Max Payne 3

Max Payne 3 is an excellent, but flawed new take on the franchise. At its core, the nugget of gameplay that makes Max Payne so fun (almost unfairly fun, really), the slow motion shoot dodging, is smoother and more stylish than it’s ever been. The surrounding package – the UI, story, presentation and pacing, however, do leave something to be desired.

1. Slow motion is really cool. 2. Guns are fantastic. John Woo put these two things together a long time ago and created what we call today balls-to-wall action bonanza extravaganza. When a shoot out wraps up on a John Woo set doing a reshoot is impossible because literally every square inch of it has been exploded or shot by someone who was diving through the air with two pistols and all two hundred extras on set have popped fifty some blood packs through their shirts. Max Payne and Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne fused this style very successfully with a depressed New York noir. While Remedy, ye old developer, has parted ways with the franchise, Rockstar Vancouver has done a very nice job tying Max Payne 3 back to the first two games with small details and references. While the typical noir setting is largely absent, the tone is not, and the writing works hard to establish that. In fact, sometimes it works too hard. But the voice acting, while flat or unconnected-feeling sometimes, is mostly excellent (and there's a lot of variety to be heard too).

While the presentation quality of the game is top-notch, it comes at some cost to the player. Nearly all of the faults I throw at Max Payne come from some contradiction between the story & presentation of the game and its actual mechanics. While I like the digital distortion style well enough, there are just too many cutscenes interspersed throughout the game. Bottom line. This has nothing to do with taste and everything to do with gameflow. Bookending chapter intro & outros are one thing, but there are a lot of others cutscenes. Even if they’re only 10 seconds long, you’ll get pretty tired of seeing them when you start dieing in a sequence repeatedly Check points are mostly well placed but it still feels strange that a cutscene or transition isn’t always a check point. More problematic is that every single cutscene says SKIP on it the bottom right corner with the appropriate button press next to it. This seems tasteless the first time through the game, though it’s useful after that. But here’s how this gets funnier and crappier: the game hides all its loading behind these cutscenes, so you can’t skip them until the level has loaded. This can be a long time. And if you press start during the load, you just pause the cutscene: there’s no way to exit to the main menu even. You have to wait until the SKIP sign appears, get to the gameplay, then exit to the main menu. Now, on your first playthrough this comes up pretty rarely, since the longest cutscenes are only at the beginning and end of each chapter, but you will become frustrated very fast if you decide to go back through the game to complete any challenges or find the last of the missing clue collectibles. It’s almost like the game doesn't really want you to replay the story mode again. Ever.

In fact, constantly throughout the game Max and your allies will yell at you to “hurry up”. Constantly. Every level. All the time. Multiple times in the span of 30 seconds. Only now and then do you get a few moments of silence and peace from the non-stop nagging. I don’t understand this design decision at all: especially since there are hidden collectibles in the level. Why would you punish me for searching for collectibles by whining at me the whole time? Again: this is not a fun game to replay in story mode considering the crying allies, the constant loading/unskippable cutscenes, the fact that jumping in and out of chapter missions just doesn’t work fast enough and that it isn’t really worth it anyway in the long run. Your rewards, golden guns (cheats for each level like unlimited bullet time and 1 shot kills) are fun, but not worth the grind. Some collectibles unlock multiplayer bonuses but, especially as time wears on and that community inevitably shrinks until it vanishes, these rewards will vary in value from player to player.

When you’re not watching cutscenes the gameplay can be, yes, awesome. Amazing. Incredible. You can get such a flow and groove on in Max Payne, diving over bar counter-tops and car hoods, twisting and turning in the air through a tornado of bullets – it’s something else. The arcade mode (where you go for high scores) can be a real couch-co-op blast actually. The problems begin to arise in the last third of the game, where the enemy and level design starts to stifle stylish gunplay and promote serious cover-using, pop-and-stop gameplay. Insert sad face here. This is not what makes Max Payne fantastic. You already get a break from slow motion shooting when your meter runs out or you’re low on health; in those moments, taking cover and playing the game like a more traditional shooter makes sense. But when it gets to the point that you’re just popping up from cover and slow-moing to do simple head shots the sequences become very flat and uninteresting.

Max Payne 3 is absolutely worth the price of admission both for action fans and fans of the franchise. The core action gameplay is 100% exciting and unpredictable. You've got to wonder if other developers don't resent the franchise - it's easy to be jealous of a game that's entire hook is "shoot in slow motion". Still, Max Payne 3 can be a bumpy ride. If you can grit your teeth through the slow and low points you’ll find the highs well worth visiting. The story mode is both fun and frustrating, but the multiplayer and arcade modes do a lot to balance the package back out.