Mad Max: It’s All About the Thunderpoon

It is the near future.  The world has been ravaged by drought and disease, leaving the human race a broken, fragile thing.  Bands of survivors are forced to abandon their lives of luxury and ease, and fight to subsist in a land of famine, violence and constant feudal warfare.  And yet, their worst fear is the psychopathic killer who seems intent on exterminating the human race, eliminating settlements one by one, committing mass genocide in order to claim their collections of hubcaps and postcards.

You are Mad Max.  You are this psychopath.

You do have a soul of a poet though.  You will frequently find a photograph of a little girl or a long-forgotten family, clearly taken before the apocalypse.  You will then wax philosophically about the harsh brutality of it all, and how this more innocent way of life now seems like a lost forgotten mirage.  The memory will make you slightly weepy.  And then you will stick a shiv in the neck of the owner of that photograph.

Your motivations are not made clear beyond a need to replace your stolen and dismantled jalopy with a handmade rustpile with the firepower of the 5^th fleet.  However, it is clear that you feel that there is no place on this earth for humanity to exist other than a handful of strongholds controlled by slightly less psychopathic feudal overlords.  They will beg you to help retake the land from the hostile forces within, allowing their unique brand of carnal civilization to flourish.  What they need most is to seize control of the oil-producing camps dotting the map, since the control of crude texas tea is power out on the wastes.  And the way you do this is to blow these places the fuck up.

Mad Max, the game, does not make a whole lot of sense.  Video game logic very often doesn’t – go ahead and try explaining Mario 64 to a non-gamer – but while I recently dissed Polygon’s recent rant about what is effectively ludonarrative dissonance, in the case of Mad Max it’s particularly jarring because the game is demanding you do the exact opposite of what the narrative suggests.  The actual context for WHY he’s doing anything is, in particular, typically unexplored. And yet, still, that’s not my chief complaint about the game.

I started playing the game because of people who got their panties in a twist about the low reviews of the game.  And I have to tell you, my initial take of the game was that the 7.0 may have been overly generous.  It’s an open world game that borrows from everything and does nothing particularly well.  Its driving controls are crappy compared to GTA.  Its combat, at low levels, is far inferior to other games, particularly Arkham (due largely to cool gadgets vs. boring fistfighting) and Mordor.  Its open world design activities like tower captures are far inferior to Far Cry 3/4.  It implies stealth in missions but gives almost no tools to actually be stealthy.  Its world interactivity (i.e. climbing and jumping) is vastly inferior to Assassin’s Creed.  It’s story and voice acting is far short of—well, all the other open world games.  In short, it’s a game that does a lot of things okay, and nothing particularly great.

The driving game was particularly frustrating.  Driving the car felt like steering a brick taped to the back of a duck (note: I played this on the PC, and it may be much better on a console controller), and in the early game you’re so desperate for scrap that you must destroy cars you fight to get it – which often revolved around ramming inert cars for 60 seconds to get them to finally blow up.  When I was reading other reviews, they were describing the driving game as an awesome, mystical experience.  For me, it was about as exciting as watching flies fuck.  I was starting to think that Polygon’s 5.0 was, perhaps, a little on the high side.

Then I discovered the thunderpoon.

If you play Mad Max, you may feel the urge to wander off the beaten path, and actually clear out entire zones before moving on.  That’s certainly how I play open world games.  However, if you do this in Mad Max, you will delay getting the Thunderpoon, which is basically a rocket launcher attached to your car.  Once this happens, car combat becomes about as difficult as remembering the words to ‘Happy Birthday’.  However, the game does suddenly blossom into something that will, in fact, make you occasionally giggle like a schoolgirl that’s eaten a Colorado brownie.

And once that tedium evaporates, you start to notice the things the game does well.  The car customization is pretty well done.  I liked the achievement-based advancement model, though I note that I had maxed out my character about halfway through a 90-hour play time.  As ridiculous as it is story-wise, blowing up the oil refineries is hella impressive.  And Mad Max’s combat actually gets pretty hella good at the end, once you’ve unlocked all his specials, even if his martial art style could best be described as ‘drunken flailing’.

Still, the game has a lot of problems.  Of particular note, it seems like the designers make the common mistake of confusing ‘tedium’ with ‘difficulty’.  Nothing in the game is hard, with most of my deaths coming to stupid bugs (falling through the terrain, or attacking someone I didn’t expect and having the momentum take me off a cliff).  There is really a paucity of boss battle types, and once you beat the first, the remainders are trivial meatbags.  Polygon isn’t far off when describing the absolute dearth of decent female roles.  The game does, in fact, sound glitch and hang a fair amount.  And the ending – lord, I know they wanted an ending that captured the futility of the Mad Max movie franchise, but when I finished, my first thought was ‘Jesus, have I actually accomplished ANYTHING in my 89 hour playthrough?’

It pains me to say it, because I passionately loved Fury Road.  Still, if you have another open world game that you haven’t played yet, I’d probably grab that one first.  On the otherhand, the thunderpoon.