As with many things in life, timing is everything. Mad Max would have been the perfect ‘Summer Drought’ game; a perfect mindless adventure through a real enough world to keep the boredom from driving you insane. Whilst there isn’t much ‘wrong’ with Mad Max, the release date has heavily dampened the success of a competent open world video game, and that is its biggest problem.

 

The Mad Max trilogy, and recent reboot, is about a man who kills lots of psychotic petrol heads and drives cars pretty darn good over sand. And that is exactly what this game is. As Max, you need to cross the desert to reach a mythical place untouched by the chaos of the apocalypse. To do this, you need to upgrade your car, The Magnum Opus, to be the best car in the land and that is pretty much where the story ends.

 

Between story missions, which barely give any plot anyway, you drive around a remarkably beautiful apocalypse killing the criminally insane and making the world a better place for the (slightly) more sane people still populating the Earth. The context given always relates back to the car, which gives a delightfully silly undertone. Even though Max is supposed to be an everyman figure in a world of madness, he is just as obsessed with his car as his enemies are about driving a hammer into civilian skulls. He treats everyone like dirt outside of cutting a deal, but because the story is so light, he becomes quite easily relatable since you learn very little about him. Through it all, Max is just a guy who wants to get a better life for himself and blood-crazed murderers keep getting in his way. We can all understand that makes him a little angry every now and then.

 

Mind you, Max isn’t exactly free of the mindless violence infecting everyone else, either. You kill a lot of people. Combat works like the Batman Arkham trilogy; you skip between several enemies at once, countering enemy attacks when necessary and rolling away from others. It’s a lot less smooth as Max is supposed to move more ‘realistically’ than The Dark Knight and is only able to attack enemies within a couple of strides. It makes the combat feel stop-start and animations are locked until you either finish the punch or get hit, meaning you always get hit mid punch.

 

Not even the counter move works until you have exited your punch animation and watching a goon about to attack makes you feel helpless and annoyed. Whilst it is simple and less free flowing than Batman, Mad Max’s blows feel glorious. Each punch lands with all the feeling of a small bomb on the recipients face, and each crunch that resounds out of each impact make you feel sorry for the poor bastard you are pummelling to the ground.

 

Mad Max also features car combat, something that often feels tedious in other games, which hits various highs and lows. The highs come when you are chasing a target through the desert, for example, a convoy. These are groups of around five vehicles protecting one and drive through the wasteland (on a set circular path, for some video game reason) and it is your job to destroy the convoy. As you chase it, enemy vehicles break away from the pack using a variety of flammable and sharp weapons to dismantle The Magnum Opus bit by bit. Battling your way through the pack at speed is great fun, as both sides have a clear objective in destroying/defending the convoy.

 

The vehicle combat breaks down pretty much everywhere else, though. When driving through the world and encounter the next psycho aiming to make you his next head ornament, you have two choices. Drive away or attack. Driving away is boring (why would want to avoid fun?) and attacking ends up in a weird dance where you try to ram each other, but end up driving in circles around each other as you both try to find the other’s exhaust pipe. It’s like watching a dog chase its tail with more explosive results, but not nearly as entertaining.

 

The world features enough side quests to warrant a play through stretching the 30 hour mark, ranging from blowing shit up to blowing people up. There are settlements to capture, races to win, and the standard collectable searching plaguing open world games of today (seriously, can this die soon?). It is easy to lose yourself in on account of its beautiful destruction, as I mentioned earlier, and the lack of direction the story has.

 

The open world genre could learn a couple of things from Mad Max. It is technically flawless, has plenty to do, and is rarely a dull affair. But it does everything competently; there is nothing unique to Mad Max and the lack narrative allows you to just put it down and never come back until you literally have nothing else to play. It’s a fun afternoon waster, which is why summer was the perfect window for its release. If you find yourself with some spare time, Mad Max will fill that void comfortably, but it isn’t anything to lose your mind to.