Mad Max (2015) is one of the better games you probably haven’t heard of. Piggy-backing off the world of Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), it re-uses some characters and locations without re-treading the events of the movie. You play the eponymous Max as he drives his way through the wasteland trying to reclaim his car, which is stolen in the opening sequence of the game. It released to a mixed critical reception; a common theme of reviews was that it was a fun game that was hard to call great. I’d like to take some time here to explore both why it’s good and what exactly it was about Mad Max that left so many people wanting.

The core mechanic that really works in Mad Max is the cars. Throughout the game you drive the Magnum Opus, maintained by your sidekick, Chumbucket, and use the scrap and parts you collect to purchase upgrades that make you more effective against the roving war boys and gastown caravans that you encounter.

A lot comes together in Mad Max to make car combat feel good. The sound and visual design is excellent, the graphics are polished, and the controls strike a great balance between challenging and satisfying. There’s a real meta-game to the car upgrades that becomes apparent as you get into the game; you need to choose between speed and agility versus attack power, and limited resources mean you can’t immediately get both. There’s a satisfying sense of progression to it as well, where like a lot of modern open world games there are clear higher and lower “level” areas that open up as you get more car upgrades, without having to assign the player a prescriptive D&D-style numbered level.

As you level up your car and explore the wasteland, you’ll also get to see a beautifully rendered version of the world of Mad Max: Fury Road that takes full advantage of advances in graphics technology in the ’10s. The lighting is lovely and plenty of attention was paid to the details of car and enemy models and textures. The intermittent sandstorms are an epic visual and auditory assault that matches up to the thrill and danger of trying to survive one in-canon. It’s a real testament to just how good studios have gotten at making great-looking video games.

The best way to understand why Mad Max doesn’t work is through the lens of “ludonarrative”, a term coined by Clint Hocking in a 2007 blog post. He describes what he calls “ludonarrative dissonance” in Bioshock, where the “ludic contract” (basically: the things the player experiences while playing) conflicts with the narrative’s critique of Randian objectivism. The single clearest way I’ve heard ludonarrative dissonance described, this time by Scott Juster, is in a later post about Nathan Drake in the Uncharted series:

I soon realized I was controlling a character whose cutscene persona clashed with his gameplay persona. Cutscene Drake was a smooth talker who tried to bluff his way out of jams, lived to solve historical mysteries, and was not immune to accidentally bumping his head on low doorways. Gameplay Drake shed his conventional charm, instead becoming an expert marksman proficient with over a dozen firearms, a stealth assassin whose first move against an unsuspecting enemy was to kill rather than incapacitate, and a juggernaut who slaughtered his way out of predicaments. Unfortunately, this Drake was unable to kill that infamous beast we call “ludonarrative dissonance.”

I think it’s worth taking a pause here to reflect on the power of ludonarrative in games. When you’ve played a game where narrative and gameplay are deliberately designed to support each other, it’s an amazing experience that highlights the power of games as a medium. Harry “hbomberguy” Brewis has an excellent video essay describing this in Darkest Dungeon and Left 4 Dead and FTL: Faster than Light are two games where I can personally remembering seeing this happen. Games that care about ludonarrative are significantly more immersive, not just in terms of the worldbuilding but in terms of ensuring that everything you do as a player feels meaningful and worthwhile.

For open world games specifically, ludonarrative is more important than you might expect. Even though you’re ostensibly free to do whatever you want, ludonarrative gives your actions a purpose: you do things because it makes sense for your character to do them and because they have an impact on the game that aligns with the overall narrative, not because the game designers put something there to do.

What you get in Mad Max isn’t ludonarrative dissonance so much as ludonarrative indifference. Some gameplay elements support the narrative, but more often than not they don’t. The game is full of elements like obtrusive completion markers that drive players towards fully scavenging every camp and loot location even if the resources aren’t required or the items have no gameplay impact. You can invest thousands of scrap units into upgrading allied “strongholds” to get benefits ranging from the minorly useful (refilling your water canteen) to literally useless (a purely cosmetic upgrade that increases the number of people in the stronghold).

Mad Max has consumable fuel (which powers your car) and water (which you use to recover health), but except for the very beginning of the game these resources are never scarce and function only as an occasional annoyance that you can mostly ignore. Max spends the entire game blowing up oil pumps and refineries, seemingly eliminating every source of fuel in the wasteland, but the destruction doesn’t even warrant a mention from the other characters in the game, never mind any actual impact on gameplay.

Note: one counterpoint I’ve heard about the consumables is that they aren’t very scarce because Mad Max isn’t a story about surviving a wasteland with scarce resources. But if that’s the case, what are they doing in the game at all? Neither option is well represented by the resource mechanic as it exists in the game today.

As a lot of other games that struggle with ludonarrative often find themselves doing, Mad Max’s story is told mostly through non-interactive cutscenes; the player drives and fights from location to location, periodically culminating in a video of characters interacting to actually drive the story forward.

Mad Max has other problems, like weak writing and a shallow hand-to-hand combat mechanic, that drag it down. But every open world game of any size has those kinds of issues. It’s when you combine those small failings with the lack of attention to ludonarrative that you get a world that is a lot of fun to drive around in, but where a lot of the other things you do feel unsatisfying at best and pointless at worst. You’ll frequently find yourself doing tasks like hunting down Scrotus Insignia in war boy camps just to watch a counter tick up to 100%, or grinding through faction quests in a region that the plot has moved on from just because it feels like you should. When you finish the story, you are simply thrown back into the world with a notice that you may continue playing as if nothing happened, a transition that’s particularly jarring because of an event that transpires during the final boss fight (I won’t spoil it).

As you’re chasing down a caravan, dodging and weaving between enemy vehicles and watching beautifully rendered explosions bloom around you, none of this matters, and for most those moments of perfection will make the game worth it to play. But when core elements of the game aren’t designed to work together the end result is a disappointment, particularly when the game is so good in so many ways.