Mad Max is one of those post apocalyptic open world games that is very easy to overlook.
The gameplay is surprisingly addictive. Most of the activities revolve around the Magnum Opus and your car in general. You snipe enemies from a distance, destroy towers, clear minefields, upgrade the car, fight convoys, race across the wasteland, and improve Max himself.
For me, the vehicle gameplay is the real heart of Mad Max. The convoy battles are easily the best part of the game. Chasing a convoy through the desert while smashing enemy cars, using the harpoon, firing the shotgun, and trying to destroy the lead vehicle feels great. It is also something I do not see often in other open world games. As someone who loves Mad Max: Fury Road, these sequences capture that same feeling of chaos on the road better than I expected.
Hand to hand combat is also very satisfying. Every punch feels heavy and brutal. The basic system reminds me of the Batman Arkham games, but it is simpler, rougher, and much more violent. Max does not fight like a superhero. He fights like someone trying to survive.
The story is probably the weakest part of the game. There simply is not that much going on for most of the campaign. The main missions often feel more like another reason to travel somewhere, fight some enemies, and keep moving.
It is only around the last quarter of the game that the story starts to dig deeper into Max as a character and delivers some genuinely strong emotional moments. Before that, Max mostly feels like a strange driver wandering through the wasteland, helping people when it benefits him and then moving on.
Mad Max is not a game I would recommend for its story. I would recommend it for the wasteland, the cars, the brutal combat, and especially the convoy battles.
If you enjoyed Fury Road and want an open world game built around surviving and driving through that kind of wasteland, this is still worth playing.
