Mad Max is a decent open world game born into a year of many exceptionally made open world games. Combined with the critical acclaim of the Fury Road movie released this year, the expectations leveled against this game were just too much. In a vacuum, Mad Max is a competent enough game with a lot of pieces that are good, but almost nothing great. It's well worth your time, but with tempered expectations.

The world of Mad Max is the world as imagined by 7-year-old boys playing in the sandbox. Rather, it's what the world would look like if civilization came crashing down and those same boys got to decide how the rest of human history would play out. Everyone has silly, gross-sounding names. Everyone hangs out in little clubs that each have their own bitchin' fort. Most importantly though, the entire social hierarchy is determined by how cool your car is, how much cool stuff you've stuck on it, and how big its flamethrower is.

In short, the Mad Max universe is pretty much the perfect setting for an open world sandbox.

We play as Max, who is the very definition of your prototypical video game protagonist. He's a tough guy loner with a tough outer shell that may or may not have a soft inner spot. The real flavour comes from the setting, the other characters, and the cars. Cars are a huge part of this game. In the very beginning Max's Car, The Black on Black, is stolen from him by ultimate bad guy Scrotus (seriously, that's his name). After wandering stranded in the desert for a while he joins up with a dog named Dinki-Di (yup) and a hunchback mechanic called Chumbucket (mmhmm).

Whereas Max is a simple man with a simple name for his simple car, Chumbucket takes the whole thing as a major religion, and he's not the only one. He wears a spark plug necklace, he sees Max as the chosen one, and he offers to build you the ultimate vehicle of destiny, which he aptly names The Magnum Opus. The vast majority of the game's mechanics and story revolve around preparing and upgrading both Max and the Magnum Opus in preparation for the final battle against Scrotus.

Cue generic open world gameplay here. You run around climbing towers to unlock new parts of the map, except instead of running you're driving and instead of towers they're hot air balloons. There are small camps to take over, large camps to take over, boss vehicles to take out, convoys to hijack, races, etc. All the normal stuff you expect in an open world game is here, and it's all done.....fine I guess. It's absolutely not bad at all, there's just nothing exceptional about it either. There were times I just wanted to advance the story and skip all the side stuff, and there were times I found some relaxation in aimlessly knocking over towers and clearing out camps.

The melee combat is a pretty big part of the game, and in a word, it's Batman-esque. Unfortunately it's not very well done. The Batman (and Sleeping Dogs, and Shadow of Mordor, etc.) combat is all based on timing and counters. I personally found the counter timing in Mad Max to be not very responsive. I frequently would get locked into an animation and be unable to counter an attack I could easily see coming. I eventually negated this by upgrading Max enough that I had a good health cushion and just overall trying not to get surrounded, but the controls felt sort of....muddy.

Car combat is the other big pillar, and I had similar issues with it. It feels very clunky and you feel pretty helpless and incapable at first. Eventually you just upgrade your way out of that issue by brute force and everything is fine. It's not that the upgrades made things more dynamic, it just made you more able to weather the clunky systems. Getting more armor and upgrading the harpoon you use to spear enemy vehicles is a must. To upgrade your car, and also to upgrade Max, you need scrap.

Scrap suffers yet again from the same issues. Getting enough scrap to buy all the upgrades you need is agonizing at first, but much of this pain can be negated by power-upgrading your way through it. My style in games is to always spend currency early on upgrades that will yield me more currency. I did that here as well, boosting Max's scrap-finding as much as I could. I can't imagine how rough the game would have been had I not done that, because even with the upgrades I still found myself strapped for scrap almost constantly. There are so many different upgrades in this game you couldn't possibly dream up ulocking all of them during the main course of playing. If you really wanted to take your sweet time going through the game and clearing out everything you might have enough scrap to to a ton of upgrades, but I didn't do that. I didn't exactly blast through the game either, I put a solid 18-20 hours into it.

Max Max picked up a lot of steam for me when I realized that I'd upgraded my car enough and decided to go straight through the main story. There are quite a few cutscenes in the game, and many of them are actually pretty good. I like a lot of the side characters like Chumbucket, Gutgash (seriously, with these names!) and the main female character, Hope and her daughter Glory. The character work around Max is pretty nice, and I thought the story was actually going some pretty good places. The ending, however, was duuuuuummmmbbb.

I'm not going to give it away, but I'll just say a character dies right at the end of the game, and then once the credits roll they dump you back into the open world and there that character is, alive and well. Literally like 10 seconds after you saw them die they're back. I never go back and clear things out after I've finished the main story anyway, but it was so jarring and utterly dismissive of the dramatic ending it was striving for I couldn't help but laugh at how absurd it was.

In fact, that's a great headspace to be in while playing Mad Max altogether. There's definitely some good fun to be had here, but don't fall for any indications they're giving you that this is supposed to be a serious, well thought out story. Just sit back and laugh at the line Mad Max consistently balances between being self-serious and absolutely ridiculous.