10 Brilliant Video Games That Surprised Everyone

8. Mad Max

Shadow of Mordor
Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment

Despite releasing in 2015, the very same year as the release of George Miller's masterful Mad Max: Fury Road, Avalanche's entry into the Mad Max mythology is not a direct adaptation or spin-off. It is, in keeping with Mad Max's ambiguous continuity, a separate chapter in the legend of the preposterously-named Max Rockatansky. And it's absolutely head-crushingly awesome.

Taking elements from the original trilogy of films and the newest entry alike, Mad Max places the player in a vast, hostile desert (a lot of which turns out to be a dried out ocean floor). True to form, Max's overarching goal is simply to get his car back from the even more preposterously-named warlord Scabrous Scrotus. The gameplay focuses on vehicular combat, a genre which has barely seen the light of day since the late 90s, and executes this with incredible style and aplomb. Suped-up cars thunder across the wasteland, battling it out and exploding in a showers of white hot metal and glass, and the trail of destruction left behind is a sight to behold.

The game's other elements also fit together very well, with hand-to-hand combat feeling weighty and muscular and the game's central car-customisation mechanic allowing the player to construct their very own magnum opus of a vehicle.

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Contributor

Neo-noir enjoyer, lover of the 1990s Lucasarts adventure games and detractor of just about everything else. An insufferable, over-opinionated pillock.