YMMV / Mad Max (2015)

• Alternative Character Interpretation
  • Are Roadkill Desert Bandits or Disaster Scavengers subjected to Protagonist-Centered Morality? Unlike War Boys, they don't attack strongholds, and sound downright TERRIFIED during the inevitable Mook Horror Show.
• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • The final confrontation with Scrotus isn't particularly difficult. Even though he's a two stage boss, the first simply involves pulling off the armoured panels of his Big Badass Rig and then shooting them, and the second has him come at you in the Interceptor while there are some conveniently placed thundersticks for you to throw at him. After that, he becomes a Cutscene Boss. A shame considering that when you fight him on foot in Gastown, he's a lot tougher.
  • Likewise, the final fight against his second-in-command, Stank Gum, is much easier than the Death Race against him a few missions earlier. He's squishier than most of his Top Dogs, to the point where he can be dropped in just a couple shotgun blasts.
• Awesome Music: Steven Stern's rendition of Soul of a Man does a fantastic job of setting up the mood of the game.
• Broken Base:
  • The lack of references to Fury Road has been a point of contention among some game reviewers, namely Kotaku and Ars Technica, who both knocked points off for not taking more from that film. However, some have countered that this game has been in development for years, and that it's not fair to take points off for a relatively petty gripe.
  • Both this game's version of Glory the Child's mother (Silk Hiding Steel Woobie Hope) and the determined low-key Action Mom from the Fury Road tie-in comics are decently popular, but there isn't a consensus on which is more popular.
• Complete Monster: Lord Scabrous Scrotus is the sadistic son of Immortan Joe who rules Gastown with an iron fist. With his garrison of War Boys, Scrotus scours his section of the Wasteland for anyone he can capture, kill, and pillage, putting him into conflict with Max. After losing to him in a fight, Scrotus goes mad with rage and takes his anger out on the Wasteland, setting his Dragon Stank Gum loose on Gutgash and Pink Eye's Strongholds to kill them and their followers. Upon learning that Max won the Gastown Race, Scrotus revokes his prize and almost beats him to death in revenge, setting a cabal of War Boys on him as well. When he learns that Chumbucket took the Magnum Opus, he orders his torture to learn whatever he could about Max, and when he learns about Hope and Glory's relation to him, he kills both of them alongside Deep Friah's followers just to spite Max one last time.
• Critical Dissonance: This has happened since the game came out. While critics have been harsh but fair on the game, most user reviews have been near universally positive. This can be attributed to the fact that the game follows a fairly standard, Ubisoft style open-world template of unlocking fast travel towers and personal upgrades, which some critics have gotten sick of. Fans tend to gravitate towards the presentation, the fast vehicle movement & combat, and story instead, which are often considered the highlight of the game.
• Designated Hero: Max's general attitude has rubbed some people the wrong way. While his dickish attitude is consistent with the films, it gets shot up extreme levels here. Ramming the Magnum Opus into Scrotus while Chum was still on the hood and killing him in the process, just to push Scrotus over the cliff hasn't sat well with everyone, to say the least.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Gutgash's ship, a broken vessel in a dried-up part of the ocean that is being reinforced as a stronghold against raiders and so it will float if the water ever returns is more popular than several of the game's prominent human characters (including Gutgash himself).
• Game-Breaker:
  • The four-barreled Shotgun has enough firepower to puncture the fuel tanks and tires of fully armored vehicles (which is to say nothing of fleshy targets, including the Top Dogs), and only requires a handful of scrap and Max's Legend rank to be high enough, compared to the Magnum Opus' more powerful weapons, which require a lot of camp raiding and scrap collecting before they can really deal with armor effectively. Since the races have no rules, the four barrelled shotgun turns them into a complete joke because Max can wipe out the competition long before they can reach the finishing line.
  • A fully-upgraded Thunderpoon is a One-Hit Kill to every normal vehicle in the game. If you've fully upgraded your ammo belt, you can kill 15 enemy cars in a row without restocking. Combing that with the Armory projects in allied bases means that Max doesn't even need to worry about conserving his ammo. At that point, the player can effectively win any car battle at will.
  • For melee combat, the combination of the two purchaseable moves, Master Melee Reversal and Melee Weapon Execution. They require a relatively low legend rank, so they can easily be gotten early in the story. Reversal lets you steal an enemy's melee weapon if you perfectly parry them, and Execution lets you immediately follow that up with a kill from it. Get good at perfect parries and any fight that has a weapon-wielding enemy becomes much easier. It's also a good source of Griffa Tokens from all the parry, disarm, and weapon kill challenges you'll be completing.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • If you clear the game (thus unlocking Max's iconic jacket and shotgun), start a new game, and proceed to Griffa's first encounter without once shutting down the game, the two items you unlocked will be waiting for you.
    • Adding to this, if you have the gun equipped when you first enter Gutgash's stronghold, the game for some reason will not render it and the result is a cutscene where Max mimes pointing a gun around.
