Quickie, time sensitive post about Mad Max on PS4

Posted on by Nimgimli

This weekend I felt like I needed a break from The Elder Scrolls Online (it was starting to feel like a job rather than a game) and Sony is running one of their “Flash Sales” and have last year’s Mad Max on sale for $15, so I snagged it.

So far (3-4 hours in) I’m really enjoying it. It definitely captures the desperate, kind of insane feel of the Mad Max movies and it looks really good. You spend a lot of time in your car racing back and forth over desert roads. You can drive most anywhere but you’re much slower off-road. Combat tends to be “ram the other guy” at low levels since ammo is scarce. On foot combat tends to be fisticuffs for the same reason.


It’s one of these “open world but not really a sandbox” games, kind of like Assassin’s Creed. You have story missions that advance the plot but you can also go around doing lots of side missions and stuff. As you gain wealth and progress through the story you can upgrade both your character and his car.

It’s not perfect and you can tell it was rushed to meet some arbitrary deadline. For example you’ll come upon remnants of what was probably going to be a morality system. (NPC’s will say something like “You going to help me recover this scrap and we’ll split it, or are you going to kill me and take it all for yourself?” but you don’t actually make a choice, you just automatically go the good-guy route.) Probably scrapped in order to make a deadline. The controls are kind of odd at times too and they definitely could’ve used more polish and more customizability.

Anyway, I don’t have screenshots ready or anything but since it’s a Flash Sale I assume it ends Sunday night or Monday, so I just wanted to mention it. I’m certainly getting (have already gotten, really) $15 worth of fun out of this title and if you like the IP you probably will too. If you’re not a fan of Mad Max’s filthy, brutal world, though, maybe give it a pass.

I looked at ~gasp~ MetaCritic and it got pretty awful reviews but I haven’t read any of them to see why. All I can say is I’m having fun so far. Maybe it gets repetitive or something but again, for $15 I won’t feel bad if I never finish it. For now I gotta get back to playing…