Interactive trailers are a thing now, apparently.
Remember those old choose your own adventure books, where you were presented with choices that forked your story into different directions? Where depending on the choices you made, you’d go to different passages in the book, and ultimately a different outcome?
Remember how you’d keep a finger in the previous page, so that if you didn’t like the outcome – for example, you died – you could flip back… and sometimes you’d read all the choices, just to see how they panned out?
Well now interactive video game trailers are a thing.
Last week, Ubisoft gave us the Rainbow Six: Siege interactive trailer that, while an excellent trailer that really showed off the gameplay in realistic terms, felt more like a car manufacturer’s website than anything else.
You know the kind. The ones with call-out buttons on the specific components you might want clarification on – and even things that you don’t like a sledgehammer, which is pretty self-explanatory – just adding a feeling of a HUD or overlay to the video, rather than any kind of true interactivity.
This week we’ve got a new contender: The Mad Max – Choose Your Path interactive trailer. Is it any better than the Rainbow Six: Siege one?
Not really. It’s actually pretty poor as trailers go, and is definitely one of the weaker video spots we’ve seen for the new Mad Max game thus far. So what about the interactivity, then?
No, that’s a swing and a miss, too.
At three points during the Mad Max – Choose Your Path interactive trailer, a choice pops up on screen for how you’d like to see Max tackle the situation at hand. If you’re that interested in how the game plays, then frankly you’re going to rewind and watch all three.
If you’re playing properly (and not keeping your finger in the page, metaphorically speaking) then you’re going to pick the third option every time, because of the way the options in the Mad Max – Choose Your Path interactive trailer are named. It may as well be asking, “Would you like the lame option, the even lamer option, or the super-mega-explosive-McAwesomeville option?”
Plus, and we’re overstating the point a little here, but it’s just not that good a trailer. The Mad Max – Choose Your Path interactive trailer tries to show you all the fun ways you can blow stuff up – much like the Just Cause 3 ‘Choose Your Own Chaos’ trailer, which is bloody brilliant – but just looks confusing, messy, and not altogether that fun by comparison.
Mad Max is released on September 1, 2015 – pre-order it from Amazon now.
