The Magnum Opus is a lie you tell yourself for twenty hours. In Mad Max, Avalanche Studios’ 2015 open-world game, you spend the first act driving a junker and the last act driving a monster, and the distance between them is the whole point. Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment published it. Feral Interactive later handled the Mac and Linux versions. It came out on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, Mac and Linux. That was 11 years ago.
Trailer, via IGDBcom.
Scabrous Scrotus and the Land Mover
The plot is thin on purpose. Max Rockatansky, voiced by Bren Foster, is a highway patrol officer turned survivalist. He wants to reach the Plains of Silence, a place he believes will give him peace. Before he gets anywhere, the War Boys run him off the road. Their leader is Scabrous Scrotus, voiced by Travis Willingham, son of Immortan Joe and ruler of Gastown. They steal his car and his supplies and leave him in the desert to die.
Max chases them. He duels Scrotus on top of the Land Mover, stabs him in the head with his own chainsaw, and gets kicked off for his trouble. The broken blade stays in Scrotus’s skull. Max takes a weapon and clothes off a dead Wastelander, tends to a wounded war hound, and decides to find Scrotus’s base and take his car back.
That is the setup. What follows is a checklist. Max meets Chumbucket, a hunchbacked mechanic voiced by Jason Spisak, who believes Max was sent by God and calls him “Warrior Saint.” Chumbucket wants to build a car called the Magnum Opus. Max agrees to find parts. To do that he has to take territory from two Wasteland leaders: Jeet, voiced by Josh Keaton, who holds an old lighthouse, and Gut Gash, whose followers think a ship built on an oil tanker’s remains will save them from a flood.
The Harpoon and the Thunderstick
The combat is the reason to stay. Max is a melee fighter first and a gunman second. His shotgun is his weapon of choice, but ammo is scarce, so the smarter play is usually his fists. The thunderstick is an explosive he can lance into an enemy’s chest, where it crackles like a lit fuse before it blows. The harpoon only works from inside a vehicle with Chum riding along.
Up to 60 percent of the game is driving, according to the publisher. That number is honest. The Magnum Opus can be fitted with a V8 engine and a ramming ability strong enough to wreck enemy vehicles and their weapons. When you drive and aim at the same time, the game drops into slow motion and lets you toggle between targets. You can switch to first person while fighting from the car. Chumbucket repairs the vehicle when told to or when you step out.
Enemies can jump onto the Magnum Opus and blow it up. You can stop that by ringing the car with spikes. It is a small system, but it makes the car feel like a place rather than a stat block.
A Garage That Punishes You
The garage screen is available throughout the game. You can change the engine, chassis, wheels, body work, paint job and the car’s “shell.” Upgrading one part hurts another. A better engine makes Max faster and the handling worse. The engine sound changes when you add or remove parts. That detail is the best thing in Mad Max. It is the one place the game admits that a car is a set of compromises.
Max himself can be upgraded, though those plans were not fully implemented. Crafting lets you build new weapons and tools from what you scavenge. You can pull materials out of the desert, hijack enemy cars, or collect their parts. The game gives you choices about how to take objectives — quietly or aggressively — and Chum will offer strategic guidance. Mostly it is up to you.
A Free-Flow System Borrowed From Batman
Mad Max uses a free-flowing combat system similar to Rocksteady Studios’ Batman: Arkham games. That comparison does the game no favors. The Arkham fights were built around a character who could move. Max is heavier, slower, and the wasteland gives him less to work with. The system functions. It rarely surprises.
The open world is deserts, canyons and caves, caused by resource shortages and ecocide. It looks right. It also runs out of ideas faster than the car runs out of fuel. Avalanche built the Just Cause series, and this game has a more mature tone than those. The studio has said vehicular combat was a challenge because it had no experience making that kind of game. You can feel that in the driving, which is solid, and in the missions around it, which are not.
The game was re-tooled a year into development, when the studio pivoted away from making Mad Max a linear experience. Two earlier Mad Max games, from Cory Barlog and Interplay Entertainment, were in production and never released. This one is not based on a specific film, though it borrows the universe and locations, and franchise co-creator George Miller was consulted during pre-production.
What the Wasteland Gets Right
Here is the schedule this game actually runs on.
| Act | What you are doing | What you have |
|---|---|---|
| Opening | Chased off the road by War Boys | Nothing |
| First hours | Meeting Chumbucket, scavenging parts | A junker |
| Middle | Taking territory from Jeet and Gut Gash | A real car |
| Late | Hunting Scrotus’s base | The Magnum Opus |
| End | Recovering the Interceptor | Whatever you built |
The Pursuit Special, also called the Interceptor, is the car Max loses at the start and spends the game trying to get back. That is the spine. It is a good spine. A man who wants his car back is a cleaner motivation than a man who wants revenge, and Mad Max knows it.
Where the game falters is in the middle. The territories are checklists. The side activities repeat. The story stops moving while you clear icons, and Scrotus, who should be the pressure on every hour, disappears for long stretches. Travis Willingham gives him a good rasp, but the game forgets to use him.
What holds it together is the car. Building the Magnum Opus, feeling the engine note change when you swap a part, watching the handling degrade as you chase speed — that is a real idea, and Avalanche commits to it. The harpoon, the thunderstick, the slow-motion aiming, the spikes that keep enemies off your roof: these are pieces of a machine that works.
Mad Max is not a great open-world game. It is a good car game wearing one as a coat. The Arkham-style fighting is the weakest inheritance it takes. The wasteland is gorgeous and empty. But the Magnum Opus is a genuine achievement, and the game is smart enough to make you build it yourself rather than hand it to you.
Avalanche was right that vehicular combat was hard for them. They mostly solved it. The parts they did not solve are the parts that are not driving.
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