Max Payne 3 Review
Max Payne 3
(Xbox 360 version)
Developed by Rockstar Vancouver
Published by Rockstar Games
Release Date: 18/05/2012 – £39.99(X360/PS3)
01/06/2012 – £34.99 (PC)
Reviewed by Aaron Seddon
Max Payne is back after a good 8 year absence from our consoles, taking over development duties from Remedy Interactive is Rockstar Games themselves as Remedy ended up spending a good chunk of the 2000s developing Alan Wake. Was it worth the wait though??
A lot has happened to Max since we last saw him; he has basically given up hope in life and is basically popping painkillers and drinking himself into a slow death, until he gets an offer to work as a bodyguard for the Branco Family who are a rich family in Sao’ Paulo, Brazil. He accepts the job and the game picks up a few months after while at one of the families parties, terrorists attack the family and try kidnapping members of the family, an event that then leads you through a great well written story that has you going through numerous environments, such as a neon-lighted night club, a Football stadium, the run-down favelas, gunning down foes left right and center, up until its dark climax. Rockstar have always had wonderfully interesting, well written characters in their games, and Max is as broken a man as ever depicted in any of the previous games. I found it surprising how little is mentioned of the story from the older games (the loss of his family, his relationship with Mona Sax, etc…) but it is clear that what has happened in those games has defined him into the mess of a person he is today. Even the intro credits and numerous points in the game show Max sprawling around his own apartment feeling sorry for himself and downing lots of booze and painkillers. He is surely the same torn-up guy from the original games.
For fans of the old games the first and most important change you will notice is the change of theme and style that the series have been so well known for, which was the Noir-comic book style. That style was one that had lots of dark looking environments intercut with the comic book cut scenes explaining the plot in a bit more detail. All of that is gone. Now we have a mix of bright sunny environments and run down slums of Southern America. The cut scenes are no longer simple looking stills but full on in-engine clips which look brilliant. It’s all flashy visuals with colour-flicker camera tricks, with odd-looking subtitle text popping up at random points of a characters line. It is extremely cool to watch and keeps you more engaged than just normal looking stale cut scenes that most games tend to go for. Rockstar are never shy from their movie influences and Max Payne 3 definitely borrows its style from some movies, the biggest notable influence is the 2004 Denzel Washington movie ‘Man on Fire’ which itself has a very distinct style and even has a somewhat similar plot to Max Payne 3.
Max still retains his internal monologue throughout the game and has a good opinion on everything that is happening around him. The actor who voiced him in the original games, James McCaffrey, reprises the role of Max and does a brilliant job of it, despite sometimes sounding a bit too like Kiefer Sutherlands’ ‘Jack Bauer’. Another nice inclusion is that the cut scenes hide the loading screens and you basically do not see, however the only downside is that you aren’t really able to skip the cut scenes at all. I have to admit, the change of theme and style was a little bit jarring for me as I do like the style the original games went for, but the change would have been made in fear of it being too similar to the old games. Despite this, it still manages to go to some really dark places with its story that the previous games didn’t go near. I think that the game goes at little OTT with this new style, and at times it can be quite distracting, but it doesn’t put you off wanting to know the rest of the story.
As for the feel of the game itself, it definitely looks and feels like a recently produced Rockstar game. Just like the original games, the game is a shooter that is at the third person perspective Max can now enter cover behind tables or posts or brick walls with a press of a button. You can use the left trigger to aim, right trigger to shoot and the right bumper allows you to Max’s signature bullet-time diving move which the series is well known for, which basically has you do a slow motion ‘Matrix-esque’ diving move where you can pick off up to 4-6 guys in one swoop. You can click the right stick in to enter bullet time, this move is governed by a bar which sits next to your health meter, the more enemies you kill the more time you get to enter bullet time. This was a function that was introduced in the second game, but it becomes much more useful in this game as I don’t remember using it very much in Max Payne 2. The shooting feels solid and a lot more enjoyable to do than the shooting found in GTA4 and feels akin to the original Max Payne games. The Heads-up-display is very minimal, which adds to the cinematic gameplay. You get a dot for aiming your shooting enemies which will turn into an X when the enemy you’re shooting goes down for good and in the bottom right corner you have your health meter and adrenaline bar. You recover health by picking up Painkillers and using them with the UP on the D-Pad, just like in the old games. If you have at least one painkiller left and you take a deadly bullet, you instantly enter a last-stand-style mode where u have a few seconds to shoot the guy who shot you down and if you succeed, you get back up with half your health. It’s a useful mechanic that you will use many times in your playthrough. After destroying each section of bad guys you will also get the pleasure of a slow-motion bullet cam where the camera follows the bullet to its intended target, giving you a brutal and fantastic looking death of the last guy in the room. This happens very often and never gets boring, to make it more gruesome you can hold the A button down at this point and slow down the enemy falling and, if you like, keep pumping rounds into him until you run out of bullets. It’s unnecessary, but it sure is fun to do. For people who aren’t used to these types of games you have an array of control options to assist you along the way, you have the different aim modes to choose from, which are called ‘Free Aim’, ‘Soft Aim’ or ‘Hard Aim’ which dictate how much you want the game to help you with locking onto enemies with the left trigger, kind of similar to a Call Of Duty game. I enabled the soft-aim mode when I first started the game but ended up turning it off after a few chapters as I felt it was distracting me from getting good enough headshots. The Free Aim mode is the aiming choice I enjoyed to use as it gave me free reign to aim at whatever and whoever I wanted to.