  • The game tracks milestones, such as killing a certain number of enemies or performing a specific move a set number of times, and rewards their completion with level-ups as well as Griffa tokens (which can be traded in for stat increases). The game though is very bad at keeping track of what it's already awarded and so may reward completion of the same milestones repeatedly, resulting in unreasonably high levels. However, there are a relatively small number of upgrades available, so after a certain point levelling up becomes meaningless.
  • The game appears to define Max's car being airborne as none of the wheels touching the ground. Thus if you manage to roll the car onto its roof, the game counts that as time spent airborne. That the game automatically rolls the car back onto its wheels makes this difficult to abuse.
• Harsher in Hindsight: One history relic is a picture of a sculpture with a critique of it on the back. Max reflects on it by wondering how he would be judged today. Going by the Designated Hero entry above, not well at all.
• Jerkass Woobie: Max is pretty much this trope's mascot. He used to be a cop trying to maintain order in a world coming apart at the seams, only to have both his wife and daughter killed, his leg crippled, and was then left alone to wander a wasteland, forced to eat dog food and maggots in order to survive. He's even worse off by the end of the game, having been left alone with nothing but the voices in his head. Max is so far gone, that not only does he not know how old he is, he's completely unaware what year it is. Despite being a single-minded jerk, by the end of the game you just want to give him a hug.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Though Griffa is ultimately a benevolent figure, he's more than a little creepy, with the places you go to find him bordering on Eldritch Locations with ambient screaming, an otherworldly atmosphere and eerie drawings covering every surface.
  • The Buzzards have nightmare fuel down to a tee. Their designs comes with creepy glowing red eyes and instead of talking they merely grunt and howl at you. They have a tendency to pop up out of the sand to ambush you. And their hideouts are poorly lit hellholes that usually end with you going deep inside and then having to make a desperate escape as they chase you down. Bonus points for your first trip to the airport in the Dunes, where they're clearly watching you the whole time but don't actually come for you, leaving you paranoid until you finally fall into the trap they laid, where they seal off the room you're in and cut off what little lights there are before pouring in by the dozens.
  • Max's Sanity Slippage after the deaths of Hope and Glory is especially creepy, with the two of them (and Chumbucket once he dies) alternating between egging you on to kill Scrotus and guilt-tripping you over their deaths (Glory going from fearing as she dies that no one will remember her name to urging you to "paint my name in blood" is especially creepy.) There's also a chance of wastelander encounters turning into Hope or Glory to twist the knife even more.
  • When driving to one scavenger location, you find the route marked with a big, yellow arrow painted on the cliffside, pointing at the cave. Inside, there's a shipping container with a bow painted on, like's a giant present. Within the container, you find about a dozen rotting bodies, which is bad enough, but whatever the hell is going on in that cave is never explained.
  • Max himself at the ending. He's gone absolutely insane. The deaths of Hope and Glory drive him straight down the path to insanity to the point he hears their voices in his head telling them to kill Scrotus no matter at what cost, leading him to even killing Chumbucket out of his pure Unstoppable Rage. It is pretty much one of the most horrifying examples of what can happen if you push a broken man too far.
  • In one of the reversal moves, you jam a shiv into the eye of the enemy grabbing you. The enemy will then stagger off for a few seconds clawing at the shiv until he collapses. It's fairly disturbing to watch. Hell, all the takedowns can be disturbing, as they're a perfect example of how brutal Max has had to become to survive in the wasteland.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: While somewhat derivative, it's considered a strong game on its own.
• Older Than They Think: Although it was released soon after Fury Road, the game is not a licensed tie-in but an original story, and was actually in development for a long time.
• Paranoia Fuel: In the mission when you go find some Christmas lights you have to go into the Buzzard lair. However, unlike other missions where you are attacked constantly as you make your way through, here you are completely left alone. But throughout it it is made completely clear that you are being constantly watched by them with their eyes just glowing in the dark or them just leaving the room as you appear. Leaving you to know you are going to be ambushed at some point, you just don't know when.
• Polished Port: The PC version of the game is unusually well optimized at the time, to the point where systems that chug on certain games released years ago run at a smooth 60 on Mad Max, despite the game is one of the first games that used Denuvo anti-tamper which, depending on the implementation per game, might lead to adverse effects to performance.
• Presumed Flop: The game had a very unfortunate release date that was shared with Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain and the PC release of Grand Theft Auto V, and critics ended up giving the game rather average review scores, so many people assumed the game was completely crushed by those other games. Despite this, the game still managed to sell 1.8 million copies and became a Sleeper Hit.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The Barrel Blastin' Death Races force you to pass through checkpoints, marked by lines of flaming barrels that you have to hit. Problem is, these barrels are just heavy enough that sometimes passing the checkpoint will cause you to spin out (which is guaranteed to ruin your run.)
