You immediately meet a mutated creature of pure tedium, Chumbucket, who unfortunately accompanies you absolutely everywhere for the entire game. Everything is immediately far too simple, far too flighty, far too tissue-thin. It’s in everything from the story to the fighting to the driving to the challenges. And as you get deeper in, the game’s opening flimsiness begins to slightly solidify. But it’s wormed its way in to that part of my brain that enjoys hoovering up itty bitty activities marked on a giant map. I wrote previously about how flat I found it. Along the way people ramble unintelligible nothingness at you in Australian drawl, which invariably ends in your being asked to drive to somewhere on the map, hit something or pick something up, then drive back. To get there, you need to improve your car such that you’re capable of tearing down defences that obstruct your larger path.

Your goal, appropriately vague for the franchise, is to reach the other side of the map. A third-person open world game built of very, very many little ideas, but no big ones, it provides you with a vast post-apocalyptic playground, thousands of things to do, and a gradually improving combination of melee and vehicular combat – and yet no real sense of purpose.

Mad Max is the most peculiar combination of the compelling and the mundane. After some impressions of the first few hours of Avalanche's Mad Max open-world action-me-do, I return having spent another week with the Road Warrior, ready to tell you wot I think.

Mad max game