Whatever you’re looking for in a Mad Max game, Mad Max isn’t it.

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Yellow-white salt wastes stretch a thousand miles in every direction. The only signs of civilization among the dunes are pockmarks of ramshackle scarecrows with oil fire apexes and the trailing dust plumes of rust-razor buggies. One such vehicle stands apart, piloted by a legend of the desert. He tears through a rival rider's lifeline in the parched pavement. It's nothing personal, but he needs 600 scrap to afford the harpoon launcher that will let him pass into the scorched ebon around Gastown, where his true prize awaits.

As the legend scavenges through the auto's wreckage, he finds what he's looking for. Ten long minutes of hard-fought vehicular combat have led to this. He crouches down, collects his prize, and... "1 Scrap."

It's a moment he — that is, Max Rockatansky, aka Mad Max — has repeated ad nauseam through half a dozen different methods, and will do so again countless times before his seemingly endless quest for a V8 engine is complete. It's a fairly simple mission, as video game plots go, but it's one fraught with complication after complication that begin to feel contrived very, very quickly.