Mad Max (PS4, 2015)
Despite them containing many elements which I enjoy in fiction, I have never seen a Mad Max film. My sole knowledge of the franchise is derived from Mel Gibson's guest appearance on The Simpsons, and of the "That's bait" gif from the reboot which you can see in your head as you read this. Let's have a look at what they're about:
- Dystopian
- Post-apocalypse
- Cars
- Entirely dehumanised violence
On the face of it, good stuff. After spending 60+ hours going around a world based on that premise... well, I have my doubts.
The story is the most important part, so let's start with that. You are Max. Max is driving around what's left of Australia when he is intercepted by Scrotus, chief bad guy who cuts about in a huge truck with an assortment of his lunatic followers. They take all of Max's stuff, so Max chases after him to get it back. Despite sticking a chainsaw in Scrotus' head Max still loses this follow-up encounter and Scrotus survives, at which point the game begins. Max finds what's left of his car as well as a deformed man called Chumbucket who is muttering about some sort of religion he has formed based on watching Max drive about.
At this point, I think, the point of the story is for Max to upgrade his car. That's it. He can basically do this without ever encountering Scrotus again. There's another part of the story which quite loosely tries to tie him to a slave woman (who's called Hope, obviously) and her child as apparent replacements for his pre-apocalypse family, but they don't seem to have any meaningful effect on... well, anything.
There's your game. It's not really a good sign when the central purpose of a game doesn't really exist. As you complete story missions you unlock new areas of the map, with a new central stronghold in each and a new person in charge for you to interact with briefly. Then you move on.
A problem I had quite early in the game was being overwhelmed with things to do. This is a problem which seems to stem back to reaction to Grand Theft Auto IV, where people felt it was too constrained and linear. As a result, open-world games have been petrified of forcing the player in any sort of direction, instead putting them in the world and leaving them to it. As games have developed and got larger, this problem has intensified. You get thrown into a world with very little explanation as to your purpose, you get Story Missions, Wasteland Missions, Wasteland Encounters, as well as all the other collectible/interactive locations. It's not even the size or the choice that sticks out here, it's the apparent lack of benefit from them all. Your instinct is do the story missions, but some other stuff is quicker and could be done on the way to your destination. But then what purpose does that serve? Oh, it lowers threat in a region. What does that do? It lets you upgrade your car. Okay. Even the game's ending is so anti-climatic it feels like you were just intended to spend time in the space, rather than do anything in it.
This sense of confusion isn't helped by the repetitiveness of what's going on. Story Missions are indistinguishable from Wasteland Missions. You go somewhere, you do something, you punch a bunch of guys. But then when you do a Wasteland Mission, the lack of any real Story means that the outcome of these at times seems more significant than the Story Missions. There are times when the game feels like a concept which was thought up, got a bunch of people really excited and thereafter didn't involve anyone who knows anything about narrative structure or pacing.
The other things you can do in the Wasteland aren't especially exciting either. There are scavenging locations, where you can find some Scrap (the in-game currency which upgrades Max's car and, er, Max himself). There are 191 of these. Some of them aren't even locations at all, it's just a bit of glowing metal lying on the ground. Most of them involve some sort of modified car/building/thing from the past though, where there'll be three bits of Scrap, two of which are out in the open and one which is hidden in an infuriatingly stupid place. This happens a lot. It says something about how dull the scavenging is as a means of world-padding and exploration-forcing though when it's the sheer volume of them which is the worst aspect. Of all the locations in the game there's one that I can recall right now. What looked like a street of houses mostly buried in the sand. You climb down into one of them and find it's almost perfectly preserved, and has a person lying in a bed. They might be dead, they might be asleep, they might be pretending so you don't try to kill them. I didn't actually, come to think of it. That's what I remember. In a game which I spent more than 60 hours with, that isn't a good sign.