Max Payne 3 uses the same engine that was used on Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption. Those games are open world games that had huge environments to travel across with plenty to do in them, however this game basically does the opposite to that and goes for smaller environments which allows for better looking, more hectic gun battles and the amount of detail is exceptional. In bullet time mode you can even see the individual bullets whizz past Max and then impact on the environment, it’s really impressive detail. The game’s single player story is spread across two discs and lasts for a good 8-10 hours depending on your skill, which for a Rockstar game is very short. This is a game that wants you to play through more than once with its numerous difficulties to go through and alternative modes, such as Score Attack or New York Minute, which has you battling against the clock to clear a stage taken from the story and on every kill you make, it adds a couple of seconds to your allotted time. This also ties into a score mode which you can compare your scores to other people on Xbox Live or against your friends, which is a nice addition. At times I did think that the game was just simply ‘walk into a room, shoot guys, trigger cut scene … rinse and repeat’ and that is sort of true for the first few chapters in the game, but the game does make up for that in the second act-onwards by having less of this and ramping up the action and having more interesting looking more realistic environments to walk around in.
The Biggest addition to the series is the online Multiplayer, a massive departure for the series. Rockstar has dabbled with multiplayer numerous times with their current generation of titles but not many of them had caught on the way they had hoped. Max Payne’s multiplayer is similar in terms of the game play and control but they have more of a familiar Call Of Duty framework built into it. There’s a levelling system where you progress through the ranks and eventually make your way up to level 50, you have unlockable weapons, powerups and character skins which can be unlocked by doing specific things in the multiplayer as well as doing some things found in the single player, such as completing the New York Minute Mode on Hardcore difficulty which is bound to be a challenge.
The multiplayer plays controls just the single player portion but probably the biggest twist that Max Payne 3 adds to their multiplayer is the ability to do the slow motion diving move that is found in the single player, in multiplayer. This would normally be something that you would think is pretty much impossible to do without it looking or feeling stupid, it works really well. same buttons and so on, once you have a few kills under your belt you are able to do a slow motion dive, which affects any of the players who are either looking in your general direction or are in your close vicinity, it definitely adds something new to multiplayer games that hasn’t been done this well before (John Woo’s Stranglehold had this but that multiplayer was very poor and broken). There are your typical Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch modes to choose from, a mode called ‘Payne Killer’ where two random players become Max Payne and Passos, Max’s partner throughout the single player campaign, whom are preloaded with powerful weapons and painkillers, while the rest of the players in the match are normal footsoldiers who must kill Max and Passos, the one who gets the majority of health and/or the final shot off the main characters then become that character until they get taken down. There is also a mode called ‘Gang Wars’ which has you on 5v5 teams and doing 5 rounds where each round has you do a set objective, whether it be simply wipe out the other gang, plant bombs or taking over your opposing gangs turfs. You also have adrenaline bursts, which vary from extra bullet time, health boosts and extra weapon boosts. These are earned from levelling up and you build up in game adrenaline with kills or by looting the dead bodies of your enemies. These modes are pretty fun to play in the early days of the game being new since it is a brand new and different game, but like Battlefield or Call Of Duty, I can imagine if you are a late-comer to the game’s multiplayer then you are going to get smoked pretty easily. Every game mode also has a Hardcore setting which turns off friendly fire. This is definitely a change of pace from your usual online multiplayer and probably the most intriguing online play that Rockstar have done, I will probably see myself investing more time into this than I normally would do with a multiplayer game. Rockstar plan to support the multiplayer with additional maps and character packs which will be released over the next twelve months or so, and will be variously priced. They have released a Max Payne 3 ‘Rockstar Pass’ which is priced at 2400 Microsoft Points (£19.99) which will net you all the DLC at a reduced price when sold separately. You can even track your stats for Single player and Multiplayer by logging into Rockstar’s Social Club website which gives you an insane amount of details regarding your experience in the game, such as how much time you have spent in cover, how many bullets you have shot and other crazy statistics like that.
All in all, it is a solid entry to a well loved franchise. Rockstar have definitely made it their own and made it for the better, fans of the series may find their changes a bit too different to their expectations and most may even dislike some of the changes, but in all it is a great game. Let’s just hope there isn’t another 8 year wait for the next game to come out.
Rating: 4/5