Max Payne 3: Difference between revisions

Max Payne is a series of multi-platform games following ex-cop Max as he fights to unravel the criminal underworld as his life collapses around him.  

As we were surrounded by armed mobsters in a busy nightclub, suddenly I had control. This was the first of many seamless transitions that makes Max Payne 3 stand out from the crowd. No clunky jump or frustrating loading screen - in fact there are no loading screens in the game at all! You're always flowing from scene to scene, with a decent cutscene covering any longer transitions. No hanging around, no periods sat twiddling your thumbs, just a constant flow of either gameplay or story. Most games will try to involve the player as much as possible by making you walk down a road or through a building to get to the action, supposedly stopping you from feeling that the game is doing most of the work for you. But with Max, you control nothing but action, from start to finish. Any period where you don't need your finger firmly squeezing the trigger is either covered by a cutscene or just missed out entirely. This game is made to immerse and entertain you, not to give you arbitrary control over walking down an empty corridor.

After lying on the floor shooting randomly at people and dying a couple of times, I thought I might take the time to figure out the controls and mechanics before randomly button-mashing my way through the game. On Xbox 360, the controls took a bit of getting used to as the game contains a few special mechanics which are absolutely necessary to being able to fight your way through.  On PC, however, the mouse made aiming much easier and a few well-placed clicks in bullet-time removed the need for a lot of the advanced mechanics available. Inverting the Y axis helped too. Even though I was dying, I was actually glad that this early level wasn't interrupted by tutorial sequences or reminders - it was clear this game was built to be immersive, right from the start.

{{quote|This game just does not stop, even for a moment.}}

As I said above, the mouse on a PC made free-aiming so much easier that often bullet-time wasn't even necessary. However on Xbox, this was a challenge for someone that doesn't play FPS-style games every day. There is option for 'soft lock' which pulled your mouse towards the nearest target when you partially-held the aim button, and 'hard lock' which forced your reticule onto a target. I chose soft-lock as I found free-aim tricky with the controller, although this resulted in many, many crotch shots. (Dude, you don't shoot a guy in the dick!) The game even had the audacity to point this out to me!

The menus were all straightforward but quite well-designed. You could design your own character for each opposing faction of each type, selecting clothing and hair etc; and for other games pick one of a selection of characters, pedestrians and special models. You could specify a number of custom loadouts for everything you carried, including the weapons and slots for extra items such as painkillers, sutures (to heal more quickly), extra ammo etc, and addons such as armour.  

The interesting twist is that everything you carry added a different amount to your total weight, which in turn affected your speed in game. You could choose to pack heavy guns, armour and several accessories, but run the risk of being caught in fire; or you could carry little and hope you can run away quickly if you get in trouble. One small issue I had was that grey unselectable options looked too similar to white selectable options, and you could still hover over them, which was quite confusing until I strained close to the screen to be able to tell the difference.  

Max Payne 3 is a well-rounded, immersive third-person shooter, with a gritty storyline and some impressive mechanics. Both the single and multiplayer modes seem well-thought through and impressively executed. The use of cutscenes rather than loading screens to build a seamless flow of gameplay and story removes the frustrations that are a part of almost every game.

The thing that I most loved about Max Payne 3 was that when I died, which happened a lot, I didn't even care. I got to play that area again, try a different tactic, experiencing a different style of opposition. I wasn't set back to the start of the whole level, I didn't have to redo half an hour of identical gameplay, I didn't have to watch all the cutscenes all over again - I just stepped back and tried again. This is the least frustrating shooter I have ever seen, and it's constantly a pleasure to play.

The game will be released on Xbox 360 and PS3 on May 15 (US) or 18 (Rest of World), and soon after for PC on May 29 (US) or June 1st (Rest of World). I played mostly on Xbox 360, which took some getting used to, but I think was a more immersive and challenging platform. PC looked a lot easier, with the accuracy of the mouse making enemies just a click away, but it was so easy you didn't benefit from shootdodge and bullet time and the scry experience that some of the fights were. After much thought, I think despite me not being particularly good at it, I'll choose Xbox as my platform for this game.

You might think [[Rockstar Games|Rockstar]] just concentrate on GTA games and everything else is just filler. Make no mistake - this is not a run-of-the-mill shooter that Rockstar's studios are pointlessly pumping out just to keep the orders coming in until the next GTA. This is a real priority for them, with a huge amount of thought, care and attention-to-detail put into this, and it shows. The result is an immersive, challenging and rewarding experience which keeps you engrossed no matter your skill level or attention span. In terms of gameplay, this is, by far, the best shooter I have ever played.