At its core, Mad Max

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Wasteland Wares

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The Road Warrior

61 IMAGES

But for Max, the reluctant hero, the wasteland is something to escape. He’s lost his car and nearly his life at the hands of Scabrous Scrotus, the resident Warlord of the refinery-city Gas Town. Fortunately, the deformed, sun-soaked blackfinger, Chumbucket, sees Max as the ordained prophet of his car-based religion, sent from the Angel of Combustion to help build and drive the Magnum Opus - the greatest vehicle the wasteland will ever know.For all this engaging premise, most of the traditional storytelling disappears until the near-end, when it ultimately, surprisingly succeeds. By the closing credits, I had a genuine reaction to Avalanche’s tale of Max, but I wish more of it had been peppered throughout my 30-40 hours of play time. Yet in the space between the premise and climax, Max is about your progression and domination of a world full of striking, ugly beauty, and incredible atmosphere. Nearly everything and everyone you’ll meet fits the purpose and lore of the wasteland; it’s alive with personality and indifference. And it may be the true star of Mad Max, despite the unsteady frame rate, texture popping, and physics quirkiness.If not the wasteland, then the excellent layers of systems that drive Mad Max’s gameplay are the real draw. Its progression mechanisms urge you to complete an exhaustive list of challenges to increase your Legend, which you cash in with Griffa – a sort of wasteland therapist – to increase base attributes. But you’ll also collect Scrap – the wasteland’s currency – to upgrade individual pieces of armor, weapons, tools, combat moves, and even Max’s look. And that’s all just Max. The same attention is offered to the Magnum Opus - where you’ll literally build the car from scrap and purchase things like nitro boosters, a harpoon, explosive javelins, spikes, armor, tires, and even side-mounted flame cannons. You are always earning something that directly changes your experience, and it’s incredibly rewarding.And fortunately, for us, the players who visit this violent husk of a world, leaving our treadmarks on its scorched earth and igniting all we touch, there are many, many things to do. In the lengthy process of wrestling control of the wasteland from its brutal, established warlords, you’ll destroy their refineries, kill their Top Dogs, burn their fuel depots, and topple their gruesome intimidation totems. All of these activities are great, and engaging in their own right, but they begin to suffer from diminishing returns as their rinse/repeat nature sinks in down the stretch.But Mad Max’s combat is the great promise at each of these destinations. Both behind the wheel and on foot, there’s an exciting flourish to the familiar feel that comes with murdering the roaming war parties of the Roadkill, Buzzard, and Scrotus’ War Boy factions. Melee combat is an instantly recognizable, absolutely brutal dance of attacks and timed-counters, though some added depth can be found in the addition of weapons, executions, chain attacks, and Fury Mode – Max’s bloodlust that turns him into a one-man wrecking crew.Vehicle combat is a high-speed gnashing of metal and the best part of Mad Max’s overflowing action. Ramming and sideswiping, using your harpoon to pull armor, wheels, and even drivers from enemy vehicles, or detonating exposed fuel drums with your gun blast - there’s simply no shortage of creative ways to annihilate on the road. And that’s necessary, as random patrols strike quickly, and the hulking convoys of wasteland machines that snake through dirt roads are challenging, but well worth the effort to take down.Even after the credits rolled, there was so much left for me to see and discover. Collecting dozens of other wasteland vehicles, building supercar variants of the Magnum Opus, competing in unique death run races, competing online against other players’ vehicles, and even collecting historical artifacts from the world before, it all reinforces the fact Mad Max is a sandbox crafted with the tone of the material in mind. And its gorgeous, striking, and often bitter visual moods can be captured in a cinematic mode, that let’s you pull the camera through time and space to snap the perfect picture or video of the destruction on screen. Despite so much time spent in the dirty, blood-stained boots of Mad Max, I know I’m nowhere near done in The Great White.