Max Payne 3 Review
One thing you could count on: you push a man too far, and sooner or later he'd start pushing back
Campaign in Max Payne 3 is easily the longest in the series, providing plenty of opportunity to showcase a variety of situations and locales. Your path is strictly linear, almost becoming claustrophobic during some levels in the poor areas of the city. It provides plenty of opportunity to tell a story with good pacing, but it also begins to feel a bit monotone as you have yet another firefight with a bunch of goons who don’t speak English in the middle of a slum. The game uses cutscenes with abundance, as they hide all loading screens seamlessly which is impressive to see, but it also means you can’t turn a corner without a short cinematic.
The gameplay is similarly solid overall, but not without some glaring issues. Probably the greatest concern with the game is the difficulty – somehow, Rockstar Games got it absolutely wrong. It’s no longer a run and gun affair, and the addition of a cover system serves to support that notion. Max Payne 3 is often frustrating, with enemies killing you from strange angles and rather quickly, while themselves requiring a healthy dose of led to take down – whether they are wearing vests or t-shirts. The bullet time mechanic is here, and works the same way as before, brining great satisfaction to slow motion diving and headshots as bullets fly by. But using it is actually not advisable if you want to stay alive for very long. A feature called Last Man Standing gives Max a chance to kill his attacker if you’ve been critically wounded, and return to battle at the expense of an automatically used painkiller. It’s a neat feature, and one that kicks in very, very often. Thus is the fall of Max – its key mechanic is underused, because you’re forced to sit in cover all day instead. And even with that, the cover system isn’t very good; Max will take his sweet time getting in and out of cover, and there are no mechanics that let you wrap around or jump to another side of a wall.
Max Payne 3 does offer three difficulty settings, but Easy feels too much so, and Medium is frustrating more often than it should be. There’s also three different aim settings, from Free Aim (which was my initial approach, and boy was that painful) to hard or soft lock-on targeting. If you play around with the settings, you’ll likely find a decent balance for the difficulty, but by default this game is just too frustrating in some sections. To the game’s credit, failing a checkpoint enough times grants you extra painkillers. These moments of anger are only barely outweighed by some of the awesome set pieces in the game. Hanging upside down from a helicopter, jumping through windows in slow motion, and much more are all in a day’s work for our redefined action hero. If there were more of these memorable moments and less checkpoint restarts for the millionth time, the overall experience would have been much improved.
And that’s actually about it as far as gameplay is concerned. It’s all a bit one-note, as you clear levels of bad guys and progress forward, occasionally using bullet time for stylish kills and more often waiting in cover. Max can now only carry two handguns and one rifle, and if you want to dual wield you have to drop the rifle. Signature takedown camera appears on the last foe in an area, and painkillers are still key to your survival. Grenades thrown by enemies can be shot out of the air, but this time around you don’t get to carry or throw any yourself. It’s perhaps a design decision to remain the game grounded in reality (as Max would have nowhere to put the grenades), but it limits your ability to clear out rooms full of goons.
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