Oh there's button-prompts to tell you what you can and can't do, but sometimes they outright conflict with one another. So if you're standing in front of a ladder and holding a weapon, it's a crapshoot whether the game will decide to let you climb the ladder or make you drop the weapon, and then it'll be a crap shoot whether the game lets you pick up the weapon again. Fortunately, a couple really important functions (like getting in and out of cars) were mapped to different buttons, but virtually everything else uses the X button. When one button does everything it does nothing (see my Assassin's Creed III review). Even the basics of moving around and interacting with objects in the game world was a constant chore. Virtually every interaction that I had with the game was either naggingly uncomfortable in some way or was prone to glitches. Many actions are overloaded to the X button - the game even displays conflicting prompts at times! After all, the concept of an open-world, post-apocalyptic action game about smashing spiky, nitrous-fueled cars into each certainly sounds like a solid premise for a game!
I wasn't expecting Mad Max to match (let alone exceed) Shadow of Mordor, but I still had hopes that this one would turn out to be a well-realized game that could stand tall and proud as one of those rare, good movie tie-in games. So Warner Bros had earned some benefit of the doubt for its next game. Warner Brothers Interactive had previously released Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, which was also sort of a tie-in to the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies, and that game was actually very exceptional! It had a novel and innovative concept around which the entire game revolved (making it very focused), and it was a very well-polished game that was immensely comfortable to control.
But this Mad Max game wasn't a direct movie adaptation, and it didn't release simultaneously with the movie, implying that it hopefully wasn't being rushed out the door to meet the movie's release. They have a very bad track record - with only a handful of exceptions. Normally, I try not to get excited about movie-tie in games. Lots of repetitive content, and the few set-piece missions that make up the limp story are almost universally terrible.Ībility to restock your fuel, water, and ammo at bases comes way to early - and fuel is far too plentiful anyway - completely killing the desire to explore along with any sense of scraping by in the wasteland. Roar of car engines and crashing of metal get the adrenaline pumping, and the variety of colorful characters are mostly well-acted. Some brilliant lighting and particle effects and a gorgeous skybox in the wonderfully-atmospheric wasteland overshadow the dull, monotonous building interiors. Melee combat feels shallow and repetitive, with camera and control issues causing cheap deaths. Vehicles feel floaty and are hard to control. Most interactions with the game feel slightly uncomfortable in some way.