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Preview: Mad Max

I’ve only seen Mad Max the one time, but I understand just how much impact the movie — actually, the whole franchise — has had on popular culture. I knew exactly what was going on in season seven of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, when, facing insurmountable odds at a cordoned-off construction site, a character yelled out, “this is Thunderdome!”

So, Iike I said, I get it. What I don’t quite get is the new Mad Max game by Avalanche Studios (not to be confused with Avalanche Software, who are making Disney Infinity).

John Fuller from Avalanche describes the game as a “modern take on the Wasteland,” seen in Mad Max. Gone from the game is a direct likeness of Mel Gibson, but whether or not that’s due to costs involved or a desire to get away from his anti-Semitic outbursts, I don’t know. Either way, I can certainly deal with that. What I’m having more trouble accepting is that Max is no longer an Australian.

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As a Canadian-Australian, I’m upset about the fact that Avalanche and Warner Bros. have chosen to ignore the franchise’s roots in such a blatant way. The series clearly resonates with the entire world — or else, you wouldn’t be making a game this long after the movies had been released, new Tom Hardy movie or not — so the move to “modernise” looks simply like a move to Americanise at this point. I can only imagine how full-fledged Australians feel.

Actually, I don’t need to imagine how Australians feel. Our friends at AusGamers have started an online petition to request that Avalanche hires an Aussie voice actor for the title, rather than the “generic” American actor used in the hands-off preview we saw at E3. If you want to sign it, click here.

With that out of the way, let’s get into the rest of the preview. Fuller explained that the game will feature an entirely new story, with Max losing his prized car, the Interceptor. As you go on a quest to gain your cherished car back, you’ll have to build and upgrade a new car, which Avalanche have named the Magnum Opus. Car customization is a key feature of the game, allowing players to make unique combinations in terms of appearance and tuning. It’s clear that Avalanche want you to really identify and connect with your own Magnum Opus of choice… which hopefully won’t get tossed aside when you come upon your original car. Max’s faithful mechanic, Chumbucket, is heavily featured in the game; after all, who’s going to modify the Magnum Opus when you find new tools to weld on?

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The game is an open world affair, allowing you to drive around the Wasteland on missions to upgrade your vehicle, or just to find trouble. We watched a sequence in which Max had to take down a gang leader and his car (and his three vehicles full of henchmen, too) to salvage a battering ram that would bust through a gate that would open up another part of the game’s map. Chumbucket rode along in the Magnum Opus’ backseat, using the harpoon gun to assist Max. Max himself used his shotgun to dispatch enemies that jumped onto the car as he drove.

After watching vehicular combat, I began to think of Max almost as a secondary character to the car itself, which ends up functioning like Batman in the Arkham series of games. It takes out tons of baddies, and it gets upgrades that makes that side of things easier, as well as getting you into other areas that you previously couldn’t. Except, you know, it’s vehicular combat fueling those combat upgrades rather than punches to the face.

You can throw punches to the face too, of course. While the car is useful to take down enemies in their own vehicles, and to use as a base to fire sniper rifles and harpoon guns, Max proves himself as quite the melee fighter as well. The car can only take you so far, and we watched as Max broke into the new area on foot, sawed-off shotgun and “thunderstick” in-hand, in order to stop an enemy sniper. Death animations are brutal and bloody, and to me just seemed to be for the sake of it rather than to show how hard life can be in Max’s circumstances.

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That’s the problem I had with the fifteen or so minutes I spent with Mad Max. As a game, it looks highly competent — I mean, come on; Avalanche is behind greats like Just Cause — but as a Mad Max game, I’m not sure the atmosphere is spot-on as of yet. Though, the game’s just been announced, so it’s not cause for alarm as of yet. For now, fans of open world and vehicular combat experiences have nothing to worry about, and hopefully fans of the franchise itself will have good news in the coming months as Max goes back to his Aussie roots.

Mad Max will be available in 2014 on PS3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One.


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About the author

Steve Wright

Steve's the owner of this very site and an active games journalist nearing twenty (TWENTY!?!) years. He's a Canadian-Australian gay gaming geek, ice hockey player and fan. Husband to Matt and cat dad to Wally and Quinn.