Mad Max review: wasted land (polygon)

Mad Max is competent at everything that it does. It has all the elements you'd expect from a game based on the franchise — violent combat, intense vehicular chases and battles and a grim world where everything that can go wrong will. It checks all the boxes for a modern open-world game too, from a sprawling 30-hour campaign to a giant map littered with hundreds of sidequests and bonus objectives.

Yet there's a feeling that pervaded my time with Mad Max, a sense of everything in the game being … okay. The films that developer Avalanche Studios are ostensibly drawing from are driven by ambition. They build visions of a world shaped by off-the-wall absurdity and chaos. This Mad Max, by comparison, feels safe and, frankly, boring.