ornament!!!!
Unfortunately, ground combat does not have the juice that the cars do. Max kills a really comical number of people in this game, and he kills them with his bare hands in basically the exact same way every time. Ground combat isn't entirely without its merits because it is nice and somatic and heavy, and catching someone in the middle of a hit always feels good, but my god it's repetitive. You kill thousands of mobs without ever having to change your tactic or use an actual weapon. You press one button over and over and when you get a popup you press a different button and when you get a different popup you dodge and if you're really suffering you pull out your gun and blow a few away before going back to pressing the one button over and over again. Related — it gets absolutely absurd how no one else in this game has a gun. I understand that it is crucial to this press-one-button gameplay that no one else has a gun, but really. Someone else should have a gun! I can't think of a solution for this besides halve the amount of enemies in the game, but I don't think that would have been missed. (Also, a surprising amount of Max's skill tree is dedicated to the use of melee weapons, which I only ever picked up to beat down bosses quicker; otherwise, they went totally ignored.)
The wasteland itself is pretty boring. I've made this same complaint a thousand times and I'll make it a thousand times again but it's a really stripped down, Walking Dead-ified type of wasteland instead of the garish proto-Borderlands flamboyance I associate more with Mad Max. The patterns of speech are what sticks around to make it feel Maxian, but otherwise everything is gray and brown. It doesn't pull in any of the blue and gold of Fury Road and basically abandons the S&M biker bullshit from Road Warrior. Individual environment design does its best with a truly limited number of props, but there's only so many times you can see the same tire and armchair and shelving unit and slave cage before you're like yeah man I get it it's the tire and armchair and shelving unit and slave cage. I keep comparing it unfavorably to the first Borderlands, which is the closest to Mad Max that those games get because it is so sparse and Western, and still deeply leaning on post-apocalyptic/dystopian tropes instead of alien planet tropes. The first Borderlands had such beautiful, thoughtful, funny environment design. Every little shack you ran into or structure you scaled was interesting to look at. Even though that game got a reputation for being brown and gray compared to the others, it was still a very rich setting to interact with, moment-to-moment. Mad Max doesn't have that vibrancy. You learn basically what a certain type of scavenging location looks like and do variants of that until the dots go away on your map. There are some outliers that are built into interesting geographic features like overpasses or large-scale ruins, but even those outliers are only outliers because they're passably interesting. They make you look more than once. The vast majority of these locations are routine, which make the game feel like a checklist — unpleasantly Far Cry-ified, though again, my gut instinct is to compare it then with Far Cry 5, which has some of the most charming and detailed minor location design I've run into in this style of game. This wasteland doesn't feel lived-in. It doesn't feel like a world that has anything going on beyond Max. I could put on my Maxian philosopher hat and talk about how that's antithetical to the message of the series as a whole, which is about how Max removes himself from the world while the world moves on without him, but what do I know.
Related to the dull brown-gray of this wasteland: Max is just a bitchy survivalist in this. I understand that not everyone has the comprehensive and innate understanding of this character that I do but also I truly don't understand why we've all decided to act like this character is a big gruff macho asshole. That man is a lost dog. We have at BEST one of four movies that puts points into the big gruff macho asshole department, and that's only if you're not swayed by the Tom Hardy argument, which, I will confess, I am not. When has Max Rockatansky, looking at the stone cold facts, ever acted in the way he acts in this game? Have we truly decided that there is no difference between a character being self-interested and being selfish, or between being wary and being callous? I find this insane. I have found this insane ever since I got in this car four months ago. There's hours and hours of spectacular cinema about how Max Rockatansky is professionally batted between regional interests in future pseudo-Australia like a pinball. The car's running out of gas. His camels got stolen. His boss won't let him retire. The settlers took the Interceptor. Tina Turner tricked him. The guy from Skins has him chained upside down. There aren't any fucking bullets in his gun! He's clever and he's quick and he's a good driver and he's extremely competent, extremely good at staying alive, but man, he's not this fucking guy. Put whoever this fucking guy is back in the zombie media and give me my lost dog back.
