Get Mad. No, Madder Than That

Set sometime before the start of Fury Road, Mad Max starts with Max being pursued by Scabrous Scrotus, one of Immortan Joe's kids. Who the hell names their kid something like that? Though Max puts a chainsaw into Scrotus' skull (shown in a cut scene, the start of annoying trend the game has of relegating the best beats to moments you're left passively watching), he's knocked off the War Rig, and watches his car get hauled away.

In dire straits, Max stumbles across first a dog and then a hunchbacked former mechanic from Gastown named Chumbucket. Chum believes he's been touched by the "Angel Combustion" to create a great vessel, the Magnum Opus. Having seen Max's driving earlier, thinks he's the one meant to control that chariot. Max just wants a ride that can carry him to the "Plains of Silence", a place his severely damaged mind has convinced him exists, where he'll be free of the fragmented memories that torment him.

What's that line, some men will do anything to avoid going to therapy? The only one playing with a full deck is the dog.

The broad arc is Max gathering the pieces Chumbucket needs to complete the Magnum Opus. Inevitably, the equipment or parts reside in the strongholds of various local muckety-mucks, none of whom are willing to give anything away for free. Favor for a favor. The favors are either to go someplace and retrieve something, or go someplace and kill someone. Good thing those are what Mad Maxes do the best!

(I finally thought to take advantage of the ability to screen shot while playing, rather than relying on the increasingly useless Google Images, so all images in today's post are courtesy of my playthrough.)

There are also optional projects you can complete to improve the strongholds. Since it would be strange for Max to do this out of the good of his heart, it's set so you benefit from the improvements. Build the Oil Well project, and your car will automatically get a full tank whenever you visit. Complete the Water Well, your canteen gets filled. The Survey Crew marks all the places in that muckety-muck's domain that have scrap to scavenge, along with how much there is.

While some upgrades for either the car or Max are unlocked by completing particular missions, others simply require a certain amount of scrap to buy. To that end, there are dozens and dozens of little sidequests and locations to scavenge. Visiting all the locations the survey crews marked. Attacking Oil Well or Fuel Transfer Camps in the region, and eliminating the legions of oddly painted fighters that serve under Scrotus' second, Stank Gum (love the names.) There are convoy routes to clear, and subterranean lairs of scavenger gangs called Buzzards to clear out. This also lowers the "threat level" in a territory, which didn't make a lot of difference from my perspective (other than killing snipers, those guys are a pain in the ass), but I was going to do it for the scrap anyway, might as well get some appreciation.

The War Boys and Roadkill factions blurred together, but the Buzzards were always easy to recognize, since they cover everything with metal spikes. Really ought to be called Porcupines, or I guess Echidnas would be more geographically appropriate. Either way, they're all trying to kill you, so the differences are largely academic.

While your cars can go places no vehicle ought to be able, they can't go everywhere. Once you reach a location, Max has to spend at least part of the time on foot. Which means a lot of fighting. The combat reminds me of Arkham City, in that you're often surrounded by enemies, and the Counter button is critical. One nice thing, outside of snipers, no enemies carry guns. Some of them do carry explosive spears - called Thunderpoons, dumb name - but it's mostly hand-to-hand. Which gives you the chance to get some distance and thin them out with your shotgun, if you've got ammo. If you do enough hitting, you fill a Fury meter and can just start tearing into people, picking them up and pile-driving them or punching clean through their guard.

There are boss fights, but except for the Stank Gum fight, they're all the same. The boss - they all look alike, just palette-swapped - carries a mace or some other weapon with a jagged blade welded around a steel ball at the end of a pole. You wait for him to charge, roll to the side, then rush up and punch him. Maybe shank him when he's stunned. Eventually his health is low enough you push the "X" button and Max smashes the guy's face in with the butt of his shotgun, then stomps on his head.

The game does its best to explore how much variety you can find in "desolate wasteland." There are no green spaces, any vegetation is brittle and dying. Some parts remind me of Monument Valley, from old Westerns. Others are vast salt flats or the huge sand dunes that might come to mind when you hear "desert." There's areas that used to be the ocean, where the roads run between the bleached remains of corals. What's not sand and rock is remnants of civilization. Crumbling stone walls, lighthouses missing their tops, the cooling tower of an old nuclear plant. The Dunes region has a mostly buried airport you can drive around inside, if you don't mind the Buzzards. There are a few strips of actual pavement here and there, but you're more likely to be on sand. Still, there are places where roads run straight enough to really pick up some speed and see what your ride can do.

There are specific combinations of gear that create certain cars Chum calls "Archangels."  In theory, it's a way to sort of test the waters and figure out what works for you in a vehicle, which you then create as the Magnum Opus. In practice, I just stuck with the Opus and modded to meet the necessities of certain missions.

When you're driving, car-to-car combat is an inevitability. If you take too much damage (the car has its own health meter separate yours), a warning on screen gives you 5 seconds to get out. If you do, you just gotta stay alive on foot until Chum can repair your ride. The guys attacking will ignore him in favor of you, and if you dodge long enough, they'll get frustrated and fight hand-to-hand. If you don't get out of the car, it explodes and you die.

As far as fighting back, you've got your shotgun, eventually a harpoon and Thunderpoon launcher (rocket launcher), and you can add flame jets, but they use up gas. Or you can just hit the boost and ram them. It took me a long time to get comfortable at any of it. The game goes into slow-motion for a few seconds when you go to use a weapon, but I seemed to struggle figuring out what to shoot. Plus, your weapons aren't always strong enough to be effective. The Harpoon has to be at least Level 3 or 4 before you can pull tires off vehicles, so until you manage that, it's basically only good for shooting people.

