So what was wrong with Mad Max?

[DudeistBelieve]

I played it for like 20 minutes last night after picking it up on sale.

Why did this get such hate? Theres a compentant game here. Yeah the combat is ripped out of Batman, but you know what else? That combat works. And the vehicle component to it is pretty neat. maybe I'll find it blander as time goes on but at the moment I'm enjoying the idea scavenging parts and gasoline for my vehicle. I like the decision to let us make our own vehicle. I feel more attached to it like Max probably does.

It's sort of like Twisted Metal and Jalopy had a bastard love child.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Nothing is "wrong" with it. It just came out at a time when the market was oversaturated with similar games. I don't think this game has any ill will towards it, I think most people just don't really care about its existence.

 

[pookie101]

i dont remember it getting much hate as such, the main complaint was that it was very by the numbers and average with no stand out features.

personally i enjoyed it

 

[DudeistBelieve]

i dont remember it getting much hate as such, the main complaint was that it was very by the numbers and average with no stand out features.

personally i enjoyed it

still considering the source material, it's brilliant it's as good as it is.

 

[nomotog_v1legacy]

The lack of focus made it feel too generic and impossible to stand out in a flooded genre.

 

[CaitSeith]

Most of the complains come from reviewers. Unless the game does something exceptional or really memorable, being another open-world among many others is met with pessimism.

 

[aozgolo]

I don't recall it getting a lot of hate, but it came out like 2 months before Fallout 4 which given that they are both post-apocalyptic open world games with a heavy action focus... well you just can't compete with Fallout's hype train which really overshadowed it.

 

[baddude1337]

It's pretty fun, but as already noted the gameplay is a very run of the mill open world collect-a-thon, and the gap between upgrades is just too long.

I still haven't finished it and likely never will. It seems pretty fresh at the start, but you quickly realise you are doing the exactly same thing throughout the entire map, it never changes bar your upgrades making things a bit easier. It just turns into a slog.

The melee combat also feels 'off' to me. I think it's because unlike Arkham and other Arkham combat clones you can't interrupt an animation to block or counter. This makes getting hit when on the attack unavoidable, which REALLY interrupts the flow of combat, and makes pretty much every hit you take feel very cheap.

Still, it's a very visually stunning game, and even with my old laptop's 765m it runs on very high settings, owing to it being an actually stellar PC port. For the sale price I paid I definitely got my monies worth too at a few dozen hours or so.

 

[sXeth]

I don't remember it getting too much hate. It was really just kind of alright.

The negatives were mostly that boss fights didn't really have much creative to offer and the vehicle combat doesn't really improve, everything just gets spongey/spammy unless you get upgrades (several of which were useless like the flamethrowers).

Gasoline scavenging also went by the wayside pretty fast as I recall. Its never more then a token nod to the setting which leaves it as a minor obtrusion in the game rather then a concern or motivator. I don't really even remember why this happened. Whether it was never a concern beyond the game trying to tell you it was, or there was an upgrade for fuel efficiency or storage or something.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

It was bland and boring and it wasn't worth $60. I'm actually amazed that so many people couldn't tell that from gameplay trailers.

 

[DudeistBelieve]

It was bland and boring and it wasn't worth $60. I'm actually amazed that so many people couldn't tell that from gameplay trailers.

Did we watch the same trailer? The one on steam, if nothing else, is a fantastic sell job of the games mechanics.

Like it doesn't look like "Heres your Mad Max game" it's a "We built an awesome game that happens to have the Mad Max License"

 

[Pseudonym]

I remember it was considered 'kinda dull'. I don't remember much hate. It was seen as mediocre.

Going over the reviews at metacritic it got middling reviews and has an average of a 7. Very few reviews call it bad and most reviewers regocnise it as competently put together. Thing is, most of those reviewers have played a lot of similar games and got bored of the same formula after a while. The kicker is that mad max is, according to many of those same reviewers, straight up worse than some of its direct competitors. (other openworld games with litle purpose like far cry 3 and 4 and shadow of mordor)

 

[meiam]

It's just one more generic open world game in the pile, total biscuit made a pretty good video talking about that.

