AusGamers was recently invited out to a pre-E3 showing in LA where we managed to get our hands on Avalanche's Mad Max take, as well as speak with a few of the developers.

The demo wasn't a hugely long one, and was designed as a show-floor slice for E3 purposes, but the core value of the game -- car combat, was present in spades.

Here's a bit from the interview feature:

“Well the game revolves around cars and car combat,” explains design director Magnus Nedfors. “The whole universe is a car-based cult, more or less. So it’s always difficult to design a new system for something like that -- how to create cars and so on, but we really tried to push it forward and make car combat a huge part of the game.”

This point is a design principle for the developer that sits alongside the core discipline for the series, but it’s where Avalanche has crafted its own story, because at the beginning of the game Max is stripped of “the last of the great Interceptors” and the player spends the game building a new car -- one the studio is calling the “Magnum Opus”. It’s a carrot I’m not convinced a lot of Mad Max fans are going to want to chase -- one of the fantasies of the series for fans, and a reason a true Mad Max game has always been wanted is to be able get behind the wheel of Max’s booby-trapped, heavily modified 1973 Ford Falcon XB GT Coupe.

Click through for our Mad Max hands-on and developer interview feature.

Mad Max is due out on PC, PS4 and Xbox One this September.

Check out the new story trailer for the game embedded below.