Max Payne 3
Producer: Rockstar
Release Date: May 15, 2012
Platform: PS3, Xbox 360, PC
Rating: Mature
Genre: Shooter
Payne in the Ass
Written by Jesse Seilhan
It seems like sequels are filling up gamers’ time in 2012, but with some franchises being dusted off by new developers with a winning track record, more of the same is not necessarily a bad thing. Take Rockstar: they took a mediocre Western game from the PS2 era and turned it into Red Dead Redemption, one of the best games of the past decade and did it with flair all their own. With Max Payne, we have another shooter from the same era of RDR’s predecessor, but with a more beloved titular character and a benchmark for great gameplay. Max Payne was a hard-and-fast shooter, built for speed and fueled by a bullet-time mechanic never-before-seen in a game. Rockstar has done a great job in preserving the character and gameplay, but made some slight changes to bring the game up to cultural standards.
Like all of Rockstar’s products, Max Payne 3 feels a lot like playing a movie. This works fantastic when the action is manic but gratifying, the dialogue is funny and smart, and the story is engaging and engrossing. Just like a bad film, however, some off-timed events and sluggish parts can turn this otherwise gem into a labor of love. With a depressing and morbid narrative, bordering on pitiful and priceless, Max Payne is one of the best/worst anti-heroes of all time. The writing is top notch, although half of it is in Portuguese, which I wish I understood after hearing hours of it via various cutscenes and death rattles. The controls are a beast that some may find hard to wrangle. The player is given three choices, from free aim to a lock-on helping hand, with a blend of the two in between for those more accustomed to slight hand-holding in today’s games. The game features a high level of difficulty underscored by a low level of forgiveness. You will die and you will curse.
The graphics are beyond gorgeous, combing a shine and detail usually saved for motion pitcures. While some of the character models end up looking a little cut-and-paste, I would chock that up to the sheer number of corpses you see over your ten-hour journey. The setting is equally impressive, as Brazil offers a visual theme not seen in very many games, contrasting its desperate favelas and hoity-toity high-rent districts. While the main plot has some obvious twists and turns, the way Max fits in is anything but obvious, especially when his layered and depressing psyche take over in the form of narrative quips and sad soliloquies. He gets in a bit more trouble than in his prior titles, and instead of handling them in his prior comic book nature, he now seems to always be jumping away from more explosions than Bruce Willis in every Die Hard flick. The multiplayer is also more addicting as all of the pills Max chugs combined. Besides the various Call of Duty perk system, which all games have become slaves to, the shootouts and sense of mortality raises even the toughest player’s heart rate. With just a few well-placed shots equaling death, the online portion of this game feels more like a third-person Counterstrike than a bullet-time charged divefest. While not the best Rockstar game, nor even the best Max Payne game, it is still head-and-shoulders above most of what has been released over the past few years and is a must-play for fans of hard-boiled noir.