17 chaotic and brutal things I did in 2 hours in the Wasteland in Mad Max
Added: 10.07.2015 17:39 | 28 views | 0 comments
is all about the Wasteland. An expansive open world of faded brown that makes you positively thirsty just looking at it. Whether you’re on foot or have your pedal to the metal in the Magnum Opus, there’s always the distinct feeling that you could die at any moment in the most inhospitable environment on Earth. The game is an explosive love letter to George Miller’s dusty, petrol-headed post-apocalypse but, after Fury Road’s almost effortless revival of action cinema earlier this year, can Avalanche’s Mad Max compete? The short answer, from what I’ve seen, is yes.
Madness and explosives in equal measure await in the shimmering heat. A warlord called Scrotus rules over the area around Gas Town where, coincidentally, Max needs to go to get fuel. After waking up in the Wasteland, robbed and with nothing, he needs to reclaim what’s his. Start your engine and get ready for the 17 things I did in Mad Max when I was let loose in the Wasteland for two hours. There really should have been a grown up present.
You’re nothing without a car in the Wasteland, and your very own hunk of junk is known as the Magnum Opus. This is Max’s baby and it’s yours now too. Fully upgradeable in a hefty customisation screen, it can be fully tweaked to your diesel hungry desires. From gearboxes to intake valves, treads to engines, it can all be switched out. Whether you want to arm up with sideburners and as much armour as possible, or customise to travel fast and in style, it’s up to you. There’s no ‘right’ way to upgrade the Magnum Opus, with a focus on different styles of play throughout. Plus, it’s a pleasure to drive. Responsive and suitably weighty. Add in the boost button for a cinematic surge forward, and it makes a worthy Wasteland steed.
Who says a backseat driver is a bad thing? Especially one who thinks you’re some kind of god of cars. Meet Max’s sidekick Chumbucket. Known as a ‘Blackfinger’ in the Wasteland, Chumbucket is your mechanic who’ll not only fix the Magnum Opus when you inevitably set it on fire, but bring the car to you if you’ve decided to go on foot. We don’t all have a remote control for summoning our vehicles a la Bruce Wayne, so a totally insane chauffeur wearing goggles is the next best thing. Chumbucket’s also on hand to berate you for driving recklessly so yeah, think the Wasteland equivalent of your gran. But bald.
Car combat in Mad Max is utterly chaotic. Vehicles of all types swerve through the sand, and rogue enemies patrol the Wasteland just waiting for someone to loot. Thankfully you’re armed with an intimidating armoury of weapons, the most important of which is the harpoon. Hurtling along beside a car and tapping B will yank said car towards you, but aim specifically at certain areas and things get a lot more fun. Pull off bumpers, doors, and wheels, all while travelling at 100mph. But the most satisfying? Aiming at the driver of the offending vehicle and plucking them effortlessly from their seat, dragging them along behind your car. They deserve it. Honest.
Ammo is pretty thin on the ground in the Wasteland, meaning you need to get inventive with explosives. While flaming fuel canisters can be thrown for some BBQ time, bombs on sticks can be tossed or stabbed through to flambé foes. Whether you’re on foot and destroying oil reserves in camps, or at the wheel and firing a well aimed, explosive Thunderpoon, Michael Bay has nothing on the carnage on offer here. With each car battle ending in flames no matter which way you play, every encounter becomes a cinematic bomb-fest.
Intimidating Wicker Man style scarecrows of wood and bodies loom across the Wasteland, representing the threat of the local warlords, so it’s a good thing you’ve got your handy harpoon. Speeding past one of these behemoths, yanking it down with the harpoon as you go, is ridiculously satisfying. The remains leave behind scrap that you can use for car upgrades and armour, but you’ll have to pick it out from amongst the body-strewn wreckage. The Wasteland might be vast but it’s little details and side distractions like this that ensure that it never feels empty.
So it turns out that you can’t afford to be picky in the Wasteland, and that means cramming chunks of post apocalyptic Pedigree Chum into your mouth. Mmmm, eating tinned reconstituted mystery meat with hands that probably haven’t ever seen a bottle of antibacterial wash. Max doesn’t seem too be worried about bacteria. Especially given the fact that you can also refill his health with fistfuls of squirming maggots removed from the ribcages of the unfortunate human corpses that litter the Wasteland. It might be a good source of protein, but ‘Press A to scoff maggots’ is a delightfully vile prompt.
Discover a convoy route zig zagging across the world, and you can follow it for inevitable treats to pillage from Scrotus’ War Boys. Ferrying fuel and goods across the world, these oh so smashable convoys are ripe for the picking but won’t go down without a serious fight. Some convoys also hold specific pieces of car you’ll want for the Magnum Opus. This is a perfect time to play with your harpoon and combine it with the Magnum Opus’ boost. Line up an enemy vehicle in front before letting fly with your harpoon and boosting into them. Boom. Literally.
