Mad Max is a blast, but also kind of a mess—a shame, because vehicle combat games are scarce these days.
The last major one was David Jaffe's Twisted Metal reboot over three years ago, an arena-based multiplayer brawler exclusive to the PlayStation 3. No one's tried their mettle at an open world, combat-focused, cross-platform role-playing toy box as ambitious as Mad Max before. So it breaks my heart to have to report that the game, just released on Windows, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 (reviewed), has serious technical shortcomings that mar an otherwise thrilling ride.
Mad Max the game wouldn't exist without Mad Max: Fury Road, director George Miller's cinematic paroxysm wrapped in two hours of chase porn amidst desiccated dunefields and mesas glazed in persimmon, cinnabar, and Judas Priest album art. If the film was style over storytelling, developer Avalanche's vehicle combat sandbox offers the inverse: a grander, more accretive post-apocalyptic Oz.
It may be missing Miller's feminist revenge fantasy, and the handful of women that do appear are back to asking favors or being rescued. But Avalanche's dystopian world-down-under feels more textured, and its mostly male characters (though still clichéd hooligans) are at least more colorfully written than any of the film's taciturn Cirque du Soleil wannabes.
Yes, the cartoon villains growl and grandstand, but allies also divulge regional backstory, a spirit guide prods Max to reconsider his past, and a quirky mechanic companion bawls hilarious backseat hosannas each time you catch air like the joyriding goofballs in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
Even Max, finally voiced by a bona fide Australian actor, has volumes to say here. If Fury Road was a near-silent film, dialogue-wise, Mad Max feels Biblically talkative by comparison.
Avalanche wraps all of that around a monster car-building game that's as deep as the bleak expanse you'll motor through is wide. As far as I can tell, the game takes place chronologically before Miller's film, though the connection points are fuzzy. After battling one of the sons of Immortan Joe (the film's big bad, extant but unseen here), you're knocked back to rookie status so you can spend the rest of the game unlocking outfits and special abilities used in fist-swinging brawls just like the ones in Warner Bros' Arkham line of Batman games.
But for most of the game you're behind the dash of a rusted hulk that gradually metamorphoses into a gleaming four-wheeled weapon of mass destruction that wouldn't be out of place at a monster truck rally. Your companion dubs it the "magnum opus," a rocket-fueled, spike-hulled, skull-ornamented uberpastiche of whatever vehicular mayhem floats your boat. To piece it together, you prowl a balkanized wasteland ruled by warlords, unearthing collectibles, storming enemy strongholds to lower the prominence of roving car gangs, scrounging for scrap to augment your arsenal, and conducting sorties for allies to roll the story forward.
Avalanche is renowned for its sprawling Just Cause open-world games, and those colossally vast fingerprints are all over Mad Max. It's a crawl up from the dregs in Max's hardscrabble world, but Avalanche iterates objectives to keep repetition to a minimum. Enemy camps, for instance, are at first easily breached, with collectibles or destructible objectives in plain sight, but later locales are heavily fortified labyrinths, each a singular exploration puzzle, with scrap or workbench components carefully hidden in obscure corners.
Hot air balloons necessary to glass an area's objectives (clearly inspired by Assassin's Creed's area-unlocking towers) are each uniquely arduous: some defended by enemies, others in need of fuel or the removal of cable tethers. Patrols and convoys bristle with increasingly powerful, tactically savvy escorts, and "death run" races, which unlock vehicles and permanent fuel depots, provide some of the most satisfying white-knuckle rustbucket-shredding this side of Steve Jackson's Car Wars. Completing all the regional tasks necessary to clear a single warlord's territory of enemy patrols can take upwards of a dozen hours.
At times the needle skips or falters anyway. Gathering intel to see around camp fortifications requires only the ability to point your car at a waypoint and chat with a wastelander. Taking out snipers is as straightforward as sniping each witless shooter first. Convoys fall apart as soon as you dispatch the lead vehicle, something you can too easily accomplish with a few hits from an explosive harpoon. "Top dog" mini-bosses are pattern-slaved, so if you've grabbed the local intel on their exploits, they're pushovers.
Clearing minefields involves using a dog to bark out locations, but wastes time by requiring you drive a primitive buggy—as if the dog couldn't do so from the magnum opus's posterior. And character leveling (independent of the vehicle) seems needlessly split along two tracks, one fed by scrap you collect, the other by tokens you unlock by performing feats you're incentivized to anyway, after which you have to drive to remote locations and listen to a crackpot philosopher just to bring up the spend interface.
Vehicle combat, by contrast, is pretty much unimpeachable. Every little tweak adjusts your car's control equilibrium, offering dozens of feasible configurations, allowing you to play with everything from speedy but vulnerable death machines to weapons-bristling, armored up tanks. The car roleplaying game feeds tactical choices that see you racing alongside and sideswiping enemies, angling for ramming-speed T-bones, fending off boarders, dropping mines, jetting spumes of flame from your sides, launching harpoons, and probing for weak spots (fuel tanks, tires, the driver) with shotguns and missiles.
The tragic kicker is that the game anomalously bogs down without warning, the frame rate suddenly chugging, turning already delicate vehicular controls into impossibly fiddly ones. I have no idea why—it often happens in the least complex areas, suggesting it's not intrinsic to the engine, but maybe a fixable coding issue somewhere. All I know is that it's bad enough to negatively impact the way the game plays, which is where it crosses the line from aesthetically debatable to functionally unacceptable.
If you can live with that (restarting the game periodically helps), this is as close as anyone's gotten to an estimable sandbox fender-shredder. It's certainly more than an adjunct to Miller's film: a punk-Western version of Mordor swarming with heavy metal foes. And by the close, you've perhaps become one yourself, your victories tallied in piles of battlefield corpses, your magnum opus a slaughterhouse tool, fetishized with menacing decals and macabre hood ornaments.
For a rebel loner, Max does one hell of a job waging the sort of unmitigated total war his least savory foes could only dream of.
