Mad Max Notebook Benchmarks

For the original German article, see here.

Engine

Mad Max was developed by Avalanche Studios. They were also the producers of Just Cause. The game is action-packed from the third-person view. Like the movie, the game is packed with over-the-top effects, like massive explosions, which will no doubt please gamers.

This title qualifies as an Arcade game thanks to the intense fist fights, like those of Batman, and straightforward races. The available gadgets and tuning elements may be a bit demanding, but this is in no way a survival game like The Evil Within. Mad Max is not a hardcore game but is a lot of fun: There is a certain appeal to shutting off the brain for a few hours and racing at full speed through the desert. Overall, the game feels like a mix of Borderlands, Rage and the Pitch Black movie.

The PC version of Mad Max is very stable. We did not encounter any crashes or other abnormalities during our tests, but some users have complained about massive quest bugs. The engine of the game is well-designed. Although the Avalanche Engine cannot match the quality of a few other open-world games, like The Witcher 3 or Assassin's Creed Unity, it does manage a good job of putting the gamer in the world of Mad Max.

The developers deserve praise for the action and physics effects. Some should be improved, like flames, but overall the effects are very good and make the fights entertaining. Most gamers will keep playing simply due to the beautiful car explosions. The dust and smoke particles, which are created when racing through the landscape, are well done. Sadly, the texture quality of Mad Max is not great. A closer look reveals that many surfaces are blurry. Also, it cannot match the object density of GTA V or Far Cry 4.

As shown by our benchmarks, the hardware requirements are modest. If the performance is decent, the game will run fluidly. Thanks to the comprehensive tutorial, precise controls and good mechanics, the game quickly immerses players into the environment. The speech quality is a bit poor, which makes the characters sound rather unenthusiastic in the original English audio.

Avalanche Studios deserves praise for its extensive graphics menu: a total of 22 settings. Sadly we found a few problems with these settings. Problem 1: if the keyboard is used to navigate the menu, some options will have to be selected by pressing the "E" key before they can be changed. Problem 2: after confirming the changes by pressing the E key again, the user has to click on "Apply" to implement the new settings. Otherwise, the settings will revert back to the old ones. Problem 3: Mad Max sometimes reduces the Hz frequency of the resolution by itself, but this only affects the menu and will not noticeably affect the gameplay.

Furthermore, the studio has included very different settings: sometimes the settings offer levels from "Off" to "Max" and sometimes they offer "Normal" to "High". The available presets only cover medium to high settings. If you want to play at minimum or maximum settings, you have to turn every option off/on in the menu by yourself. To avoid mistakes, we chose the 3 presets available for our tests. Annoying: the integrated Anti-Aliasing feature (probably FXAA) does not do a good job. Skewed borders and some objects tend to flicker a lot on levels.