Max Payne 3 (2012)

I have mixed feelings about this game. On the one hand, it's a beautiful example of how a user can be guided through a story in an almost cinematic fashion, and the intense action is all there, but there are a few elements that make me wonder.

Quick time elements. Since Resident Evil 4 introduced these, it seems that quick time elements are becoming a norm with a vast repertoire of action games that have never needed to use them before.

In most cases the quick time effects in this game feel intuitive, but there is this one fight where they take it a bit overboard. First you have to click one mouse button to dodge, then the other to disarm, then F to kick away the opponents gun and finally CTRL to attack him before he kills you.

For the most part of the game there's just the one occasional quick time effect at a time, where you need to disarm the cops that arrested you, or hit a thug in the head with the same shovel you're digging your own grave with, etc. For all those cases it works fine, but for this one, it's no longer just breaking out of the cutscene back into the action, it's actually a form of action within the scene, and for that I definitely prefer the traditional controls. Where you have control. Where you don't need to click key combinations you're not ready for, when if I was Max Payne in real life, I wouldn't need to wonder which keys to press, I'd just need fast reactions. So that one battle bugged me a bit.

Then there's the talking.

Max is always talking. He rarely stays quite long enough so that you can truly immerse yourself in the action. And if you do just stop and stand still and admire the view he'll start speaking about how lost he (in other words: you) are, what a shithole this place is or that he really is in a hurry to find that one girl or the other two or get out of this place as soon as possible.

I don't remember him speaking this much in the previous games. I think speech was previously saved mostly for cutscenes, special level transitions and the occasional painkiller pick-up. This time, it gets excessive. His really negative mindset isn't making me enjoy the talks more, either, and it seems that much of the poetical glory from the previous two games are lost on this one. You won't hear lines like 'The past is a gaping hole. You try to run from it, but the more you run, the deeper, more terrible it grows behind you, its edges yawning at your heels. Your only chance is to turn around and face it. But it's like looking down into the grave of your love, or kissing the mouth of a gun, a bullet trembling in its dark nest, ready to blow your head off.' or how about 'The sun went down with practiced bravado. Twilight crawled across the sky, laden with foreboding.'

You will hear plenty of punchlines though. Actually, there are probably more good punchlines in this than in the previous two combined, but as for the poetical manner of speech it looks like Max's head must be pretty numbed out from all that drinking. After a while, it doesn't make him seem very smart.

Then there are the bosses. None of them have the same charisma as they did in the previous games, and rarely the same intensity. One leader is cowering behind a shield, another is cowering behind a fence, a third isn't cowering but isn't very intimidating either. They're not as sinister, crazy, willful personalities as last time. But I do appreciate the twist in how not everybody you'd think has turned on you or could potentially turn on you actually does. This time, the ending is actually happy. Not as happy as it could be, but not a miserable failure either. I like the ending scene.

What I don't like, however, are the credits. Holy hell those are loooong credits! Probably more than 15 minutes long, scrolling slowly, and I let them play while surfing the net hoping that I'd be rewarded once they were done, but when they were done... there was no reward. I honored the creators (well, kinda, who has the patience to watch through 15 minutes of text anyway) and all I get is another shot at the game and a new roll of credits? That's not how it's supposed to be! They could've thrown in a screenshot at least, or if they really wanted to: some fun cutscene, just some little gem that lifted your spirits. After all I went through I feel like I deserved that bonus!

Oh, and then there are the grinds.

I'm probably a bit behind in the world of video games, but when games of epic proportions like this start including accomplishments along with the regular storyline, it somehow kills a part of the intensity. How can I feel like life is truly despairful and bleak and nothing good ever comes in my way (like Max is constantly telling me) when accomplishment messages pop up congratulating me that I've just killed 500 people with a sniper rifle? Is there some form of intentional irony in this? Something Max could phrase as "My life was a wreck, a ruin I was finally climbing out of, and I had killed more bad guys than I could count."

Those grinds just get in the way of the gameplay.

