This game is perfectly achieves the post-apocalypse tone and look and just like an actual apocalypse it makes you suffer all the way through to the end. I have no idea why people consider this to be an underrated gem. 90% of this game is doing the mundane activities in the open world and the other 10% is the awful story missions. A big chunk of the game is doing to hand to hand combat which is essentially hitting the X button until the prompt appears on screen for you to hit the Y button. Truly awful game overall.

A license game that plays it safe and somehow manages to succeed even without putting anything new to the table. Mad Max isn’t an easy game to recommend, it doesn’t do anything of note and those who would love it are probably two distinct categories: the fan of its setting, especially of the latest film – Fury Road, – and those who indiscriminately like open world sandboxes with nothing much to do except repeat the same chores and find the same meaningless collectibles over and over again. If you are familiar with any recent UbiSoft titles, that’s basically it.

This time tho you get a sick sport car and also the option to pimp it as you see fit. That is quite fun.

No really, the best part of the game is in its car. You can modify basically every part of it, it rides magnificently and sounds even better. You feel invested in upgrading it and it is a pure joy to ride it everywhere, inside sandstorms, on empty roads, during battles and as a battering ram during sieges on enemy bases. The world is a huge barren wasteland that perfectly reflects the setting of the original movies, but both the characters and the plot lack the insightful mind of the original author, George Miller, and the enjoyable and trash punchline of the 80s. Players are going to do quests and side quests more for the heck of it and a urge to complete everything rather than for any sort of attachment to the titular main character – a huge downgrade both from Mel Gibson and Tom Hardy tbh – or any other character for that matter.

Nevertheless, the game is engaging if played in small doses so not to feel loaded by its monotony and sameness. Avalanche studio certainly made it looks beautiful and it is significantly optimised for PC performances. If you just like strolling around in your ride and punch the everliving sh-t out of mobs with a combat system akin to the Batman Arkham series – because that was the combat system which was ‘in’ at the time – then this game will provide tens of hours of pure enjoyment and thrill.

This was my second attempt at playing through this game. Unfortunately I remembered rather quickly why I stopped. Repetitive 100% gameplay, the driving becomes rather dull quickly, and the story is uninteresting. The combat is arguably very fun Arkham style with combos and counters, however it can get bogged down with the camera not zoomed out enough and being hit by an enemy off screen. There is also ALOT of animation locking where Max is not immune during it.

Overall, it's not a bad game especially if you're fond of a mind numbing grind, just not for me.

I was so curious about this game when it first came out but the mixed reviews and reports of glitches scared me away. So 5 years later and a good enough sale to make me give it a shot, I finally played it.

Its pretty much just an Arkham combat clone with cars. The car mechanics are really fun and I like that its impossible to make an ultra car that has maxed out stats in all areas. Taking out convoys is fun and charging into strongholds are solid too. Despite the melee combat being the generic style of combat thats gotten popular recently, which I've started refering to as "Counter Combat" its still really chunky and satisfying to beat the piss out people. Big bonus points to whichever programmer made Max do wrestling moves, big fan of hitting a war boy with a FAT ASS German Suplex. Dope shit.

Avalanche will always contain a special place within my heart. Just Cause 3 is one of my favorite games of all time with over 100 hours and three 100% playthroughs logged on Steam, and Mad Max was my first introduction to their magnificent, gorgeous, sandbox worlds. This was one of the earliest games I played on my PS4, and I played it some small amount of time after playing Arkham Knight for the first time. It's certainly reminiscent of that signature Arkham-style combat--it feels a lot more brutal and grounds Max in a more realized world. Getting surrounded by enemies can become terrifying as you're overwhelmed by grunts with hefty weapons. Tools like the shivs and shotgun allow for slick, vicious takedowns without over-complicating the combat with numerous gadgets and moves as in Arkham. I felt like blocking or countering was pretty stuttery and unforgiving, however, this encouraged me to play a lot more aggressively.