Problem is, there's a lot of things to upgrade, so you're constantly balancing what you think needs the most urgent attention against how much scrap you've got. Maybe you'd like to upgrade the Harpoon, but the car gets busted up too easy when you attack convoys, so you have to improve the armor. Or it takes too long punching guys to death, so you need better brass knucks (Frankensteined out of spark plugs and wrenches) or to unlock finishing moves for when they're stunned. This is where clearing out those camps comes in handy, because the (presumably more peaceful) people who take them over will give you scrap regularly from then on. You get it automatically, you don't have to drive to each camp to pick it up. Either way, as Alex noted, the game involves a lot of grinding.

Completing certain tasks grants you Griffa tokens. What's that? Well, Griffa is some weird guy with a shade frame on his back, who hangs out in particular places in the desert. If you have tokens, you can visit him, he'll make some cryptic remarks about you and your life, blow some dust in your face, and you can upgrade certain attributes with the tokens. How long the Rage Meter lasts, how much water you get when you refill the canteen. You can get additional scrap when you scavenge, or make your gas last longer.

But Griffa's mostly of interest for what his interactions say about Max. The whole game is the world trying to make Max rejoin it, while Max resists. Stop endlessly drifting and plant roots, form connections. There's Chumbucket and the dog, but if you help the strongholds out enough, the people inside greet you or congratulate you on your accomplishments. Max keeps everything transactional, simply another step to getting the car that will take him to the Plains of Silence.

Griffa taunts Max with the knowledge of himself Griffa somehow has and that Max has suppressed. Jabbing at him to stop denying the man he was in favor of the husk he is. To further the conflict, the game introduces a woman with the jarringly unsubtle name of Hope, who has a daughter, even more jarringly named Glory. You do Hope a small favor once, she saves your butt a couple of times later. So Max tracks down Glory for her, and that is exhausting because Max walks incredibly slowly while carrying Glory, even though we're in the middle of Buzzard turf. I kept screaming at him to move with some alacrity, but no dice.

Hope tries to get Max to make a little family with them, and I was groaning at the thought the game would go that way. I was in this to drive a kickass car and explore the wastelands, not play Happy Homemaker. The man's got a head full of broken glass, lady, he's bad news all day, every day.

(There's also Tenderloin, a fighter that rides with Max when he wins the race for the V-8 engine. She got herself off whatever she was huffing to help him win, then they had to Thunderdome. You kill her, but she never gets mentioned as another person that dies because of Max. It's a little odd, given everything the game hammers on about.)

To my relief, Max keeps his eye on the prize. Chum bailed during the rescue mission, with the Magnum Opus. To be fair, Max was finally clear that he was taking the car, alone, and leaving Chum behind. So Max leaves Hope and Glory behind. Chum gets caught first, talks to a not-dead Scrotus (credit to Alex, who correctly predicted how the guy survived a chainsaw to the skull without having ever heard of this game until I mentioned it), who then kills the happy little family Max was decidedly not forming.

Throughout the game, there are these things called History Relics, which Max can collect. Usually a photograph with something written on the back, or a sign someone made. The photo itself may be innocuous enough, but what's written on the back always reflects the either imminent or already completed collapse of society.

When one opines that beauty will exist so long as life dies, Max remarks, 'Did we kill that, too? Beauty?' On a photo of a playground, the writer hopes the kid pictured survived, as the bombs fell just minutes later. Max's thoughts? 'I wouldn't wish that on anyone. Survival.' It became one of my favorite things to do, finding the history relics, so I could hear the next bit of commentary, even as I would mutter, "They call you Mad Max, not Emo Max."

Well, after that little atrocity, he's mad in both senses of the term. Besides hearing voices, not only Hope and Glory's, but his long-dead wife, Max starts hallucinating. Thankfully not while you're driving or fighting, but a few times I stopped to talk with people in the Wasteland (I was trying to pull together enough scrap to buy the last two upgrades to the V-8 engine before the final showdown). Instead of whatever they were probably saying, Max would hear them say he was a killer, and was the blood on his hands enemies, or his family's? Or he'd see Hope, or the grave of his daughter, calling him a killer of everyone.

Which makes the final showdown a disappointment. I was already kind of annoyed the deathblow to Stank Gum was a cut scene. The fight with Scrotus starts by taking out his war rig, which, after all the convoys I wiped out, was cake. His rig is teetering on a cliff edge and the Opus could ram it over. But Chum objects that will destroy it! Even though I've rammed dozens of vehicles by now. Max rams anyway, while Chum's on the hood, refusing to abandon his masterpiece. The Opus catches fire, it blows up. So does Chumbucket. So does the War Rig, but Scrotus Dukes-of-Hazzards out the back in Max's old car. So you have to grab Thunderpoons that fell off the rig and wait for them to try and run you over. Then you chuck 'em and roll clear.

The deathblow is, again, a damn cut scene. I've had to go through all these other missions to get to this point, I finally get the awesome car, only to blow it up to trying kill this guy, only for him to try and kill me with my first car. Let me actually finish him off myself! There's already one hand-to-hand fight with Scrotus partway through, and it was a lot like all those other boss fights, except for it kept getting interrupted and interfered with. Maybe they worried it would be too repetitive to end that way, but the end result was a letdown.