Reviews

Concise Review:

A relatively simple and repetitive open world experience that is enjoyable due to its excellent sense of style, and its effective upgrade system. There is constant progression for Max and the Magnum Opus that feels impactful. It’s relaxing and enjoyable to mess around in the wasteland clearing the various tasks. A lot of good experiences in this game, not a lot of great or bad ones. Strong ending.

Journal Style Review:

Years ago I started this game and probably played 2-3 hours and then stopped. It didn’t capture my interest. I think I might have been worn out with open world games at the time. I am giving it another go now.

Solid opening cutscene. That chainsaw was a nice touch. First tutorial sections are alright. I like the idea of upgrading my vehicle. This seems like it may be pretty cookie cutter for open world games of this time, but I like the mad max world so far. I like the style to it. The sand storm was cool. Nice touch.

I wish it wasn’t so slow to pick stuff up and open doors etc. The hold A for everything isn’t great. There’s a lot of collecting and looting as well. I find myself getting lost looking for scrap sometimes and I think I’ll enjoy this game more if I just move on. That being said I’m enjoying it and like the style to the world. I think the combat feels good even though it’s simple. It has a good weight to it. I like the amount of upgrades and customization this game has also. There’s a lot.

I don’t love searching for things to blow up in camps. I hope I get better at finding them. This game is a bit too slow to begin. I want to be driving and fighting people more, not walking around in camps looking for things. 

The world looks really cool at times. They have made a nice wasteland. This game has something pretty cool going on that I can’t quite describe. It’s somehow very generic and familiar while also feeling unique and special. I don’t know why. But I’m liking it.

This game feels like it’s best scenario should be at night when stoned. I haven’t played it stoned yet but it feels like a stoned game. 

I love the car races/combat. I need more of it. The death race was very fun. The combat and action is so cinimatic. Shooting the tanks and blowing up the cars or smashing them and the slow mo looks so awesome.

This game is epic. It’s picked up the pace, or maybe I’ve just accepted the pace, either way, I’ve been really enjoying it. It feels like an epic movie. The world is actually so awesome. I thought it was going to look boring because it’s so dead everywhere but they nailed the atmosphere and look of the world. So far at least. I hope it continues to look amazing.

Quality of life complaint. I don’t like that you need to drive chum’s buggy for the dog to clear minefields. My custom car is so fucking cool and super fun to drive so I don’t like it when I’m forced to go back to garage, change my car specifically for mines, and then go clear a bunch out. It’s my least favourite of the  activities.

Seriously though, I love Max’s car. It is decked out and it’s the type of car I really like. Super cool. I had a few sessions where I was driving around a lot (while stoned) and it was a great time. This game is currently a high B+ but it’s been steadily rising.

Still get lost looking for transfer tanks sometimes.

This game is pretty easy for the most part. At least with my overleveled max it is. It suits the game though. This is a low stress casual game for me. The hardest part are the different death races, but that might be partly because I haven't unlocked some of the other vehicles. 

I’d say I enjoy about 80% of the tasks. Occasionally I’m frustrated because I get lost and I don’t like the decision to force max to use chums buggy for the mines. I don’t like driving that rust bucket when I have this dope muscle car that’s better in every way. It makes the minefields a chore. I want to do them because I want to fully lower the threat level to 0 for unlocks but it becomes a chore. Most of the other tasks are enjoyable.

The game is fairly simple overall and there isn’t a ton of variety. Because of the lack of challenge and the lack of variety I’m usually good to play something else after 1 or 2 hours. At this point I don’t think this game makes the jump to A-. It will be close probably.

Driving through the lightening sandstorms is so cool. I’ve had a good streak of fun sessions.

Overall story is very bare bones and I ignored most of it. The vibes of the world and the characters are where I’m getting my “story” beats from. I’m a wanderer building up a sick car. I don’t need anymore than that.

I actually really liked the story ending. I did not expect the child and mother to get killed. That was intense and nicely transitioned into full crazy max. Which I loved. Then the final scrotus death was pretty great too.

I cleared every camp, scarecrow, sniper, and death race, so I clearly enjoyed the game. It ends a high B+. It was so close an A-.

