The list of games I need to tackle is so long, I realised most of them are probably never going to get a look in. To even the playing field a little, I made myself a little script.
This script contains a list of the games I still need to complete, and I have decided that I'm occasionally going to use it to help me decide the next game to give a proper, good faith, go at.
Each time I run it, I will receive three random games from the list, from which I will then have to make my selection.
For this first use of the game chooser, it gave me the choice of Overcooked, Hellblade Senua's Sacrifice, or Mad Max.
As I'd already tried Overcooked, and it feels more like a multiplayer game anyway, I decided not to choose that one. I probably should have gone Hellblade, for its shorter run time, but I was liking the look of Mad Max, especially as it would be the first game of my MAXimum random game efforts.
This is a massive open world game where you drive around taking on the worst scum that the wasteland has to offer. Your buddy, Chumbucket, helps you out by upgrading and repairing your car.
There's also plenty of 3rd person brawling going on, with a similar style of combat to the Arkham games, though stripped down and without all of the gadgets.
Game won't even let me pet the dog
Rugby tackle
Well this is not gonna go well
Would you quit hanging around?
There's a lot of good stuff going on with the game, and the basic mechanics are solid. If you're into typical open world games, you'd probably like this. Everything is here, such as towers to scout the area (in this case balloons), camps to take over, scrap to loot, enemy convoys to track down and disable. You name it.
But it was all of this extra filler that started getting me a little bit annoyed with the game. Now, it's not that the extra side content exists, but the fact that at many points in the main story, the game will not let you progress unless you have tackled enough of the side content.
So for the people that just like to straight-line the main story, this game is not for you.
It was also a problem in that there was just so much of this side content. It just became so repetitive. In addition, as you go through the zones, it becomes more and more difficult. For example, I was having to tackle armoured enemy vehicles long before I'd got the means to actually deal with them properly. Every battle became an exercise in escape, fix car, go back do some more chip damage, escape, fix car, etc...
The constant holding down of the button to loot, and to do nearly any other command, quickly became grating as well. Just like in Witcher 3, and having to hold down the button to use witcher senses. Why can all of these commands not just be press the button once?
There were also a bunch of sporadic bugs, like enemy cars disappearing right as I was about to ram them, or me seemingly hitting nothing on the road and getting smashed up into the air.
Things get grindy
Come here and get decked
Yum, om nom, dog food
Sound the Dukes Of Hazzard horn
The end for this game came when it started making me race. I'd avoided all of the optional death races up to this point because I knew, with the sluggish handling of the car, that I wouldn't do very well.
So you can imagine how I felt when the main story demanded two races on the trot.
It didn't go well.
The first race was easy enough, and I nailed it on my second go after figuring out what was going on. But there was very little violence in that race.
The second one was a full-on combat track, where you have to kill a target with a missile launcher, while driving a very tight and twisty course, while avoiding a million traps, while all of the other cars are out to smash you up.
As you can imagine, after a bunch of attempts at this, I was absolutely sick of it. There was no way I was ever going to get passed this with a car that is just so unresponsive. There's simply no way to dodge traps like mines or flamethrowers unless I just stopped dead and let the target car get away from me.
So sadly, this is another game for the incomplete pile. It's highly unlikely that I'll ever come back to it, as because there's no manual saves, my autosave is right at the start of this race. So it's not like I can even back out, go do some other quests and beef the car up a bit. I'm pretty sure I would have to start the game all over again.
And screw that.
Scrapping with some aliens from Guardians Of The Galaxy
Waiting for repairs. Again.
This is probably only 20% of the map. Too much shit to do.
Stamping out this game's hopes