Max Payne 3 (PS3)
Max Payne 3
The Max Payne name has been a staple gaming title since the release of the first game. It made its mark with its comic-noir style of storytelling, meshed with its bloody gun-toting combat that's filled with epic scenes that can take place in slow-motion bullet time. With the third installment in the series, the dev team sought to take things to a different place, present the world with a Max that was mostly the same, but still completely different.
Taking place almost a decade after the end of Max Payne 2, we see Max as a retired cop, working as security for a wealthy family. While at a private party, he comes to the rescue when an attempted kidnapping is aimed at the wife of one of his clients. However, a short few nights later, he escorts Fabiana, the wife, to a club where another attempt takes place, and this time it's successful. He and his partner try to pay the ransom at a local stadium, when yet another attack takes place. What follows is a downward spiral into something bigger than Max could have ever anticipated.
A lot of the game mechanics from the earlier titles are back for this entry, however they bring along a few new ones as well. You'll still be slinging tons of bullets, dodging in slow-motion, and downing painkillers by the bottle to heal yourself. Now, though, you can hide in cover to avoid taking damage, there's an aim assist when you need some help locking on someone who seems to be a bit too dodgy, and a Last Man Standing mechanic that gives you just one more chance to stay alive.
The bullet time is a ton of fun, and with the massive jump in graphical detail from the previous game to this one, it looks even sexier as crisp at is now. I actually found myself jumping around like crazy just so I could use this, or triggering it manually while walking into room and playing out my part in a bad ass action scene.
Entering and exit cover can be a bit troublesome. It's a great mechanic, excellent to use to give yourself a breather while you reload, but when you exit cover Max seems to hesitate for a moment and perform the exit a bit sluggishly. The problem with this comes with trying to re-enter cover immediately : it's virtually impossible. So if you do it by complete accident, or prematurely not realizing exactly where a particular enemy is, you'll be hanging out in the open for a few moments. Moments that will feel like a lot longer when the bullets start coming in your direction.
It's the Last Man Standing that I loved the most. This feature is great, and can be so useful. Which is ironic because it only triggers at what is potentially the worst possible moment. What this feature does is, if you're life is completely drained, and you have any painkillers on hand, everything will go super slow-mo. You're given a chance to kill the person who is at risk of killing you. It only lasts a handful of seconds, or until you run out of bullets in your current clip, but if you achieve the kill then you'll be completely healed (minus a bottle of pills) and ready to move on in the game.
The one big change that's probably the most negative and questionable one is the game completely limits what you can carry for weapons. In previous games, you had full access to every weapon in the game. Or at least what you had on your person. So if you walked over every variant of handgun, you had each one ready to go. Max Payne 3 makes you choose favorites. You can carry up to two handguns (which can be dual wielded), and a two-handed weapon (shotgun, machine gun, rocket launcher etc). On top of that, don't expect any throwables in the campaign. Your enemies can chuck grenades and molotov's freely, but you can't throw them back, and this change alone had me baffled and bit nerd-ragey when I realized it.
Max's voice-over story telling returns again as well, and it feels just like it did the first two times around. However, you won't see many comic-book style pages telling the story. It all takes place in full fledged cutscenes. What's even greater? These cutscenes are seamless with the gameplay. You won't see a single loading screen between movie and gameplay, you'll only see them if you die and need to retry.
While playing, I did come across a few issues. Some were definitely just shitty timing and placement, like a Last Man Standing triggering while I had fallen just out of sight of the person who shot me. But there was one instance where I was literally right in the persons face, and apparently was "too close" since I unloaded a full clip of bullets into them and not one counted. My favorite though had to be an instance where Max's arm had a mind of it's own and...well I'll let the clip speak for itself.
The "issues" such as the one above though aren't really game breaking. They can be annoying at times, especially in the moment, but they can always provide for some good laughs. Rockstar physics as a whole typically do this in a lot of their games, and it's ever present here in Max Payne 3. No matter where you go looking for this game you'll find it super cheap, no more than $5 US. It more than holds that value, I would gladly pay $20 for this game (which fairly enough is the price for it on Steam for PC). This is certainly a title worth having in your library, so if you find it, snatch it up.