I also picked it up on sale and played maybe 5 hour of it, it just never did anything that impressed me. It's still installed and I may very well go back to it one day, but it's generic at it's finest.

 

[stroopwafel]

I'd say the game was 'competent' but lacked any real incentives to stay invested. It didn't really have any interesting characters or story or even some standout setpiece missions to punctuate the filler. It was just the same map clearing crap over and over. It's like the developers copy/pasted the Arkham combat into a Ubisoft game. The car combat was mildy enjoyable and the Arkham combat was at a slower pace but not bad either but fact is you play the game for a few hours and you've seen all it has to offer.

I think releasing the game after summer on the same day as MGS5 didn't help either. If they released it a few months earlier it would have probably done a bit better. Not that the game wouldn't still be mediocre though.

 

[Zhukov]

Eh, it was okay I guess.

Actually, it was very, very, very okay.

Like, aggressively okay.

It was a bland, open-world collect-o-thon in an industry currently overflowing with bland, open-world collect-o-thons. It was like being a 2D platformer in the 90s or a brown military FPS in 2010.

Like you say, the combat is a Arkham knock off. Except it's worse than the Arkham games. (Or Shadow of Mordor which uses the same system.) So why should I play it when those games are available?

Their Max is a right boring ****.

It had the misfortune of coming out after Fury Road breathed awesome new life into Mad Max. Then they tried to crowbar a whole lot of Fury Road references into the game late in development. So they ended up in this awkward halfway point between old and new and did a shitty job at both.

I'm glad you're enjoying the idea of scavenging fuel and parts for your car because the idea is all the game offers.

Scavenging fuel goes right out the window after a couple of upgrades. Scavenging parts turns into an Ubisoft checklist exercise. Congratulations player, you have scavenged 24/1070 of the things! Scavenge all the things for an achievement so you momentarily feel you have accomplished something before grim reality reasserts itself!

The only thing I remember enjoying was the convoy missions. And there are only eight or so in the whole game. Once those were done I promptly uninstalled with nary a backwards glance.

 

[Barbas]

*Strains to remember*.

...Oh yeah, I know that one. Don't think it had enough ass-less chaps in it, to be honest. I can understand that, though, what with the sandstorms. Few things worse than a sand-blasted crack.

It also didn't set itself apart from Shadow Of Mordor very well, or something like that.

 

[MrCalavera_v1legacy]

Why did this get such hate?

Did it, though? All i remember is that some of its elements were praised, and the other were panned. Critics were generally divided between finding it boring and liking it, but without finding it special in any way. In other words, the consensus could be that it was in overall a very, that's right Joe, Mediocre game.

It fails as a Mad Max adventure. Vehicular combat is bland, storytelling is bland, melee is bland. It's another open world collect-a-thon with little of substance.

Some of that reminds me about Br?tal Legend - another case where Open World? doesn't make anything for the story or gameplay.

 

[DudeistBelieve]

Why did this get such hate?

Did it, though? All i remember is that some of its elements were praised, and the other were panned. Critics were generally divided between finding it boring and liking it, but without finding it special in any way. In other words, the consensus could be that it was in overall a very, that's right Joe, Mediocre game.

It fails as a Mad Max adventure. Vehicular combat is bland, storytelling is bland, melee is bland. It's another open world collect-a-thon with little of substance.

Some of that reminds me about Br?tal Legend - another case where Open World? doesn't make anything for the story or gameplay.

I remember negativity. I was largely immune to the wave of nostalgia that was Mad Max that summer. I just remember that the game was considered a disappointment.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

As someone who thinks Mad Max was better when it was purely ozploitation flicks... mmmmm ... eh? I think the game would have been better if Fury Road was the Road Warrior and used that as its inspiration.

At the very least the remembered to program the cars as if designed for the Australian market (ala right hand drive).

Previous MM movies were laden with heavy symbology of the human condition, and what it means to evolve in relation with a changing world. With a healthy dose of Australiana to sell the idea of a world closing its borders and surrendering to societal collapse ... reinforcing cultural differences and cultural idiosyncratic weirdness as opposed to simply bizarro world.