Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsDecent, but...
Reviewed in the United States on December 29, 2015
For 2015 this game has to many things that should not exist. Artificial game time inflation, horrible controls, a saving system that is less than stellar, and is a massive grind fest. I've invested 13 hours into the game, and am only half way through the story. The reasoning behind this, inflation. To progress in the story you have to unlock certain things for your car, which is all fine until you realize the game is forcing you to do extra missions to continue with a story. An example of this is at the point when I said no more: I have my car upgraded how I like it, but to continue I have to go defeat a "top dog" (mini boss) for a paint scheme for my car, reduce the threat in "Pink Eye's" territory to 3, then get roughly 3,000 scrap to be able to buy all the upgrades I need for my car. Defeating the top dog isn't a huge difficulty, but I find it annoying for the studio to say that everyone's car would be their own unique vehicle, when in reality they are forcing me to make it into a specific car. Reducing the threat, we'll that's quite a bit more annoying as that could potentially take 2 or more hours of playtime. To reduce threat you have to destroy mine fields, destroy enemy camps, kill specific snipers placed in the wasteland, and destroy totems, some of which you can't even destroy without the proper gear. Now to get the 3000 scrap, you would think this would at least be an abundant resource in the game, but no, apparently this stuff is gold. Each scrap pile you pick up is 8-20 scrap, and you can get extra with a certain ability in the game, but its usually only 3-8 extra scrap. You can also find scrap pallets worth 60-80, and scrap trucks (extremely rare, only found one after 13 hours) which offer 300-600). That said scrounging around looking for this stuff would take at least 4-5 hours, unless you have your ally camps scrounging for you, but even then they only bring in 200 every 30ish minutes, so it'll still be several hours of gathering. And the amount of scrap they want you to spend on things is unreal. For all of the upgrades you can do to Max himself, it is several thousand scrap, plus to fully upgrade each stronghold, 4 in total, you need 3000 scrap, plus scrap to upgrade the car, your looking at 20-40 thousand scrap easy. That is some massive time invested in this game. I think so far I've described how the grind of the game and the artificial play time inflation, so now I'll cover controls and saving, both of which will be shorter. Saving isn't the worst I've seen, but it is annoying that it only seems to save at the strongholds, forcing you to drive all the way back to wherever you were to get back to what you were doing. Now doing this may not seem bad, but when you realize how unnecessarily large the map is you realize how aweful this choice was. The map is insane, especially if you were to ever have the inclination that you could walk anywhere in the world, because you would be dead wrong. Sorry, got side tracked, on to the controls (which will be for Xbox one, so remap them as A=X, B=O, Y=Triangle, X=Square, LT=L2, LB=L1, RT=R2, and RB=R1) They are aweful, and I know a lot of review just say they are awful, but I haven't seen many that describe why, so...they are not intuitive with any of the controls learned so far, like the studio didn't realize you could map more than one function to a button. For instance most games have the jump button set to A, the evade set to B, then if you come across something you need to pick up, you still press A or B to interact with it, LT is generally aim, RI is shoot, RB is usually grenade; however, in Mad Max LT is jump, aim is LB, RB is evade, RT is run (unless you are holding LB, in which it changes to shoot), A is interact, B is quick shoot, X is attack, and Y is parry (which is nearly useless, as you rarely ever actually parry, and instead often get hit). So there now you can actually see what the controls are, and why they are considered bad.
So that covers all the problems I have with this game, which after reading, you may be wondering why I gave this 3 stars, it's because in spite of this, there are things that are fun, especially after getting past the controls. The setting of the game is really cool, a post apocalyptic universe that is pretty much run by the amount of gas you have. The car driving is actually not that bad. And the controls while driving aren't bad, definitely more intuitive than the non vehicle controls. Basically this is the way you should judge whether or not you should get this: are you a huge Mad Max fan that just loves everything about the universe created in the movies, are you a person who enjoys massive open world sandbox games, even though there isn't a huge amount of story, and what story there is is going to require you to grind a lot. I would NOT recommend this to someone who has a large amount of games they still play or need to beat as well, or if you have any sense at all and read everything I've said. If you have literally nothing else to play, or any games you're anticipating then grab this. I know a ton of other reviews say fallout this and fallout that, but I will use the comparison here and say if your going to put side quests and activities in, make them optional and not mandatory similar to fallout.