Car combat is a beast within and of itself. The dogfights, convoy chases, and cacophonous arena fights illuminate the game's pacing by providing some of the most exciting fights in any game I've played. You are always given the opportunity and viability to take on multiple vehicles. The Magnum Opus is fitted with its own suite of weaponry and the ability to completely customize the car to allow for your specific type of gameplay is amazing. I personally outfitted mine with a really fast engine and slimmed down on accessories to make it faster, and equipped a powerful ram at the front that allowed me to demolish smaller cars with a single nitrous boost. This customization is the heart of the game and completely enables the player to play the way THEY want to play. Max's customization leaves less to be desired, but this isn't really an RPG, so the individual player skill trees aren't really important to my experience.

I think what's so amazing about this game is that it's one of the rare few games where having an empty, sparse, wasteland of an open world excels the gameplay forward to an amazing level. There's moments of calm fortitude where you drive through the ravaged, buried wasteland of an Australia forgotten long ago. These moments are perfectly juxtaposed with the adrenaline-pumping car fights and base takedowns that are frequently scattered throughout the world. Many open-world sandbox games develop this atmosphere of the player being somewhat of a god--Avalanche is no stranger to this, as Rico Rodriguez takes on the role of some immortal, Jesus-like figurehead that swings from exploding vehicle to exploding vehicle, gunning down dozens of fascists as he liberates foreign countries from the hands of dictators. Mad is the complete opposite of this--he's one man against a dangerous world. While the world is trapped inside with Rico, Max is trapped inside with the wasteland. Everything in the game forms some sort of threat, and the minimal resources you have to survive and replenish your health, such as food and water, are not frequently found.

Ultimately the game feels quite distanced from many other modern open world games despite following the same formula. It's no Fury Road in terms of scale, cinematic story, or narrative, but Mad Max still allots the player a ton of freedom in their approach to how they choose to play the game. My main gripe in which the game fails is its lack of an interesting narrative. Pacing is stuttery across the five acts that range from being anywhere from 10 hours to 1 hour. I found myself consistently more intrigued in doing side content or "flattening" the world by checking off markers across the map than I did in continuing the story. The lack of mission diversity is a huge problem here, and the game often requires you to complete a certain amount of open-world activities before continuing the story. It's that lack in freedom for story progression that hurts the game, as the freedom within gameplay is so counterintuitive to it that you encounter these weird progression locks that prevent you from moving forward. I did, admittedly, love the idea of having different strongholds across the world that you could upgrade. This provided more motivation for doing side activities, as I could collect scrap or materials that I could then use to build permanent upgrades such as canteen or gas refills. I felt like the game was always rewarding me for doing extra content instead of just checking things off a list.

Ultimately, this is a very interesting and fresh open world game that manages to make the constantly retreaded Far Cry-esque formula more enjoyable to play. If you're looking for a liberating open world sandbox, or a game with truly MAGNIFICENT vehicular gameplay, or simply another game to scratch that Arkham/Shadow of Mordor itch, then I'd recommend Mad Max for you.

I really wanted to love Mad Max. Fury Road is one of my favourite films of all time and the Mad Max universe seems like the perfect setting for a videogame. While Avalanche games does prove this, their execution leaves me wanting more. The gameplay itself is fantastic. Cars drive like a dream and the over the top car combat is fun and utter carnage. The drip feed of car upgrades you get throughout the game keeps things fresh, though I wish some of the better ones were dished out sooner. Hand to hand combat is decent, with an adaptation of the Arkham style combat system that doesn’t feel nearly as fluid but compensates for this with satisfyingly brutal animations and finishers. The wasteland is the perfect location to try out these systems, and it is stunning even by todays standards. The desolate nature of the world is captured perfectly. The cherry on top would’ve been a bit more visual variety with more diverse landmarks.

Unfortunately, Mad Max’s story is unengaging and forgettable. Max himself is very lifeless and the vibrant cast of misfits that surround him do little to make things more interesting thanks to poor voice acting and storytelling. On top of this, quest design is pretty average with everything you’d expect from this sort of game and nothing more. Side quests are a particular let down, leaning into the trap of open world syndrome where they value quantity over quality. And that sums up a lot of the game for me. As much fun as I found the individual gameplay elements, eventually the repetition became too much and I decided to stop playing before completing the campaign. Ultimately, Mad Max is fun for a bit, but once the initial novelty of the gameplay and setting wear off, the bland story and repetitive gameplay loop drag the whole experience down. When there’s so many better open world games available, as fun as some elements are, this one isn’t worth your time.