Mad Max

[Rasix]

Yah, I can't quite carve out 50 minutes of my day to listen to a 3 minute overview of a game/issue.  I swear in one video he went on about graphics sliders for 20 odd minutes.

As for this game, my review is "ehhh".  It's an interesting combination of yay, meh, and bad.  The driving and car combat is neat.  The wasteland isn't bad.  That combat is like a retarded version of the DDR punchfests in Batman and Mordor. The activities range from fun to "why is this even in the game?".   Just bumming around the wasteland can be fun. Taking camps isn't particularly fun (have fun hunting the ground spawn objectives).

It's just a very mixed bag. I'd say this game is about $25 worth of fun, so I'm not mad for playing $15.  

[Khaldun]

I wish I hadn't tried this. It feels exactly like a bad implementation of Mordor/Batman and worries me about this template becoming the norm of how you do an intellectual property adaptation.

[stray]

I don't have high expectations of these movie-to-game things in the first place.. It's hard to get disappointed. I haven't fully played it, but it looks pretty. And I'll commend them for actually extending development time. That's more than what you can ask for from this.

[Falconeer]

Luckily this is not a movie to game game. This is just a bunch of things that might have happened to Max after Beyond Thunderdome and right before Fury Road. You CANNOT live up to the glory of Fury Road in any way, but the representation of the Mad Maxian wasteland in this game is nothing short of fantastic. If you think it's bland by looking around for the the first few hours you are so missing out. The world is immense. Sure it has a lot of the same theme, but the different areas are characterised with wonderful attention to details. Even camps and minor loot areas tend to be diverse from each other and when you thought you've seen everything you end up in a cave, or an abandoned subway station, or a buried church, or a condemned gas pipeline or (my favourite) a secret, and immense, airport.

There has been some complaining about the gating in the first few days, but I would assume that came mostly from people trying to rush the story. Yes, I believe that's the case if you choose to go that way, but it would be a mistake to rush the story exactly because there is so much to discover in the open world that even when you are done with the main quest there's still plenty to look around. Lots of huge areas aren't even touched by the main story which is nothing but a vague indication of where to go next. Mad Max The Game is proudly story-light which was a winning choice by the Devs you if ask me since anything more specific would have just clashed with multiple personal interpretation of Max exactly for the reasons Stray mentioned. Instead of characters, this game is about the world which faithfully to the most recent rendition of the Mad Max universe chooses to bother you very little with plot complexity leaving you the time and space to settle in, dig it up, and enjoy what feels enjoyable and forget the stuff that just doesn't (the damn mine defusing). Criticism is fair when people point out that characters are too streamlined, but this is probably a nod to old games, where NPC and dialogues were short and to the point, and to the Mad Max tradition where action and atmosphere -more than words- make the movies.

In short, I think that this game doesn't succeed or fail based on some absolute or objective metric, and that's probably why it's getting such incoherent ratings, but more on how much you enjoy the immersion in a huge postapocalyptic world made of killer cars and hundreds of explorable and mostly depressing locations. And even though this game is not directed by a George Miller, it isn't often that you find such attention for mood and tone in a blockbuster action game.

There is NO game without repetition and deifnitely no open world game without repetition. It makes sense that Mad Max doesn't click to some so it starts to feel like a grind pretty soon. Hell, I love Diablo but after a week I have to put it down, even though I still love it. At least here, all the gameplay elements are solid and flow like silk albeit certainly simplified to the extreme, and the presentation is so beautiful that it isn't rare to just get out of the car, sit on a hill, simply listen to the wind and gaze at the horizon as the sun sets over some sand dunes. Only to see some faint lights glimmer in the distance and get back in the Interceptor for more exploring and scavenging. Side note: this might have the longest viewing distance of any game I've ever played, and it adds SO MUCH to the whole experience.

"But is it fun?" Obviously yes if you ask me. But even more than usual, this is a moody one: you have to be into a particular theme, and have a certain appreciation for solitude, to appreciate it in full. Otherwise, yes, it's as boring as Shadow of Mordor, Batman or Far Cry are to me.


EDIT: spelling.

[Azazel]

It's got some interesting locations but while being unique, they also feel very samey as well. This is exacerbated by the fact that there is so little variation in the sandbox palette.

I don't think you can so easily brush off the missteps that the game makes by suggesting that people just "forget" it. The mine defusing is awful and I don't see how something this bad could have gotten through concept or "fun" testing. The combat is ropey and seriously flawed - I keep getting pounded by enemies while Max is in the midst of uninterruptable animations and executions, and the parry is also sub-par. Combat in Mordor was a far more smooth and refined variation of the same Arkham system, and it was a year ago now. The "Balloon" variation of the Assassins' Creed tower climbing is fine in theory but physically painful in practice. Seriously, blurry shitty binocular-vision actually makes my eyes hurt and once again I don't know how this made it past QA.