In addition to the scavenging spots there are an assortment of camps for you to infiltrate and destroy. These are slightly larger but follow the same basic pattern. Since they're bigger they're generally more convoluted and harder to navigate, making it harder to know where you're going and where to find things. In Oil Camps you destroy some oil pumps which... does... a thing, and in Top Dog camps you fight through an assortment of henchmen to defeat an eight foot tall man in a gimp mask. These battles aren't any more interesting than regular melee combat. Before going into a camp there's always someone hanging around outside ready to give you intel, and it always follows the same pattern. There's a secret entrance, there's perimeter defences, and the main guy doesn't like it when you hit him. Great.
The melee combat is probably the most satisfying part of the game, even (because?) it's one of the simplest. It's your standard third person hit/parry button masher, with very little variety. You press square to hit guys, you press triangle to block them when the prompt appears above your head. As you upgrade Max you can employ some finishers but these only go as far as throwing pressing X into the mix. Battles can be a bit difficult to begin with until you upgrade him a bit and get used to the rhythm, but once you do you can't lose. He has a fury meter which activates when he's killed enough people but that just makes individual enemies need a punch or two fewer to die, it's not important.
The camera and targeting is probably your biggest enemy here, especially if you decide to employ Max's shotgun. While you can target before you aim, the game effectively auto-targets when you press shoot. In many cases it's quicker. But, if you're next to an enemy and a fuel can and you press shoot, guess which of them the game targets. I wish there had been more explosives involved to be honest. In some locations there are Thundersticks which are basically spears with explosives on the end that you can throw at people/the environment or jab people with, but they're only in certain places and are basically a free pass to winning with no problems. It says something that this is the most enjoyable and well-playing part of the game.
While I said I don't know much about Mad Max, I do know one thing. It's very car-heavy. Max drives a car. He likes his car a lot. Most of the bad guys centre around cars somehow, and the civilisation which is persisting has a bunch of car-related objects/mythos at its centre. This is actually quite true for Australia, which is a big place where you need a car to get around. I like cars too, in video games at least. Always have done. In open world games I usually roll my eyes when people criticise the driving. Borderlands and GTAIV are the big ones for this. You get used to it. Not in Mad Max you don't. This is, by far, the worst driving I have ever experienced in an open-world game.
As you progress through the game you can purchase upgrades for your car. Tyres, engine, exhaust, armour, etc. On the upgrade screen there's a chart at the side showing how much each upgrade affects things like the speed and handling. Having spent my final five hours or so of the game driving around in a fully upgraded car, I'm still at a loss as to what the upgrades do. The car is slow. The car gets bogged down and won't accelerate in some areas, which don't appear to be any different from the regular sand you find everywhere else. Somehow, there's no handbrake, so it's impossible to fling the car about properly, arcade style. The regular brakes you do have seem to double up, because if you try to turn while braking the car effectively digs in and comes to the most out of control stop you've ever seen. It won't roll though, because it can't. Even the boost you can unlock seems to make the screen zoom out rather than increase the car's speed. It's awful. In a video about Avalanche Studios' latest open world game, Rage 2, Jim Sterling described the driving as "something where friction isn't a concept that's in the game." That's the feeling I get here. It's like no driving physics I've ever encountered, and that's a bad thing.
Since the basis of Mad Max is gangs of lunatics that drive around in cars, a key aspect of the open world is gangs of lunatics driving around in cars trying to attack you. The game gets this wrong as well, in multiple ways:
If you're driving along and a group of two or three enemies appears driving towards you, you might try to ram them head on. They'll dodge it. If you steer harder to try and hit them, they'll still dodge it and you'll end up stopped and stuck because of the car's ****ty handling, and you'll then get swamped by multiple cars.
If you're driving along and find some enemies going the same direction as you - a common occurrence, as there are Convoys which you have to destroy, with a lead car and 5/6 as back up going round in a circle at various points on the map - you can try a few things. You can press square to ram a car alongside you. You can try driving into one and grinding it down if you've installed spikes on your wheels. Except you won't, because they'll dodge that as well.
If a car starts chasing you, you might try to slow down so it can go alongside you and you can try to ram or grind it, it won't. If you stop, it stops.
