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Mad Max (2015): Maybe we do need another hero.
🕑 Added 2025-02-20 22:25:51 +0000 UTCI gotta say, 2025 has been off to a terrible start. What with everything happening in the USA, I decided to try to take my mind off things by well, doing anything that didn’t involve doomscrolling 24/7. Watching movies, playing games, that sort of thing. I ended up picking up a game that was a post-apocalyptic free roaming action game from 10 years ago that felt… a bit too on the nose at times considering current events.
(This is the most "box art by committee" I've seen in a while.)
Mad Max is a game based on the famous film series created by George Miller. Our hero, Max Rockatansky, trudges along the wasteland of a blown out world, where chaos and disorder reign supreme. During his travels he’ll help out stragglers, get into epic car chases on desert lands, and even fight his way in the Thunderdome. Developed by Avalanche Studios and published by Warner Bros. Games, this came out in 2015 to fairly above average reviews. I had heard how alright this game was for being a small little timewaster, and since it was constantly going on sale, I decided to get on Mad Max’s wild ride.
Our story begins with ol’ Max Rockatansky driving his godlike car until he meets a powerful villain by the name of Scrotus. Scrotus and his gang of thieves steal Max’s car and supplies, intending to leave him for dead. It’s not until Max meets a gremlin-like character by the name of Chumbucket, who is a wizard with cars. Max must get his ride back and build enough trust with the various folks around the wasteland to get to his ultimate goal: Get to Gastown and continue his travels.
While the game is based on the film franchise, it’s a standalone entry that does not require watching the movies to understand. There’s winks and nods to the previous films, but sadly no other characters besides Max himself appear. No Furiosa or Tina Turner-likes here.
Max has a combat system similar to Rocksteady’s Batman Arkham games: Tap X to punch, hold for a stronger hit that can stop enemies from blocking, enemies will choreograph an attack that can be countered with Y, there’s finishers that can be activated with A, that sort of thing. Build up enough of a combo to activate a rage mode where Max can do more damage more quickly. Since Mad Max relies on weaponry alongside the usual fisticuffs, pressing B will shoot Max’s shotgun, locking on to any nearby target, instantly killing any non-boss foe.
During some combat sections, there will be a War Crier that, if not dispatched, will buff enemies. This is a real pain if there’s several enemies to fight at once. There’s two ways to take him out: destroying the chain that’s holding him up, or with gunfire/explosions. Eventually I got into a groove where taking out the War Crier was priority one, which he was easily killed by shotgun or stray explosive. Since he explodes once killed, it also helped do damage to his buddies and make fights a bit less monotonous.
While most of the game is Max on foot fighting foes Batman Arkham style, there is a good chunk of the game centered towards the vehicles. Max gets a car from Chumbucket called the “Magnum Opus,” which can be upgraded with scrap – a material all around the wasteland – to have power nitro boosters, spikes on the car to avoid enemies jumping on it, sidefire jets to damage foes from the side, the grappling hook to yank doors open or eliminate snipers. Speaking of snipers, Max has a portable sniper of his own that he can use while in the Magnum Opus, which can be useful for some annoying targets at range, but keeps you completely stationary. It’s a nice deviation but I tended to use some of the other weapons in my arsenal instead.
There’s also a myriad of other vehicles to collect, but outside of one vehicle where Max’s dog could sniff out where landmines were, I never really bothered with them unless I somehow got far far away from the Magnum Opus and needed a ride immediately. This is often a thing I’ve noticed about playing Avalanche’s games: There’s a myriad of vehicles to drive and collect, but I ended up rarely deviating from the starter car you can customize. I don’t know what one can do to solve this sort of problem, maybe customizing any vehicle, not just your signature car.
To lower the heat of a certain faction showing up, you can destroy totems, participate in races, eliminate a convoy of vehicles, among other things. Doing this is also necessary, as certain abilities for Max and the Magnum Opus require a faction to have low enough heat to purchase. Unfortunately like a lot of Avalanche’s other games, the factions don’t really do much with one another except to be mission-givers and a safe haven where Max can upgrade bases to refill water and other little bits of it.
I keep thinking about how Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction had a really interesting system where helping out one faction could harm the trust of another to the point where they consider you as hostile like the main bad guys. I really wish more games borrowed that system, because it would give a push and pull to everything.
(Fun fact: The safe havens have a feature where Max could gain scrap at any time while the game is offline. This feature no longer works. Even for a singleplayer game in the mid-2010s couldn’t get away from requiring you to log in to a service.)
(You can also give water to random passersby, and that can gain you some critical intel or just brownie points for helping out.)