Car combat seems amazing at first, but before long becomes pretty samey. I'm hoping that with more unlocks it'll be less tedious, but I've clearly got to blast through a bunch more story missions to unlock more car parts in the hope that it re-funs the car combat. There also seems to be little to no point to collecting all of the minor variations in Warboy and Bandit cars, and no way (that I can find?) to check if the car you've just jacked is one of the ones you need. But they're all obviously shit compared to the Magnum Opus anyway.

I enjoyed the game a great deal at first, but it now feels like it's becoming a tedious grind. I've just about finished the first "kingdom" (Jeet) though I spent a lot of time exploring and doing the side activities and have little left to do for those, so I haven't rushed through at all. I might actually change tack and go harder on the story now. It's certainly much grindier and the gameplay isn't as nearly as smooth or refined as Mordor. The combat is a poor shadow to Mordor's combat (see what I did there?) and the driving is decent but not best-in-category. The tiny number of shotgun shells Max can carry (even upgraded) is just silly, and while I'm totally happy to ignore the silly "how can he carry all this scrap?" issue that Gamespot had, the ammo thing is less easy to handwave away to me.

Other things, such as the pronounciation of "Dinky-Di" being laughably and jarringly wrong (it's Dinki-DIE, not Dinki-DEE) You guys might WTF who cares on that one, but it's an incredibly well-known Australian expression of the "ocker" type, and while people don't really use it all that much where I live, everyone who I've played that bit of audio to has laughed at how painfully awful it is. Other voice issues include Max's Aussie accent being overdone (yeah, I know the voice actor is an Aussie, but he's overdoing it), and the number of characters with redneck hillbilly accents in post-apocalyptic Australia is also jarringly bad. Some American accents is fine, and both Entity and Furiosa provide precedent in the films (and hell, I've worked with Americans here, many Canadians, constantly with Brits, and SO many Europeans that fewer clucking hillbillies and a few British and European/Mediterranean accents would have been much nicer to hear and more realistic for the game's world.

Ahem.

So anyway, it's a decent game. It's not a great game and while the world is larger, it's not nearly as good or fun in terms of gameplay as Mordor was this time last year, nor as diverse, alive and entertaining that Far Cry 4 still manages to be for me. I think I'll probably manage to finish it, but once I do I doubt I can see myself firing it up again.

[MournelitheCalix]

I enjoyed the game a great deal at first, but it now feels like it's becoming a tedious grind. I've just about finished the first "kingdom" (Jeet) though I spent a lot of time exploring and doing the side activities and have little left to do for those, so I haven't rushed through at all. I might actually change tack and go harder on the story now. It's certainly much grindier and the gameplay isn't as nearly as smooth or refined as Mordor. The combat is a poor shadow to Mordor's combat (see what I did there?) and the driving is decent but not best-in-category. The tiny number of shotgun shells Max can carry (even upgraded) is just silly, and while I'm totally happy to ignore the silly "how can he carry all this scrap?" issue that Gamespot had, the ammo thing is less easy to handwave away to me.

Yep that just about sums this title up for me.  Right now I am to "gas town" and I simply have no desire to finish the game at all.  I don't care about the "story" such that it is.  The characters might as well be talking trees, actually the talking tree thing might be more interesting come to think about it.   The world is full of I don't really care moments, the "relic" system could have been compelling like trying to explain how the world came to be but instead its more of a unfocused meaningless grind.   The mechanics of this game is simply broken in too many places.  One of the most unforgivable things IMHO is how any sidewise contact only damages you no matter what.  The crafting system for unlocking archangels is broken and riddled with bugs.  The quest system has several times led me to the wrong place since multiple objectives show and I really don't have any way of focusing on one.   The set focus upon the way point is broken half of the time.  Your supposed to be able to find stuff in the big nothing.  I have yet to find anything but the auto kill function.   The batman mechanics even seem screwed up to me.  I loved Shadows of Mordor and I loved the batman games but this max max version doesn't feel quite right to me at all.

Anyway for $15 it was worth the pick up,  I would be really kind of mad if I paid the $60.

[Rasix]

As I said to someone else: the game is kind of fun, but it's bad. Nearly every single mechanic is poorly done, and some of them are just ill advised in the first place.

But eh, $15. I have 12 hours in, not sure I'll get much more. 

[Azazel]

I wrote most of a review based on what I posted above, but wanted to play a bit more. I put 1-2 days more into it, got to Gastown, etc but now I feel like I've got little interest in going any further. Maybe that's how I'll end my review.
I'm on PS4 and paying in AU$, so not a $15 job here. Luckily we only got it for like $20, or $40 if you count the other shit game that I returned (I wanted to take a look at Evolve) instead of the AU$80 retailers want, so like yourself, I'm good with that.

[Hawkbit]

I beat the story last night, and I'm glad because I was getting a bit bored with it. The game also started acting really strange in the last 24 hours. The ps4 touchpad stopped working, I would hit invisible objects with the car and the camera would randomly turn for no reason. Without the touchpad, there's no way to fast travel or see the map. So for the last two camps I had to hunt them by memory.

