A little more than 10 years ago, not long after I quit my job to become a freelance writer, a colleague warned me that sometimes the work could be grueling and unrewarding. “I want to talk to you when you’re writing a story only for money,” he said. It took a decade, but I finally found that assignment: reviewing Mad Max for Kotaku. I never would have finished this game if someone wasn’t paying me to do so. If this were Thunderdome, I would have let Mad Max win.
Not everything about Mad Max is awful. The wasteland is austerely pretty, and driving through it can be pleasant. The car combat is reasonably engaging, especially once you unlock the Thunderpoon, a shoulder-fired missile used by Chumbucket, your mechanic and near-constant companion. Moments in the plot surprised me. There are five campaign-based achievements/trophies in the game, and I kind of enjoyed working to get the last two.
Those modest satisfactions are not worth the time it takes to complete the journey. It begins with a series of dull multi-minute cutscenes—before the menu, then after you press start, then the opening credits, then some more narration—involving an antagonist known as Lord Scrotus. (A silly name, yes, but this is a movie franchise with a character who goes by the Doof Warrior.) Things go downhill from there. One of the very first missions is to run about 20 feet so that you can watch another cutscene.
Once things actually get underway, Mad Max is a sprawling and bloated open-world game with story missions and side missions and to-do lists—destroy some enemy towers, invade some enemy camps, collect some items—that would take scores of hours to complete. It’s not a Ubisoft game, but it feels like one: Watch Dogs in the desert.
When you do get to interact with the world, the game is larded with short animations that play when Max takes important actions: when he fills his canteen with water (which he can drink to restore his health); when he bends down on one knee to eat dog food or maggots (another way to increase his hit points); when he refills his car with gasoline (which he must do to avoid being stranded); when he ascends in a balloon to scan a new region with his binoculars (which marks new locations on his map).
This commitment to realism is sort of impressive but also a little silly. Drinking water and eating dog food don’t actually make you more impervious to violence, after all. Nor do these animations make the game more “cinematic.” Mad Max.
OS: 64-bit Windows Vista, 7, or 8
CPU: Intel Core i5-650, 3.2 GHz or AMD Phenom II X4 965, 3.4 Ghz
RAM: 6 GB
Video: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660ti (2 GB Memory or higher) or AMD Radeon HD 7870 (2 GB Memory or higher)
DirectX: DX11
HDD: 32 GB available space
Download the game downloader from the button below and run it then wait until it complete.
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