Final Score: B+

I do not have a single artistic bone in my body, and I say forthright that I would probably not have picked up this quaint indie game were it not for the fact it is free this month for PSN users. This circumvention of the rather steep £30 tag coupled with the fact I went in with no expectations likely makes me more lenient on reviewing this.

 Nevertheless I enjoyed this for what it was, a heavily stylised and cartoonish little drawing game where you use your controller to draw (preset) neon monsters on walls and decorate them with (preset) tails, ears, hats and various other little bits to try to breathe life into these otherwise characterless creatures. But there lies perhaps the biggest problem (and surely the most grating for the artists), the fact there are many restrictions to what you can paint. Yes you can draw cute landscapes on just about every wall and theres a good amount of natural objects to choose from, but even if you manage to wrangle your controller into the shape you want these objects to take on the wall, by the time you’re done it still looks more like a great neon mess than anything resembling the natural world. The same is true for the aforementioned genies, as although there are numerous customisation options for you to drunkenly play ‘pin-the-tail-on the-genie’, the difficulty in making it look the way you want combined with the brief time you most likely will spend with these individuals before they become lumped together in your genie puzzle-solving army makes most efforts to make them standout futile (the most artistic genie I made was one with 8 gargantuan spider legs jutting out of its body, something I quickly altered after the first time I saw him bounding towards me at record speeds), in this sense they are much akin to the messy environmental drawings, just with a friendlier face. As mentioned, there are puzzles in this game that have to be solved to progress, although these puzzles amount to little more than ‘call the genie over and draw stuff for it’. The combat system they introduce is similarly simple and limiting, equating to little more than periodic button-pressing.

 I had no qualms about the overarching story, yes it was simple and cliche, but it was done in a well enough way that I didn’t really mind. And how it incorporates a great change up in gameplay during the last chapter is quite well done too, making it feel truly like a final push against the ‘Darkness’. The world that this story takes place in is also an intriguing one, a forgotten fishing village enveloped by an unknown evil sets an effectively eerie atmosphere from the start, making all the more incentive to ‘paint the town back to life’ as standing back and witnessing some of the light you have brought back to Denska really helps to carry motivation for seeing out the story. Although the short completion time of this, even if you go for Platinum, stops most of the gameplay and story aspects from really shining.

 All-in-all a unique little indie title doesn’t quite justify its £30 price tag due to all the limits it imposes on the players creativity. Still for the price of free you could do a lot worse and you’re bound to get some forgettable fun out of this.

Including Miles into the Spidey universe is a masterstroke from this studio. Miles is the perfect answer to the older Peter Parker that the game created in the first entry. This entry really captures the young, scrappy feeling of a teen who has too many spinning plates in his life.

The game exists in this strange middle-place between our current NYC and futuristic NYC that is full of military tech. The plot pacing moved a little too fast when the Tinkerer all of a sudden has anti-grav boots and is better at fighting than Miles. Besides the leaps in world believability that is required, the tech of the Underground was really innovative and cleverly designed.

The relationship between Miles, Phin, Prowler, and Roxxon creates a pretty standard and obvious plot that doesn’t pack the same surprises that the first game did. Having said that the end is full of some pretty incredible cinematic moments and fight scenes that are thrilling and go a long way to make Miles such a standout character. The street level stuff with Miles helping out a small bodega, a deaf street artist, and all the stuff at the Morales family apartment were fantastic. The game went really deep in building out the culture and vibe of Miles’ life, and how his experience is unique to Parkers.

The character models are not good for a PS5 game and the voice cast is pretty lackluster besides the actor who plays Miles. They are really going for that MCU style snarky humor but it just doesn’t land.

The gameplay tutorials come fast, but the new powers from Miles add a great element to the move-set. Having an open-world that is immediately fully accessible and not locked at all behind enemies or artificial barriers creates an awesome world that is very difficult to not want to keep exploring. Thank goodness there aren’t tile puzzles or any Mary Jane sneaking sequences that killed the pacing in the first game.

Overall a great experience that benefited from the shorter run time.