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When you play Mad Max, you're not really playing a single video game so much as you're playing a sort of cross-section: a geological sample of where many big-budget video games are at today. You're seeing the things big-budget developers like and you're seeing the things they think we like. Mad Max may seem scrappy, with all that rust and bent metal and all those insane, babbling NPCs, but this is game design as a sort of science - or game flow design as a science, at least. A huge map, constantly prodding you in a direction and then teasing you away again one gimmick at a time, with everything you find adding to a total somewhere, all of it taking you closer to completion.As such, it's very pleasing to get stuck into. I don't play Assassin's Creed much these days, I am behind on Far Cries and I'm waiting for a large chunk of time in which to give Batman the attention he deserves, so it's nice to catch up with mainstream open-world game design in Mad Max. It's nice to see what a huge chunk of games are up to.
And I'll admit that, if there's one thing that's kept me playing, it's something that I gather almost all open-world games are up to in some shape or form. With Mad Max, I've become obsessed with the balloons.
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