7 reasons why Mad Max doesn't deserve praise

[Lux Interior]

The game got me hooked and I played many hours. Still didn't finish the main quest because I'm almost done with clearing up the last remains of the baddies.
Compulsion, however, isn't the same as fun. And there are many elements that get in the way of it being an enjoyable, not just long, experience. Here is my list of grievances:
1) No minimap. In lots of large areas, you just walk in circles until finding the part you haven't explored. Particularly egregious on branching, labyrinthic areas, as Gastown.
2) Transfer tank bases. Why those optional insignias glow red, the non-mission exploding tanks are red, while your quest requisites are dull gray/green? It only shows it's a transfer tank when you look at very closely, sometimes obscured by grids or other objects. Many, many times I had to watch videos to discover where the last tank was. Again, no minimap - sometimes they show in the regular map, sometimes it bugs out and shows nothing.
3) Armored enemies. I've upgraded my harpoon and ramming bumper before the thunderpoon, thinking I could keep using the same strategies on Pink Eye's area. No sell. You use the harpoon to destroy catapults and convoy trucks, but you can't use it in regular, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Roadkill enemies. The solution was jumping out of the car, trying to shoot their weels with the shotgun or just waiting for them to get bored and leave the car to fight me in melee.
4) Thunderpoon is the end of all weapons. You can't take armor with the harpoon, but you can one-shot any armored vehicle (except convoy trucksm that takes two) with the last level thunderpoon. It makes everything else pointless.
5) Waiting for storms to pass. So, you're in the middle of capturing a base and suddenly a storm comes. What you do? Find an abandoned container and leave your controller aside for 5 minutes. Apparently, that's the developer's idea of fun.
6) ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Gastown Race. The most evil design since Sierra's adventures from the 90s. Bump into anything, your car turns behind. Are you good enough at controlling your car? Oh, wait, there are those little cars that will try to ram you so you bump into a corner and turn behind. They can appear out of the screen. And the mines, those also can force you to bump and turn backwards. Whenever that happens, Stank Gun disappears on the horizon for the next 2 minutes, if you can stay alive for that long and not turning backwards again. The best "strategy" I discovered was that you can fail the mission if you drive backwards. At least that was better than trying to kill myself to start over.
7) No restart mission option. Mostly felt on Gastown race, but also another time, when I got my character stuck on geometry.

[Lux Interior]

DLM eredeti hozzászólása:

Lux Interior eredeti hozzászólása:

6) ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Gastown Race. The most evil design since Sierra's adventures from the 90s. Bump into anything, your car turns behind. Are you good enough at controlling your car? Oh, wait, there are those little cars that will try to ram you so you bump into a corner and turn behind. They can appear out of the screen. And the mines, those also can force you to bump and turn backwards. Whenever that happens, Stank Gun disappears on the horizon for the next 2 minutes, if you can stay alive for that long and not turning backwards again. The best "strategy" I discovered was that you can fail the mission if you drive backwards. At least that was better than trying to kill myself to start over.

Think smart maybe? I also struggled a couple of times on this before finding that the best strategy was completely ignoring the other vehicles and going for Stank Gun, the idea is to make it as short as possible because the longer it goes the harder it will be to avoid damage.

I should have FRAPS'ed this, I completed the race in about 30 seconds. You get a clear shot at his car right at the beginning, then boost your way through the other cars and when they are behind you ignore them and just spam your thunderpoon at Gun and voila.

You know, I passed Gastwon Race, on the 11th or so try. And it took less than 90 seconds. What you should do is obvious, just get behind Stank Gum and shoot 4 or 5 thunderpoons. The problem is that I didn`t feel like I had finally learned how to win the stage, just that I got lucky on that particular try.

The situation here is that, when I started playing, I thought critics were too harsh. For my first 20 or so hours, I would easily give an 8 to the game. But on the 20th occurrence of each same annoyances, I started feeling less forgiving. Now that I`m finishing it, I think it`s a 6. Very unfortunately, because I love the universe and the idea.

