But one way or another, Max Payne 3 is going to coax you out of your hiding spot. Clever use of cover can help thin out aggressive enemy fire teams, and kills also add to bullet time. Your cover can also be destroyed, but while you're taking fire, you accumulate bullet time. If you sit in cover under fire, enemies will try to flank you - no, really. Max Payne 3's battles always feel like they're searching for a moving target of equilibrium in the best way possible. Rockstar pulls it off by making cover, aggression, and bullet time work together, playing off of each other. Given the complications of mixing the arcade style of the Max Payne games and the realities of the current state of shooter affairs, this is a hell of an achievement. The controls aren't quite up to the level of Gears or the like - they're a little sticky, a little slower than I'd like.īut they work well, and Max Payne 3 is exceptionally well designed around player capability. Max Payne 3 is the most mechanically refined game Rockstar has put its name on since Max Payne 2. There are no mini-games, no economies, no relationships. Max Payne 3 is all about shooting people, practically speaking. Rockstar games typically get away with just "par" mechanics because of the sheer breadth of things to do. But the story often bleeds out any sense of heft or weight from its big beats well in advance. Max Payne 3 has mood and tone coming out of its ears. Max Payne 3 is a great-looking game, and the nods to movies like Man on Fire and Collateral - from film grain to framing to split-scenes and narrative text appearing on screen - are effective. MAX PAYNE 3 HAS MOOD AND TONE COMING OUT OF ITS EARS. Later on, Max Payne 3's story stalls, trying to squeeze another ridiculous action sequence - and Max Payne monologue - in before the bloody conclusion. Max Payne 3feels like a low-frequency sine wave of plot points, scattered to sync up with gameplay beats rather than the fictions it borrows from. Worse, the story falls prey to set-piece indulgence over proper narrative. While there's characterization in Max Payne 3's noir-infused conspiracy, it's composed of sketches of people that can devolve into caricature. In some ways, Max Payne 3 is indicative of the worst of Rockstar's indulgences, particularly in the story. Max Payne 3 might not be the most successful cinematic experience Rockstar has ever made, but it's easily its best game.
#Max payne 2 review series#
The questions are myriad: how can Rockstar make a sequel to a series so intimately linked to the sensibilities of Remedy? How can a company not known for its action chops follow up a series known for its twitch, arcadey action? And how in the hell can a game move through almost nine years of third-person shooter evolution and still find relevance?īut through smart combat design, smart iteration, and a lot of respect for the legacy of Max Payne, series stewards Rockstar have pulled it off, and more. So here we are, in 2012, and Rockstar Vancouver has finally delivered Max Payne 3. It's been almost that long since original developers Remedy Entertainment sold the rights to the series to Rockstar and moved on to Alan Wake. Rockstar Games is releasing Max Payne 3 almost nine years after Max Payne 2: that was a year before Halo 2, and Half-Life 2 three years before Gears of War six years before Uncharted 2. While Max Payne 3 has about as much baggage as a game can carry, Rockstar's uncompromising vision has delivered something truly impressive.
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