The new Mad Max game isn’t Fury Road, but it has its moments

The first thing to know about the upcoming Mad Max game from Warner Bros. Interactive is that it is not directly tied to George Miller's recent film franchise relaunch, Mad Max: Fury Road. While both the film and the game have been caught in drawn-out, complicated development and rights battles over the last three decades, their final forms were developed on parallel tracks, without much direct collaboration on the story.

That means you're unlikely to see Imperator Furiosa, Immortan Joe, or any of the other breakout characters from the critical and commercial darling now playing in cineplexes. Instead, the game is focused primarily on Max himself, who's looking to rebuild his interceptor by scrounging for spare parts found out among a vast desert landscape. It's all an effort to reach a "place of silence" where he can finally quiet the voices in his head.

"The Mad Max universe is one of those universes you can continue building on," Avalanche Studios Design Director Magnus Nedfors told Ars. "New stories, new characters, new possibilities. Like many big adventures, many stories take place in the worlds, and you don't see the same characters everywhere."

Nedfors said the team at Avalanche was inspired to take that universe and put together a game in the style of Just Cause. That doesn't necessarily mean riding on airplanes or shooting guys while floating on a parachute, but it does mean the same kind of free-wheeling, go-anywhere style that lets players pick their next move. "The Avalanche way of making games, we love building open world games, free roaming, where we let the player loose to have fun in the game world," Nedfors said. "That's what the whole studio breathes and loves."

During a recent playable demo set during the middle of the game, the open world map was indeed littered with icons indicating individual side missions: sniper's nests to take out, convoys to overtake, abandoned settlements to salvage scrap material from, and so on. Even after a half hour or so of play time, though, I worried that the desert environments would get a bit tiresome and monotonous.

The game's art director, Martin Bergquist, tried to put my fears to rest, saying that there is plenty of visual variety available even in a world with little water. "When you start to dig in, [real world] deserts have a lot of variation," he said. "You start to look around the different areas around the world, you have the sand dunes and the big rocky deserts, and you also have this designed area in our world that is a dried-out sea bed. We have a great mixture of different areas. They give you different silhouettes, different feelings of materials and colors. I think there's a lot of variations in the word 'desert.'"

Stay in the car

Exploring that desert in Mad Max is divided into two main parts: driving and running around on foot. The driving sections were much more intriguing during our demo time, with high-speed combat that feels like a crunchier, more impactful version of Twisted Metal. There's something intensely satisfying about bringing your car around slowly, lining up with the path of a vehicle running roughly parallel, then turning hard and using a turbo boost to launch directly into their side, knocking them into a tailspin.

Car combat isn't all about direct hits, though. A tap of a face button can unleash lateral attacks while running alongside enemy vehicles, and you can launch harpoon grenades from afar, for instance. Then there's the harpoon gun, which lets you attach yourself to nearby cars and accelerate directly into them without the need for precise aim. You can also use the harpoon to pull off an opposing vehicle's wheel as you're tailing them, sending them into a spinout and letting you catch up.

All this combat takes a toll on Max's car, but the blackfinger mechanic that rides alongside Max can fix things up in a jiffy if you just pull over away from the combat zone. This is Mad Max's version of regenerating health, and it does take a little bit of the tension away to know that any damage can simply be fixed quickly with a few turns of a virtual wrench. It's also a bit odd that Max can simply upgrade his car using scrap parts and a menu interface that works at any point in the middle of the desert—no need for an auto shop or specialized tools. Sure, this game isn't supposed to be realistic, but these little things took me out of the experience.

Outside the car, the game feels quite a bit clunkier. Combat seems cribbed directly from Rocksteady's Arkham series, with Max sliding between groups of enemies as you tap the punch buttons in time with the blows landing. The animation is a bit stiff, though, and the timing in general feels a bit off. Max also had a few guns at this point in the demo, but with ammunition being in short supply, they will probably only come out when the situation is extremely dire.

During the demo, I mostly decided to stay in my car and take out the occasional on-foot assailant by ramming them at full speed or occasionally using the on-board harpoon to grab them and fling them into the air, ragdoll-style. The only exception was an enemy fort, where I was forced to get out of the car and wander through on foot. Here I took out occasional pockets of enemies while searching for six giant fuel tanks to blow up in simple exploratory puzzles.

The whole time, I found myself wishing I was driving around again on those open dunes, weaving through convoys and lining up ramming angles like a pirate sailing on a sea of sand. Hopefully the final experience will lean heavily toward this gameplay when the game launches on Windows, Linux, PS4, and Xbox One September 1.