With all these explosions and a heat haze shimmering over the Wasteland, health-replenishing water is the most precious of soggy treasures when you’re lucky enough to find it. Marked with a nice blue droplet on the map, wells and water taps are a welcome sight. So much so that when Max slowly fills his canteen via an oddly satisfying filling/emptying mechanic, it’s guaranteed to make you thirsty. Although wells and water sources do refill eventually, it takes time that you might not have, so you’ll need to be sparing with the old eau.
Ok, it might just be a slightly less exciting name for flame-throwers, but that doesn’t matter when you turn on your sideburners mid-battle. There are few things more grimly exhilarating than spewing fire from both sides of the Magnum Opus at once, and hearing the opposition roar in fury. Your sideburners can be upgraded too, to make sure that you’re always cooking your enemies well done.
Yup, sometimes there’s something enjoyable about taking the non-Batman approach to things. While you can take a more softly softly approach to taking down camps and view it all through binoculars before planning your attack, it’s far more entertaining to arrive at a camp and yank down every guard tower in sight with your harpoon, before hauling down the front door and skipping inside to slaughter the evil horde within. The first thing to do once in there is to check above for a caged enemy strapped to an explosive barrel. He’ll rile up the other goons, so taking him out is a good call, if nothing else but to watch him disappear in a ball of flame.
Furiousa might not be present in the game, but Max has his very own Fury meter. With Batman-style, counter-focused combat, Max has both a light and heavy attacks. Juggle them just right and Max’s Fury meter slowly builds, culminating in an utter rage that means you inflict more damage. And oh what damage. While this isn’t quite at Rocksteady’s level of punchy panache, a perfect parry - pressing the counter button at just the right time - will reward you with delightfully crunchy skull crushing and bone breaking finishers. Which leads me nicely onto...
Just like Joel in The Last Of Us, Max has a collection of shivs for close combat carnage. Short and brutal, you can see how many you’ve got in your collection at the bottom right of the screen. Unlike in The Last Of Us however, these are just bonus bloody extras during combat. When there’s a chance to use one of the deadly blades, a prompt appears for a shiv execution, which come in a number of delightfully brutal variations. Stabbings against walls, plunging blades into the necks of prone enemies... none of these things disappoint when you want things to get satisfyingly nasty.
Max’s handy sniper rifle can only be used from the rear of the car, and Chumbucket will hand it over for easy targeting of distant goons. Sniper towers are scattered across the world and clearly labelled in red on your world map. Sniping is a far more controlled way to clean up the guard areas outside camps, but you’ll miss out on some gloriously chaotic carnage if you choose to play it safe.
The joy of this almost completely desolate open-world is the freedom to drive in whichever direction you like. Chances are you’ll find something interesting whichever way you head. Doing so, I discovered two enormous guarded oil silos called The Twins. Sniper bullets greeted me as I screeched up, so I quickly darted inside the only door that wasn’t guarded by flames. Once inside I battled slews of neon dust covered enemies in near darkness, before heading up to the roof and taking out even more mutated nasties. A bridge linked the two silos. and a quick jaunt across later, I was doing it all again on other other side. The best bit? However strenuous a gauntlet this whole assault was, it felt like just a drop in a rich and brutal ocean.
Avalanche didn’t want to build a racing game with Max, but of course there are opportunities to get behind the wheel and prove you’re better than everyone else. Races and unique time trials are scattered across the Wasteland. During one, I ended up screeching across the world, desperately trying to reach a designated point on the map before the explosives strapped to my car decided to go off. Making matters somewhat worse, I was attacked by a mob of bandits on the way. Whether I was just unlucky, or this was a scripted occurrence, who knows, but it certainly added to the general, ongoing theme of complete and utter chaos.
Handily, Avalanche has made sure you’ve got the same controls for both driving and when you’re on foot, for a more seamless transition between the two. However, this does mean you’re firing your weapons with the B button and not the traditional trigger. You get used to it pretty speedily, but it does mean a little rewiring of your brain until you stop missing well-trained sniper shots as a result of, well, not actually firing.
Scattered across the world are historical images taken before that big bad apocalypse of unknown origin. These signs and tokens of the world before everything was just hot and insane are intriguing snapshots. Yet this is just the beginning of the collectibles strewn across the Wasteland. Scrap is lying around everywhere, just waiting to be thrown into upgrades, and chests of ammo can be discovered too. Less invitingly, Scrotus’ insignia is also hidden across various campsites for you to destroy. OCD MacGuffin-hunters are going to have a field day with this overwhelming open-world.
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