Mad Max

This is a good game and I had fun with it but I always had the feeling that it could have been one of the best open world games with a bit more effort and some tweaks in the right places. The world is large, has a lot to explore and (although it's a post-apocalyptic wasteland) has enough variety - you always know roughly where you are. The car combat and improving and customizing your ride is fun. This is not a racing simulation though, so vehicle physics are not too realistic. The hand-to-hand combat is fluent and can be very satisfying but lacks variety. Most of the time you are fighting the same hordes of enemies and while in theory there are a lot of different enemy types, most of the time it hardly matters. Only occasionally you come across some high level or boss type opponent to spice things up. As many other reviews have noted, the game becomes repetitive too quickly. The main reason for this is the lack of interesting story missions. There are not too many story missions anyway and half of those are simple 'fetch this' or 'clear this' quests. This leaves you with just a handful of unique and interesting missions at the start and end of the game and a ton of generic game-play in-between.

I've been wanting to pick up this game for a long while now, but so many people had issues with the DRMs Warner utilized with the Steam release. When I found out it was just released as DRM-free here, I instantly snagged. And wow, this game is fun. The melee combat is where it shines in my opinion. The adrenaline rush of strategically taking down hoards of enemies with your bare fists is insane. The car combat is awesome as well and overall incredibly polished. The graphics are very pretty too, especially for a game released in 2015. They remind me of Spec Ops: The Line with the contrasts of blues and reds. Quite literally the only gripe I have is with the voice acting. It's just my preference but I thought the Chumbucket character was kind of shrill, but it's most definitely not a deal-breaker. Easy 9/10. Incredibly enjoyable experience.

Remember Mass Effect 3? Great game, right until the end that ruined everything? Same story here. You'll have so much fun playing for hours on end, cleaning up the wasteland and becoming that legendary road warrior, with a car outfitted like a bloody tank, that can ram, blow up or burn anything that gets near it. ...then near the end you get a FORCED RACING SEGMENT that completely throws out everything you've worked with previously, forcing you to adapt to a new playstyle that runs contrary to everything you've done so far, and likely forcing to retry the bloody race against Stank Gum for six million times. On the plus side: Once you finally win that race, you will have been driven to an absolute mad-max-grade cannibal rage, ready to eat the liver of whatever gamedev thought it was a good idea to put a forced racing segment into the end of the game. Summary: Everything other than the end is 8/10, great fun, very Mad Max. The forced racing segment ruins it with extremely janky physics and a contrarian game mechanics. This bit is -1293784/10. It is so sad to see an otherwise really amazing game, utterly ruined by a single really bad forced elemented in it.

The forced racing segments are just terrible. This is NOT a racing game. The vehicle mechanics are not suitable for that. For some reason the developers thought this was ok. The driving is fine for the open world and for vehicle combat. But once you start getting thrown into the racing is when the poor mechanics really start to rear its ugly head. The Stank Gum race is beyond frustrating. Barely clip a wall (which you WILL do lots of) and your car spins out of control or comes to a dead stop. Drive perfectly, and your car still sometimes flips out for no apparent reason. With how poorly your car handles, there is no avoiding this. Add on that you are constantly being barraged by enemy vehicles and environmental obstacles in the process, the frustration level goes through the roof. I thought this was one awesome game (and one of my favorites) up until this point. This will unfortunately deter me from replaying this game again. It was a 5 star game marred terrible, forced races, that now is only a 3 star game.

... simulation of the average day of an Australian. I jest. This game is actually really solid. Controls are crisp and easy to learn. Combat is fun and can be deadly if you don't watch your back. There's massive amounts of stuff to do. Everything from racing to upgrading strongholds to clearing out some subterranean dwellings all over the map. Story is kinda so so but it's Mad Max so it's sort of half expected. Absolutely worth a buy. You won't regret it.