Each area is much like a lot of free-roaming games of this time, where there’s loads of enemies to take out, a primary objective like destroying oil tanks, and bonus objectives like scrap piles and Scrotus insignias, bright red icons featuring the main antagonist’s faction. Of course, there’s also hot air balloons that not only work as fast travel but also a way to observe what is around the region, akin to those stupid towers in most Ubisoft games.
(I tended to call them “Scrotum insignias,” which I assume I’m not the only one who’s called them that.)
Since this is a fairly modern game, there’s a whole metric ton of yellow paint to point where Max can go to. It’s interesting to see this, especially since Yellow Paint discourse has gotten a a bit contentious in recent memory. As much as I can maneuver through most action games and not get lost all the time, I’m probably the exception rather than the rule. And honestly, considering how brown and dusty the world of Mad Max is, I’m for yellow paint in games. You could say I’m on #TeamYellowPaint if you want. We should be giving any amount of help/assistance to players that we can, so folks can make progress in games.
(When I saw this, I was gobsmacked, primarily because it just seems so relevant now as it was in 2015. And this was before Donald Trump even became president!)
Mad Max really took up a good chunk of my time during January. It became one of those games where I got hooked and infatuated with the world, getting as much unlocks that I could, but the gameplay got really monotonous. While Mad Max does dole out dozens of ways to dispatch foes, from fist to shotgun to even finishing moves, it just gets boring to do after a while. The last games I can think of that used that Batman Arkham like gameplay was Sleeping Dogs and Batman: Arkham City, and the problem with that combat system is that while it can accommodate for multiple play styles, the gameplay ends up feeling rote and repetitive after playing several hours of it. Hell, once I upgraded my shotgun, it ended up being used a lot more since I was so sick of having to punch dudes with shields and equipable weapons. I don’t know what you could do to improve this gameplay loop, but I can give Avalanche credit for at least trying to spice it up. If there was no vehicular element to this game, I would’ve gotten sick of it long ago, but there was enough bouncing between punching and driving that it didn’t feel too boring.
As I kept playing, I noticed something: Despite releasing in late 2015, towards the middle of the PS4/Xbox One generation, Mad Max really feels like something that could’ve released just a few years earlier and fit in perfectly. The grimy brown world, the gruff white dude protagonist, even some of the women being made for titillation first and characterization later. By accident, Avalanche Studios made a game that feels unearthed from the Xbox 360 days. That’s not bad by any means, but it just feels like an outlier compared to similar games released around this time, which were trying to get past that brown, gruff, angry mindset of the 360 generation. Then again, with how Mad Max is depicted as a franchise, I figured this could be just a coincidence. A case of right place and the right time, that sort of thing.
Despite my complaints on the gameplay and how some mechanics feel somewhat half-baked, I did enjoy my time with Mad Max. Despite only vaguely remembering the films, I enjoyed what I played. Maybe it’s because I tried to 100% the game and gave up on it, but if you don’t decide to do that, you end up with a solid game that’s fun for a bit, and that’s really all games need to be. I try to champion “7/10” kind of games. Games that may not be completely outstanding, but have something about them that makes them charming and fun for a few hours. To me, those are the most interesting, since my expectations are fairly on the low side when it comes to any game. Mad Max is a strong “7/10” kind of game. That’s not necessarily my score for it – I hate scoring things with a passion, you can’t just distill hundreds of words into a number without missing a lot of context – but that’s what it feels like. A game that has some neat ideas, tends to hit more than miss, and is a nice little distraction for 10-15 hours. It’s kind of a lost art these days, what with the gulf between AAA and smaller developers getting wider and wider.
(I didn't know where to put this, and I thought this would be funny.)
Mad Max is available on all current platforms – PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Steam – and is definitely worth the time. It may not do anything outstanding, but it’s a nice little time waster and a solid use of the license. It often goes on sale for $5 or less, and honestly it’s worth it at that price. Since this is based on a Warner Bros. property, it may only be a matter of time before David Zaslav – a man who canceled finished films for a tax writeoff and shut down Adult Swim Games – decides to go scorched earth on the entire WB gaming division and gets this delisted, so I’d say grab it while you can.
It’s funny, I’m playing Rage 2 as of this writing, which has a lot of similar traits that Mad Max has: A post-apocalyptic world where you’re visiting areas, completing missions and helping out factions. Fitting, considering Avalanche worked on both of these games, so they knew a thing or two when it came to making games like these. (I very nearly made this a double feature where I’d cover this game and Rage 2 in the same article, but I’m still playing Rage 2 and there might be differences between the two games that they might merit separate articles. Maybe. We’ll see.)