It's also impossible to avoid being chased if you find some enemies. In a Grand Theft Auto for instance you might find yourself being chased by the police. If you drive flat out in the opposite direction you will lose the police. Not here. You're in a fully upgraded car driving full speed. A group of three cars drives along the road towards you. You can't be bothered with the fuss of killing them so you keep going. They stop, turn round, and catch up to you. Just imagine what that's like. Now imagine it happening every time you drive to a location you have to do a mission.
All of this underwhelming combat is a moot point anyway, because you have two weapons that can destroy a car instantly. Either Max's shotgun can take out a wheel or blow up the fuel tank, or the thunderpoon can blow it up. Why even bother? And in the Death Races dotted around the map, why bother trying to race when you can just blow your competitors up with no penalty? And you'll have to, because at the start you are always rammed by the car next to you straight off the line.
Pretty much everything in the game seems counter-productive to what the game is about. It's about cars, but the cars drive like arse. It's about the gangs that have taken over, but although there are apparently three or four different types it makes no different. It's a vast wasteland built out of the ruins of civilisation, but there's nothing to do or see or any sense that you're in a real place. Making your way through the Wasteland and the activities within doesn't feel like exploration. It doesn't feel like a solemn task as you fight for survival among people as desperate as you who're going through the same thing. It feels like an obligation, a scattergun list of hundreds of generic activities in a generic location big enough to hold all of them.
Max isn't even interesting enough to compensate for this. Look at the picture. When you're going through camps and scavenging locations you can pick up History Relics, which are photographs or notes from before... whatever it was that happened, happened. No matter what he finds, Max is always the same. A strained, desperate, husky voice trying far too hard to be pained, moaning for the change people have gone through. A picture of some cows? Look at all that food just wandering around freely. I'm sure there was one about a toilet, at which he bemoaned a waste of water. This is about the only time the game comes close to explaining why the world is the way it is, but they're so fleeting, brief and dreary that when you've heard one you've heard them all. Much like the rest of the game.
And here's something that's been bugging me for the few days I've been doing this write-up. Max is what, in his forties? One of the pictures he finds was from a wedding. "M- Married? I think I did that once." Right. So you're old enough to have been married. You're old enough to have lived before the world ended. Before all the water dried up, before the food riots, the infection, the killing, everything else. It can't have been more than twenty years for all of this to happen. Yet the only thing left from before is some rusting frames of ships and boats lying around? The skeletons of some huge creatures sticking out of the sand? No. I'm not having this. Games that have interesting back-stories make some attempt at fleshing them out and explaining them. A game that I've spent more than sixty hours in should have more than this conveniently forgetful gruff wank moaning about everything.
And you know what else? The game is weird. The story is nonsense as I've described, but you wonder how much of it is in Max's mind. In an early story mission you meet a guy called Grippa. Grippa appears to have a small boat attached to his back, and as you complete challenges you earn tokens you can take to him to spend and upgrade Max. Why? Why this... weirdness? Why is it like a dream whenever you talk to him? Why have they tried to rip off the man in the top hat from Red Dead Redemption by adding in some faux-philosophical bull**** every time you visit him? And how can you have Max and all of these lunatics he meets be the way they are when the only food is maggots, rats, tins of dog food and water? How is it possible to have so much potential for a world and make something so completely bland and pedestrian, yet with these oddities thrown in?
It looks nice, mind you. The lighting's good and I like that it has a semi-decent photomode. I've shared some of my pictures here. The game is split up into four distinct regions and I only realised late on that they're all supposed to look different. The final one of these is basically completely phoned-in. It's just sand with a couple of trains and bridges half-buried and sticking out like icebergs. Even with that and direct comparisons in mind, there's not enough to the imagery of the landscape to make it feel diverse and well-built. It's quite similar to the gameplay. Large, repetitive, and filled with superficial differences from location to location.
Mad Max was made by the same people who make the Just Cause games. When I played Just Cause 3 a few months ago I was disappointed by much of the same things as I was here. It's quite concerning that all of these games are generally well-received, and sell well. They shouldn't. If this was the only video game I'd ever played, I'd probably think it was amazing. It isn't.
