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.
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.