I enjoyed the story. It was the perfect length. The collect-a-thon was the part that went on for too long. Sometimes it felt like an obligation simulator, or "filling out spreadsheets: the game". I would have been very happy with the removal of scrap collection, minefields and all but a few of the convoys. The scarecrows, snipers and camps were okay-ish. It's a gorgeous game and there's a few times I wasn't sure if I was looking at a game or a real sky, they did a great job on that part.

My biggest disappointment is that they played up how scarce fuel, water, food and ammo are in the beginning. However, by a few hours in the game I realized you never really have to worry about them. The survival of the wasteland never really came to fruition, yet that would have made the game much better.

Happy with my purchase and I'd give it a 7 out of 10. What is really did was make me want Fallout 4.

[Bungee]

Been on steam for a while now. Watched some Streams and I must say I really like what they did. Granted, it's basically Shadow of Mordor reskinned, but it works really well. I think this might be the first SP focused game I'll pick up after 6 years.

[Bungee]

Been on Steam for a while now. Watched some Streams and I must say I really like what they did. Granted, it's basically Shadow of Mordor reskinned, but it works really well. I think this might be the first SP focused game I'll pick up after 6 years.

[Nija]

Busier thread: http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=24995.0

[Trippy]

Merged.

[Rishathra]

Finally finished the story after putting it off for a long while.  I was enjoying just puttering around the wasteland and didn't want it to "end," even though I knew you could keep playing afterwards.

Holy shit that ending was dark.  I mean, dark even by Mad Max post-apocalypse standards.  A good ending, but  all the same.

While I agree with essentially every criticism made in this thread, I still loved the crap out of it.  I can only imagine how amazing this thing would have been if they designed it better.  The tone, the atmosphere, the car combat, even the hth combat (not nearly as polished as Arkham or Mordor, but still fun and visceral), the voice acting (minus the overuse of hillbilly accents, and the random wasters you encounter who are trying WAY too hard), were very enjoyable, warts and all.  Tons of things they could have done better, but it was still fun and worth my time.  I'll probably never pick it up again, though.

[Azazel]

I've been playing this thing again recently, after finishing Far Cry Primal (which I don't particularly recommend, even for Far Cry Fans). I'm enjoying it a lot more this time, too - as I'm basically playing it with the same kind of mostly-relaxed mentality as I would while running around world-exploring in an M̶M̶O̶ Ubisoft open world game. Collecting all of the things on the map, despite how meaningless they are and so forth, and occasionally doing a progression quest. I won't bother trying to get all of the achievements, because there's some fucking seriously mindless grind involved in that, nor will I bother trying to collect all of the wastelander cars - especially since there's no way to tell in the world if you already have this one or not. At the pace I'm playing, I'll probably have it done in a month, and it's not too bad - played like this. I think I'm playing with much mroe of a Falconeer-style "explorer" mentality rather than a "gamer" mentality.

[Yegolev]

I do realize that this isn't on topic, but Far Cry Primal looked like something I would really enjoy.  Did it fail on execution?

I enjoyed the Max Max environments a great deal.  The underlying game was something I was OK with.

[Sky]

I think I'm playing with much mroe of a Falconeer-style "explorer" mentality rather than a "gamer" mentality.

Congrats :)

I still haven't finished GTA V, and when I started playing on the new computer....I started without my old saves, intentionally. I spend at least half the time just hanging out and enjoying all the little touches they put friggin everywhere. It's really an amazing game, which can easily be overlooked if you just race through the story.

Write up a BIIF for Primal, I thought that looked cool, too.

[Azazel]

I do realize that this isn't on topic, but Far Cry Primal looked like something I would really enjoy.  Did it fail on execution?

I enjoyed the Max Max environments a great deal.  The underlying game was something I was OK with.

Far Cry Primal... I expected to really enjoy it, and it has some positive features, but it just fell quite flat to me. The lack of co-op was a bit loss for me (I play with my wife in co-op in as many games as possible) but the lack of weapon variety, meaningful story, humour, characters with any charisma etc really reveal that underneath is really just Generic Repetitive Ubi Open World Game #32. The pets were cool, but not as cool as they could have been and added less than I had hoped. I actually started writing a review, but set it down after 1800 words. I should finish it sometime.

I think I'm playing with much mroe of a Falconeer-style "explorer" mentality rather than a "gamer" mentality.

Congrats :)

I still haven't finished GTA V, and when I started playing on the new computer....I started without my old saves, intentionally. I spend at least half the time just hanging out and enjoying all the little touches they put friggin everywhere. It's really an amazing game, which can easily be overlooked if you just race through the story.

Write up a BIIF for Primal, I thought that looked cool, too.

I'll get back to the review sometime soon. Maybe next weekend. I might summarise a BIIF when I do. The trouble with Max is that the beautiful world/visuals isn't quite enough to redeem the average quality moment-to-moment gameplay loop, repetitive tasks and MMO-10-rats-quality quality story. Which is why I'm managing to enjoy it only via playing for an hour or two a couple of times a week. If the gameplay was as strong as I'd hoped, I'd have been sucked right in - I'm a player who reads all the quests and explores most/all of the map anyway - I just like the rest of the game to be as good!