[Montanus77]

1/2) on the one hand you're right (esp. in gastown, where you cannot enter some parts of the underworld the first time you get there). on the other hand most locations for the missions are marked on the map, so there is at least a little challenge to find the loot in the searching areas.
3/4) when you like to capture the enemies' cars (like me), i'd recommend you to take a weaker thunderpoon, destroy the armor and then go on as with unarmored cars.
5) absolutely agree. totally annoying when it starts while you're conquering a camp. (when you're in your car, it's ok.) and yes, you CAN get hit by a storm while conquering a camp - even during a boss fight (and of course the boss doesn't take any damage from the storm). i can smoke 2-3 zigarettes during a storm, waiting in a safe corner of a camp. -.-
6) it's really hard, but the challenge is to get the right elements for your magnum opus. your bumper shouldn't be to heavy (it's not that important for the race), instead you should put more wheight on the armor (since this saves you from the most kinds of possible collisions during the race). most important: keep your accelaration high, so you can gain speed very fast, when your car stops. i also had to learn (by failing), that a 'good magnum opus' doesn't have all the highest elements possible, but you have to focus on what you really need/use, to get a well running and reacting vehicle.
7) i've never tried it during the gastown race, but you can end a death run by just leaving your car. maybe it also works for the gastown race.

[AJRimmer Bsc Ssc]

reason No 9

rockstar energy drink

[Jagerman1980]

grihn eredeti hozzászólása:

4) Upgrades and Leveling Up - These just come way too easy. Max and the Opus are pretty much unstoppable powerhouses half way through the game. I feel like these upgrades should have trickled in a little slower.

.

I have two save files because of your number 4 option. My first go around I ignored quests that took me to Gutgash because I wanted to do everything in Jeets because I was enjoying it. Normally I don't like games like this, because I hate the repetitive ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that I found during Assasins Creed. AC was the best 2 hours in a game when it came out, then the next 4 I slowly got bored and stopped playing because of the repetitive stuff. This game I haven't found that, however what I did find was by doing everything I found the game too easy. So I decided to start over and have just been doing the quests with very little exploring and found that by not grinding the upgrades before advancing the game is still easy but a lot more challenging then before.

[Johnny 5]

fowl intentions eredeti hozzászólása:

wow. i've been complaining about how too easy this game is haha. this kid is doing homework for this game like it will have a test at the end haha

The game's difficulty seemed to of went 0 to 100 real quick once I started doing stuff in the gas town area, which is a good thing IMO because the game felt a little to easy up until then.

[Montanus77]

grihn eredeti hozzászólása:

Scrap Piles - You know, the 3 scrap piles you have to build in each stronghold if you want 100% completion? There just doesn't seem to be any point to it other than to achieve 100% completion. There's no reward, no additional mission given, you're just paying 3000 scrap to achieve completion. There should have at least been some sort of benefit to the player.

i'm not sure, but is it possible, that the scrap piles decrease the time in which you can gain the benefits from the stronghold again? in my first playthrough, where i built them all, i just had to wait for a few minutes. in my recent playthrough i didn't built them and i have to wait around 20 minutes or so.

[SpeedForc3]

the games big let down is this dev studio seems to not be very creative outside of the base premise of a game they make. all the bosses are literally the same, the enemies have armor that you cannot even get, and all the side mission stuff is literally all the same no change at all. gets boring half way through.

also this game would have been perfect to atleast let modders make racing multiplayer. the car combat is pretty fun. while the on foot combat is too much of the same old same.

[Sephrax]

Lux Interior eredeti hozzászólása:

3) Armored enemies. I've upgraded my harpoon and ramming bumper before the thunderpoon, thinking I could keep using the same strategies on Pink Eye's area. No sell. You use the harpoon to destroy catapults and convoy trucks, but you can't use it in regular, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Roadkill enemies. The solution was jumping out of the car, trying to shoot their weels with the shotgun or just waiting for them to get bored and leave the car to fight me in melee.

- Ram until armor drops, use harpoon
- Fully upgraded shotgun, there's really nothing this thing can't destroy
- Fully upgraded thunderpoon

Lux Interior eredeti hozzászólása:

5) Waiting for storms to pass. So, you're in the middle of capturing a base and suddenly a storm comes. What you do? Find an abandoned container and leave your controller aside for 5 minutes. Apparently, that's the developer's idea of fun.

Or you could go and get some scrap. 300 scrap per box. Sometimes I find 3 of them at the same time.

