10 Brilliant Video Games That Surprised Everyone

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.