Been playing Mad Max and I have pretty much mixed feelings about it. It is interesting that this game was universally panned while having nothing of different from other AAA games but somehow thw AAA open world gameplay on this one is bad but on other games is good. The big bags of money as bribes for gaming journalists and the superficiality of youtubers is obvious. Mad Max is an AAA game that focus on the mechanics and don't have cinematic cutscenes every 2 mins and when you strip that away from those AAA games, their cutscenes, the repetitiouness and lack of creativity on the gameplay is so obvious. I wish there were enough critics on the gaming industry with enough grey matter to see through AAA cinematic galore and judge the games by their mechanics but their corruption or low IQ seems to prevent that.
Mad Max is a game focused on the mechanics, for good or worse, the combat is the same ole button smashing shit of Arkham games, the focus of the game is on the traditional popamole Ubisoft collectaton, you go around collecting lame shit that barely gives you a reward, the only somewhat original part of the game is on car combat. There is ramming, laying off mines, throwing explosive harpoons at enemy cars, shooting enemy tires with your shotgun and when everything works, it is the best part of the game.
Most of those mechanics were stripped from other games on the classic AAA fashion but Mad Max tries to do the maximum an AAA game can do with the very limited tools it has. When you are collecting scrap (the currency of the game), most places you go to get it have nice ambient storytelling touches. It isn't the case like Ubisoft games where you've seen a camp you've seen them all and they all look generic, no, most places you explore are the ruins of supermarkets, roadside dinners, abandoned airports, sea ports that are now on the middle of the desert and, on the first half of the game, you explore what was once ocean floor with calcified reefs and deposits of salt everywhere. On Mad Max world, the oceans are gone and that was a nice touch of world design.
As on Ubisoft The Game, you need to conquer enemy forts but quite some forts have interesting layouts, it isn't as lazy as Ubisoft games are, some forts are big and you go from flying on zip line to underground places on the same fort and is enjoyable enough to explore those places even if the reward isn't that great.
They tried to add some meaning to the currency system too, on other AAA games, you are inundated with money so fast that money becomes meaningless, not so much on Mad Max, the scrap you collect is limited and it will be a while before you can buy all the upgrades.
While I enjoyed exploring this post apocalyptic world, there are three HUGE flaws on Mad Max, the Arkham combat, how survival is easy and the lack of a coherent narrative. While you see on the reviews that Mad Max supposedly did Arkham combat wrong, this is typical bullshit from gaming journalists subhumans, it did exactly whay arkham asylum and city did and it is crap exactly for it, it is that you aren't larping playing batman this time you cunt. You spam left mouse button, press the right mouse button sometimes and roll out of the frey when there are too much enemies around, that is it, that is your combat right there. The game tries to shake things up by introducing different enemy types with special abilities like shield bearers, suicide bombers, explosive stick throwers but it does the traditional modern open world BS: "Okay, the first half of our game must be terribly easy because we know most casuals will only reach 50% before moving to another game and we want to cause minimum frustration."
Nowdays, the tutorial isn't only some limited area for you to learn the controls, no, no, it is fucking half of a game, that is how shitty things got. Can you guess the consequences? The tougher and more interesting enemy types only start really appearing on the second half of the map and even there they are rare, so, you will be reduced to spam the left mouse button alot for most of the game. Mad Max world tests the sanity of its people and boy, after torturing the left mouse button on my mouse for so long I started questioning my own sanity.
The second flaw of the game is how easy it is to survive, you drink water to replenish your life and have to fuel your car, I never even got close to lack fuel and need water badly, it is mostly a flavour mechanic to try to build on the feeling of desperation of the world but they go out of their way to make sure you won't be frustrated what it is unfortunately expected from an AAA game.
And the last problem of the game is the lack of a coherent narrative, actually, the game has no narrative, you are Mad Max, you need a good car and you go on fectch quests to build it, that is it. There is this warlord, Scabrous Scrotus (I really can't take this name seriously, I dunno what Avalanche Studios was thinking.), and Mad Max saw his cranium in half with a motor saw right on the introduction movie, it was one of the most bizarre things I ever saw a video game do storywise. Well, the guy somehow is still alive after that, can I take this shit seriously? It doesn't matter anyway because you don't see him do nothing of worth for 99% of the game where you are collecting scrap.
Even with all the typical AAA frustrations, there is still something quite amusing of you exploring a huge place that was once an airport and now is called the Underdune where cannibalist savages that hate the light live and people tell legends about the place. Sometimes while playing I couldn't stop thinking, man, I would love a decent game made on this world, imagine a true RPG game made on this world where you actually solve quests and interact with NPCs with real survival mechanics instead of button mashing everything that moves and collecting scrap for your car engine to be 10% better.
