Recent reviews by Riari

This is excellent. It's a faithful remake of the original with a tastefully upgraded art style, and it retains much of the old school essence of the original where it makes sense. Made me feel like a kid again. :D

I almost never go out of my way to recommend a game, but I have to make an exception for this one. It's one of the best open world games I've ever played. Almost every facet of it is highly polished - great visuals, great writing, great voice acting, and great gameplay, to name a few things. It's one of the few games I've veered towards completionism with; I didn't 100% it, but left very few bits of side content unfinished by the time I finished my first playthrough.

Vehicle combat is one example of where this game really shines. Once you get enough upgrades to reliably tackle the convoys, you get some awesome moments that feel like they could have come straight out of one of the movies. Vehicle physics are pretty good and explosions are very satisfying since the vehicles are modelled in such a way that parts of them (including the wheels) can be blasted off.

It does suffer from some issues that most open world games have in some form. It definitely shows in the side activities; I found most of them to be OK and not particularly tedious, but the worst offender by far is the minefields. There's really nothing fun or satisfying about clearing them, they're just a tedious thing you must power through if you want to reduce the threat level of every region to 0 (which is necessary to get all of the vehicle upgrades).

There is a degree of repetition in doing the side activities overall, but this is to be expected with any open world game and you can minimise the risk of them feeling like a chore if you mix things up a little instead of focusing on any one thing until you've finished it.

Overall, it is a well-designed, well-executed game that still looks pretty good 7 years after release. Even if you're not a Mad Max fan, I'd say it's worth a shot for the price. You just might love it.