Mad Max: Fury Road was one of 2015’s best, intense and most thrilling movies. The Mad Max universe itself almost begs to have a video game based off of it. I’m sure there is very few gamers who would say no to a game filled with psychotic factions fighting to the death on the road in a desolate wasteland using whatever they could find to fight and to survive.

This is the world of Mad Max and what a beautiful world it is. Beautiful may seem an odd word to describe a barren, post-apocalyptic wasteland but it is beautiful, gruesomely so. This is the best looking wasteland ever seen in a game – and it’s on a massive scale too. The world is split into three large sections, further split into five smaller sub-sections along with a larger desert-like area and the repugnant Gastown, always on the horizon. And even though every single sub-section may just be ‘wasteland,’ Avalanche Studios have went to great lengths to make every one look different; whether it’s a destroyed highway, the leftovers of a massive turbine area or the dried-up remnants of a lagoon.

There is masses of content too, every area is filled with areas to scavenge, oil plantations to destroy, scarecrows to tear down and races to partake in. Completing it all would take upwards of 50 hours, if you wanted to actually do it. The problem is – like many open-world games – while this content is fun for awhile (It took me 30 hours before I ‘completed’ the game) everything just ends up feeling a little samey. While massive lengths have been went to to make the world seem distinct and original, individual areas all just feel (and look) the same.

Both in car and ground combat, enemies feel similar too. While the game has three different enemy factions each with different tiers of enemies and vehicles no faction feels unique in any way as the tiers are the same throughout all and the only distinct feature is visual appearance. Although, oddly, every single boss looks and plays exactly the same and while most normal enemy ground combatants look unique and crazy in their own way, most vehicles look very similar. This can end up being a little problematic when you are fighting a war party on the road and a suicider drives up next to you with no way of telling it’s not just a normal car.

The starring part of anything Mad Max – movie or game – is the vehicular combat. Luckily, Avalanche have pulled off a mostly thrilling and visceral experience, though, at times is a little frustrating. The star of Mad Max here is the Magnum Opus; your car, created by the mechanic Chumbucket (and who hails you as a divine saint) and will serve as your vessel to traverse, upgrade and brawl with. Like Max, the Magnum Opus will begin barebones and it’s up to you to upgrade it with scrap – which can be found doing pretty much anything. Upgrades come in many forms, from better tires and new paints to more powerful engines, damaging rims to grind against enemies and defensive spikes to impale jumping attackers. Although, while there are many upgrades they all unlock in a very linear fashion by completing this challenge or completing this quest. This means that instead of creating a truly unique vehicle to you, you instead just have a base vehicle which slowly upgrades.

You will also quickly gain access to new weapons to do battle with from your vehicle. Beginning with just a basic ram attack, you will soon have access to a high-powerful sniper, explosive throwing spears and fire that can shoot out of the sides of the Opus. Your most trusty weapon, however, will be the harpoon. With this, you can tear off car doors, rip off tires or just impale the driver and yank him out the vehicle. While incredibly cool can lead to problems with weaker vehicles being – well, too weak. Stronger vehicles face oddly similar problems in being, you guessed it..too strong. While not annoyingly difficult it is still frustrating reaching a large convoy to instantly kill half the enemies and then spending five minutes chasing down and slowly destroying the other half. More balancing would have been appreciated.

This problem continues to translate through to ground combat. Fighting on the ground is majoritively button-mashing fistfighting in a dumbed down version of the Arkham series’ fighting style. Where Arkham itself succeeded in having multiple combos, different styles of attacks and many gadgets to use, Mad Max fails by having a one-button counter system, no advanced combos and no fun gadgets. Not to say it isn’t enjoying, the Arkham systems greatness is in its simpleness but having something else to do other than hit, hit with weapon (until it breaks) or use shotgun (until you run out of ammo) would have been nice.

Combat is again not helped by failing to do something fellow Arkham system user, Shadow of Mordor, did do – have a decent camera. Shadow of Mordor, in fact, had a great camera, one which always kept itself centred on the nearby group of enemies during combat and would quickly move when an enemy was about to attack. Mad Max’s on the other hand fails. It will very rarely, if ever, attempt to focus on nearby enemies and nearly every single fight you will be attacked by an enemy off screen with no chance to counter.

The story itself doesn’t try incredibly hard either. After an admittedly great and stirring introduction where Max loses his car, The Enforcer, Max has to try and survive off the land and finds refuge with Chumbucket. It’s a slow start and unfortunately never seems to pick up speed again until near-end game. Throughout the story you will come into contact with many (mostly psychotic) survivors and trade favours until you get what you need and move on. This means playing errand boy and doing fetch quests for a majority of your time and for people you – or Max – don’t really care for. There are very few memorable characters here – even Chumbucket, probably the most interesting of all, talks too much for his own good – and the few others are around for too short a time. And while end-game provides a more purposeful mission and an enjoying (if a little easy) fight, it almost ruins it with either illogical writing or an illogical choice from Max. Though, to be fair, he is mad.

When it comes to Mad Max it isn’t a case of quality over quantity and rather lots and lots of mostly solid content. Nothing spectacular, nothing terrible. And for a game of such high visual fidelity frame drops are rare, though can occur in large vehicular battles or during the stunning dust storms – which brilliantly evoke memories of Fury Road. Though it is a little odd for a series so well-known for its car’s for nearly all side content to be on foot.

When compared to the absolutely brilliant, visceral and thrilling Mad Max: Fury Road this game seems rather dull, but then, so do most things. It may sound like Mad Max the game isn’t all that good but it is and will provide you with hours of fun. Just unfortunately, nothing stands out, while everything available here is solid for what it is, it lacks the psychotic charisma that injects so much life into George Miller’s universe.

7.5/10

Platforms: PC, PS4, Xbox One

Release Date: September 1, 2015