And to top it off, there aren't just grinds within the game, there are accomplishments for the Social Club too. I appreciate accomplishments for smaller games. Wait, scratch that. I appreciate accomplishments in arcade games - games where you don't immerse yourself in a story, but in a full-blown adventure such as this, I'd rather they keep their golden rifles out of it.

As for plot, it's great. cinematic cut-scenes let you take a break from the action and look into Max's for the most part rather pitiful state, but for some parts also beautiful sceneries and people. They've done a great job at transforming the majority of the game into a movie, and when you're walking along per-defined paths, just able to move forwards or stop, the way the levels are mapped out look great.

And yet I wonder, wouldn't it have been even better if the player retained control over the character at all times, even the control to falter and fall, the control to accidentally sidestep and be buried in a sea of flame? That's how it was in the previous two games. Call me sentimental, but that's how I'd still like it to be. I'd like to at least have the opportunity to fail when things are darkest.

After playing so many other action games it takes some getting used to the new controls, namely the disability to jump. You can't jump. You can climb onto certain surfaces the creators let you climb onto, however, and after a few levels this becomes the natural method of progressing through levels, yet in the beginning the lack of jump button takes some getting used to.

I guess there was no jump button in the first two games either, but strangely I don't remember that. It feels like I was jumping all over the place back then. In this game, I rarely use the bullet-time effects unless they're triggered automatically in these awesomely intense action cutscenes where you shoot at people while flying through the air in a speedboat, sliding through a room on a trolley, or how about busting in through a window into a room full of angry goons. I like those bullet-time moments very much, but the general bullet time is a waste - you're better of just dodging, unless you're certain you can kill em all in one slow-mo moment and not just end up lying vulnerable on the floor. Which I usually ended up doing when I gave it a shot.

Don't get me wrong! I loved this game. I loved the scenery, the way flashbacks move the story from present to past, and then seamlessly back to present again. I loved exploring the slums of Brazil, feeling as lost and unwelcome as I was supposed to feel, journeying around an abandoned cruise boat in its 'Resident Evil: Dead Aim'ish grandeur, running around an empty soccer stadium dodging sniper bullets, escaping the fire in the office building where your boss was just assassinated, or how about breaking into police headquarters, escaping in a bus, having a shootout in a moving tram and fighting it out at a very realistically-modeled airport. I love how the scenery changes, I love the action, I love how each level is built for different strategical approaches; especially the final one, with plenty of obstacles and walls to hide behind, plenty of foes to sneak up on, plenty of conversations to eve-drop on...

But those conversations, I don't understand them at all. For the most part people are speaking Brazilian. And guess what, subtitles are in Brazilian. No doubt this is an intentional move to make the player feel just as lost as Max is. And it's working. I feel lost... for a while. Then I stop caring about conversations, stop wondering what they're actually saying, just wanting the cut-scenes to be over with so we can all move back to the action. Probably not the intended effect, huh?

The sceneries are beautiful, the cut-scenes are beautiful, the play with shadows and light all looks wonderful - the graphical aspects of this game are just awesome. The story's great. The action's great. Everything's great, and yet it could have been so much better. I'm not sure it's the misery: Max wallowing in a grief over both past and present, but rather a subtle lack of control, of unnecessary gaming elements.

I'm not sure what it is, but somethings missing, something that will probably prevent me from playing this game again. I enjoyed almost every second of it, but now that the journey is complete I feel complete. That satisfaction that urges me to play the game again; to explore every facet of it... it just isn't there. Maybe every facet has already been explored through the elaborate cut-scenes; through the in-game cut-scenes where you don't have much choice but to move along at an already designated game.

Also, I'm a bit disappointed that all 6 DLCs focus on multiplayer. There's nothing to further expand on or enhance the plot. That would've been a great way to include a happier ending for those who'd like it, to twist the game a bit, maybe. But since they didn't... maybe this calls for a sequel?

I'm moving onto my next game in previously unplayed Rockstar Games: GTA 4.

 rated 5/5: friggin awesome