  • Defusing Minefields is one of the recurring objectives to lower the Threat level of a region. It requires the use of the Dog and Buggy, one of the game's least interesting (not to mention combat capable) vehicles, which requires driving directly to the minefield from a Stronghold (since fast travelling spawns the Magnum Opus instead of whatever vehicle Max is currently using). The Minefields themselves are easily the hardest Threat objective to locate, as they're the only ones that can't be marked on the map by spotting it from a hot-air balloon. To top it off, most minefields are near roads that War Parties patrol, making it entirely possible that you'll be spotted while trying to hunt down the mines— in which case, it's not unheard of to get bumped onto a mine by enemies, which will likely either destroy the buggy (thus making it impossible to locate the remaining mines), or kill Max outright, either of which forces the player to drive all the way back.Or you remove all other threats first, then spend a tedious twenty minutes or so driving around every single minefield in an entire stronghold's territory.
  • The big storms tend to come out of nowhere while you're in the middle of completing an objective, make it nearly impossible to see where you're driving, damage you if you're in an exterior part of an enemy camp (forcing you to find some sheltered place and sit around doing nothing for several minutes until the storm departs so you can continue clearing the camp), and have seemingly no effect on enemy vehicles, who will continue to attack you when you can barely see. And once you've got a few camps giving you scrap deliveries, the mutha loot crates cease to be worth the effort of chasing. The whole mechanic quickly turns into nothing but a forced timeout that stops you in the middle of whatever you were trying to do.
• Squick:
  • The staple Wastelander diets of dog food, maggots and people. In fact, maggots are a healing item, which you eat after scooping them out of decaying corpses.
  • Some of the moves Max pulls off in combat are really brutal.
  • Jeet has scraps of metal embedded in his forehead, which would be gross enough, but the skin has started to grow over them, almost looking like bandages made out of flesh.
  • One of Chumbucket's quote when you leave him alone with the car is that he is happy since there are some stuff he wants to do with the carburetor socket without Max looking. He is already worshiping the machine and is quite enthusiastic about it to begin with so it's not far fetched to assume he humping the car.
• That One Boss: The Gastown Race against Stank Gum is less of a race and more of a lap-based car duel. Stank Gum's car is incredibly durable (even against maximum level Thunderpoon shots), surprisingly fast, can drop very powerful landmines, and can spray fire at close quarters. The track itself is a series of narrow tunnels, with protruding ridges that are angled so that even grazing the sides at most parts of the track will cause a spin out, forcing a lengthy attempt to catch up. The longer the race goes, the more deadly the track becomes, with swinging mines and portions of the track that will set the Magnum Opus on fire, causing damage and preventing the use of the Thunderpoon until the fire goes out. Perhaps worst of all, however, is that there's limited opportunities to repair the car— Chumbucket isn't allowed into the race, which means it's not possible to sit and let him repair the Magnum Opus, which means that even a small handful of mistakes can result in death.
• Tear Jerker:
  • One historic artifact is a letter someone wrote for her pet dog, Molly. Because she was forced to evacuate with little notice and wasn't allowed to take Molly with her, she left the treat cabinet open for her dog before she had to leave her behind.
  • Another historic artifact is of a picture of a girl celebrating her birthday. On the back is a letter: "Mum, I know you don't want anything to do with us, but little Brienne sure wants to meet her grandmother. Love, Janet and Skyler." On top of not knowing the fate of Janet, Skyler, or little Brienne, there is the suggestion that the mother of whoever wrote the letter cut them off because they were a lesbian.
  • Another relic is a picture of two kids in front of a lake. On the back is written: "Beauty is life. Beauty is family. Beauty is eternal. As long as there is life on this planet, beauty will follow. I can't imagine it any other way. Feeling good! -Abby." After reading it, Max wonders "Did it die too? Beauty?"
  • Chumbucket in the final missions, after standing beside Max through the whole game and giving him everything he has. Max makes it clear that he's going to steal the Magnum Opus and abandon Chumbucket the first moment he can. When Max decides to destroy the Magnum Opus to kill Scrotus, Chumbucket pleads with him to spare his creation, only for Max to kill him in the attempt. Max then drives away, leaving Chumbucket's smoldering corpse unmourned.
• Ugly Cute: Chumbucket comes across as this to a lot of people. The humpback's sheer enthusiasm for cars gets to a lot of people, and his car religion is weirdly enticing to listen to. Which makes it all the more tragic when Max kills him at the end.
• Vindicatedby History: At the time of its release, the game had the great misfortune of being released amidst an oversaturated market of open-world sandbox exploration action games, with Ubisoft, in particular, being a frequent target of ridicule for this reason. As such many critics dismissed the game as another dime-a-dozen sandbox game with a Mad Max paintjob and little else to distinguish it. However, now that the gaming industry has moved on to new trends and genres, alleviating the deluge of Open-World Sandbox games, many now look back at Mad Max with significantly more fondness and appreciation of its vehicle-focused action gameplay and for being a worthwhile addition to the Mad Max canon for authentically recreating its world and titular designated hero.
• Woolseyism: In the French version, Stank Gum's name becomes "Scorbut" (literally: "Scurvy") instead of something like "Gencive Puante". Since the guy has completely rotten teeth and one of scurvy's most notorious symptoms is a decay of the gums, that isn't less meaningful than the original.

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