Having re-watched Mad Max: Fury Road recently, I decided to finally get around to playing the Mad Max game on PS4. My current feelings are...mixed. The idea of an open-world game set in that universe seems sound in theory but it seems kind of limited so far - then again, I guess I'm still in the early stages. Some of the controls are a little clumsy (turns out Square is used for both igniting fuel cans and refueling your car so if you're not standing in front of the exact right spot when you press it...yeah) and the fighting system's pretty whatever. I also don't dig the "collect X things to 100% a place" approach to locations, seems a little antithetical to the property. The driving's not bad, though. We'll see if I manage to see it through to completion or give up in favour of something that's probably better.
It's honestly not that great. I tried really hard to like it when I was looking for shiny stuff to test my new GPU on. The highlights I recall, in order, were:
- At one point, a really dull cookie-cutter NPC was killed mid-dialogue by some sheet metal whipped up by a storm.
- The car battles with the convoys, pulling bits off them with grappling hooks etc, starts edging towards epic.
- The engineer guy clinging to your car is a descent companion.
- Some of the locations look cool and right.
- The storms are atmospheric.
- Cars look good in chrome...
Most everything else is super rote, and screams 'ran out of budget'. There's one nice cut-scene in the middle, the Arkham fight system is fine enough, but everything else is pretty much an unimaginative grind. They use literally the same boss at the end of every story 'dungeon'. I think that says it all :/
(Although weirdly I found a variant boss in the basement of a gas station once. It was a hint of what could have been, if the open world was more populated with surprises...)
Try at least one race against the exploding spikey hedgehog cars though. That was kinda fun