[grihn]

Montanus77 eredeti hozzászólása:

grihn eredeti hozzászólása:

Scrap Piles - You know, the 3 scrap piles you have to build in each stronghold if you want 100% completion? There just doesn't seem to be any point to it other than to achieve 100% completion. There's no reward, no additional mission given, you're just paying 3000 scrap to achieve completion. There should have at least been some sort of benefit to the player.

i'm not sure, but is it possible, that the scrap piles decrease the time in which you can gain the benefits from the stronghold again? in my first playthrough, where i built them all, i just had to wait for a few minutes. in my recent playthrough i didn't built them and i have to wait around 20 minutes or so.

That may be, I'm not sure...I'll try to pay attention and see if it makes a difference...I think I still have a stronghold I haven't upgraded.

[Ingel Riday]

I've played 25 hours of this game in the past 12 days, so I can't complain too much. I've been generally having a blast. :-P That having been said, I respect your opinions Mr. Topic Creator. Not saying I agree with most of them, but I can see where you're coming from.

I think one of the predominant issues from which complaints stem is that this game is a Mad Max grafted onto a fairly standard open-world formula. You have towers that reveal points of interest on the map, numerous camps with copy-and-paste objectives (blow up an oil transfer pump or oil storage tanks), myriad collectibles that suck up time to find, etc. Like in most other open world games, making mini-maps for each camp would take a lot of time and resources... so they compromised and gave you red icons on the map to indicate transfer tanks while leaving it to you to scavenge for collectibles... which I've personally gotten used to in these games.

The open world trickles into mission design as well. Since you can start a mission and then ignore it for hours as you drive around whacking stuff, how would restarting work? I've had "cross Dead Barrens pass" for hours while doing Gutgash stuff. If it could be restarted, I'm not sure how that'd go. :-P

With respect to character upgrades, open worlds complicate that too. In a linear game, you know what the flow of XP is going to generally be. With this... how many players are going to pimp out the ride with every possible upgrade before the Jaw? How many are going to just plow through? You have to build scenarios and enemies that give the speed-runners a doable taks while leaving some challenge for the obsessive completionists, and that's a tricky feat. I have a fully maxed out Max and an incredibly good Magnum-Opus (almost done with Gutgash side objectives before hitting the Jaw), and that throws some things off. Not as egregious as Kingdom of Amalur, but I am indeed the Batman of the Wastes.

Oh, and then the whole "pragmatic game design" thing kicks into effect too. Most players aren't going to do all 50+ camps and kill every single Top Dog... so is it worth it to give each camp a unique objective or each Top Dog their own unique animations and weapons? Heck, a vast majority of gamers never even beat the games they buy and probably won't get past the Jaw or kill more than a single convoy. *copy and paste*

That having been said, I've found the camps varied enough in level design and the Top Dogs crazy enough in personality that I don't mind. I dislike the Dinki-Di minesweeper sections in the poorly defensible buggy (plenty of room in the Magnum Opus for Dinki-Di, really), but that seems to be the most egregious thing to me. Heck, I even like the storms. Each time, I've tried to beeline to shelter and made it just before the storm wall reached me. Then, I'm fistfighting freaks in a scavenger camp as debris and cars are flying in the air and Chumbucket is screaming in terror for his Angel Combustion. It's been kind of a hoot, and watching the lightning and explosions from a dilapidated shelter built into a bluff as I wait for my chance to pick up leftover scrap... feels very Mad Max to me. It works.

[⚡Snake⚡Plissken⚡]

7 deadly sins to why OP hates something, yet is in game right now

[Afterdark]

I would agree on #7 for the sole purpose that you can use it to work on the challeneges.

[WILDCARD]

I think the game is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ awesome, but that's my opinion.

[naomha]

It's fun. Really fun. Hasn't gotten old for me yet but I haven't put near as much time into it as I have MGSV:TPP. If it gets old for you simply take a damn break and play something else for awhile. Hell, I still have AC3 downloaded and haven't finished it yet. Love the game, just needed a break. With all the games I have something getting stale simply means I can move onto something else I haven't finished yet until I feel like coming back to it. You guys/ladies that feel you "need" to finish a game within the first week you buy it is mindnumbing. Especially on PC. It's not like you're going to trade it in so take your time, savor the fun factor. Don't get me wrong. I'll play the $hit out of a great game but I always try to take my time, find what I can, enjoy it as much as possible. If it starts to even get a wee bit tiring give it a break. Let it marinate for a week or 2 or 6 months or a year. There's nothing out there written in stone saying you HAVE to finish a game anytime soon.

[Rabid Urko]

Talk about trivial stuff OP.