That being said, it's the moments where that version of Max sneaks out that shit gets good. This is really, I'd say, only possible if you're not fast traveling, and it's only possible before fully upgrading strongholds. Early on, you've got such limited shotgun shells, limited water, extended repair time, etc, that you might have to do actual scavenging, by which I mean go and investigate something you see in the distance not because you want to clear it off your map but because it might have the ammo you need to shoot loose a survey balloon, or because it's got water and you're dry, or because — god, what a concept! — it's got gas. This is the best part of the game (save convoys.) The extreme limits they set on you when you first start out work excellently. You find yourself in corners scraping down your health because you weren't prepared enough or someone caught you off guard; you feel the genuine rush of relief when you make it out. There's that sense of improvisation, of making it up as you go, that I feel like is such a crucial part of Road Warrior specifically. Road Warrior is Max acting, repeatedly, on immediate information. He sees the gyrocoptor, he goes for it. He hears of the oil camp, he stakes them out. He sees the bandit ambush, he has an idea, he tries it. You obviously can't replicate that kind of story in a game of this scale, really, but the survival and resource collection elements of the game did mimic that in a very satisfying way — you're not looking forward to an ultimate goal, but instead almost horizontally, at your own weak spots and how you need to buffer them. I wish that kind of gameplay had been sustainable; I desperately want a Mad Max game that's fully survival-focused now. As it is, the stronghold upgrades make that whole loop irrelevant. When you get everything filled every time you return, you never run out of anything. I don't think I had to put gas in the Magnum Opus for the last forty hours of the game, and that's with being conservative with how often I went back to strongholds. `
In general, the moments where the game really shines are when the mechanics and built world work together to mimic the vibe of the Mad Max movies, and to make you feel like you're an integrated part of that ecosystem, existing in the world in the way Max Rockatansky might. It's catching an impression of the series rather than trying to write another definite installment of it that works well. Unfortunately that is not what they ended up doing. They do, at the end of this game, just try to hand you a Mad Max movie, and it sucks ass. Max being out of character (imo, but also, I'm right) which was just mildly annoying before, turns into the driver of the whole plot. I'm fine with all the Max as Christ figure stuff, even though it's executed in a way that left something to be desired. What I dislike is the weird redemptive heterosexuality plotline with Hope and Glory (I know writers that use subtext, and they're all cowards) that gestures vaguely to Mad Max (1979) without understanding where that film left him. During that movie, he is angry; after it, he is hollow. From Road Warrior onward, Max's life is trauma and animal survival. His innate human core, which still exists, is something vulnerable that he hides, not something dangerous that he sacrifices. Not to come back to my doctorate in Maxian philosophy, but nothing in the movies implies that a wife and child will heal you! They, in fact, emphasize that a wife and child will probably kill you! It's just boring and stupid, and those characters are written badly to boot, and I wish I hadn't had to deal with anything that happens in this game after getting to Gastown, I was so happy clearing my little map and meeting increasingly weirder stronghold leaders and occasionally beating the shit out of a big guy with a hammer. The only writer of this game I respect is whoever wrote the super rapey Top Dog that calls Max "lovely boy" and then repeatedly quotes Fifi Macaffee. (I obviously respect all the writers of this game. I am just being a cunt because I have specific opinions about an IP.)
So there's my evaluation of Mad Max (2015). If I was forced to give this game a numerical score, it would be 7/10 because that's the score that makes people angry and this game made me angry. Still, you can get it for really cheap now (it was $1.99 during the most recent Steam sale, iirc), and for all my complaining there is a lot of this game that's great and worth playing. You can get twenty to forty good hours out of it, and that's a lot of hours! Just — when you start to get frustrated and think that things are becoming stupid, it's because they are. That's when you can put the controller down.
All this being said. All this being said. I still yelled "that's my BABY" out loud when credits hit and I unlocked the Interceptor. What can I say… I'm easy.
That's my fucking baby.