Max Payne 3: Thoughts?

[peruvianskys]

This was the first game in my whole life that I honestly wanted to ask for a refund.

Not even Duke Nukem Forever wanted me to do that.

It's not a Max Payne game. In MP3, it felt like the bullet time meter depleted way too fast and regained from kills way too slowly. In previous Max Payne games, you could regain it during BT via kills to maintain the meter and keep gunning, while in MP3 it was poorly used to the point of why bother. And cover fire, WTF? This isn't Gears of War, this is MAX PAYNE, you don't need to hide in cover, you jump into the fray, enable bullet time, and kill 5 guys before you hit the ground.

The first two Max Payne games were too reliant on the same jumping in slow-mo obsession. They were one-note and never properly evolved. Max Payne 3 is what the first two should have been like; intense, well-controlled action with a peppering of incredible slow-mo effects. I liked that I had to ration my dives and jumps instead of just playing the entire thing in slow motion. It made the action feel strategic, rewarding, challenging, and realistic.

Speaking of hitting the ground, gameplay took a backseat to the desire to play all the animations to "be realistic" to the point that it got into the way because they forced you to finish the animation before you could do anything else, even while being shot it. I love waiting for 2 seconds while they played the animation for Max to get off the ground, meanwhile guys are shooting at him. Or recovering when dodging to the side and hitting a wall. You'd think adrenaline from being shot at would make him react a bit faster.

So you're complaining that you weren't able to behave unrealistically? I don't get it. Obviously leaping into a group of men with guns is going to end with you dying should you not take them all out before landing. If you want to be able to leap into the air, land, and then pop back up to your feet in six frames without taking damage, then you're essentially asking the game to put no weight behind your choices.

I'm sorry, but having realistic animations and character modeling is not a flaw, no matter how you stretch it.

Due to said high graphics bar and poor streaming system, it resulted in really small areas connected by unskippable cinematics to mask loading of the next area. While I can tolerate a linear storyline (re: Uncharted), and film noir atmosphere (staple of Max Payne), the need to have so many broken up small sections really gets frustrating when you hit a cinematic of Max opening a gate, walk down a hall, then hit another cinematic of Max opening another gate. Crysis 2 had larger areas.

I definitely agree here, although it's worth noting that the first two had even smaller areas.

I loved, loved, loved Max Payne. I thought it was a perfect update on a series I love and I thought the three gun system was the best I've seen inventory-wise in a game so far. The action was great and the story was interesting, if not stellar. I played through twice and found the highest difficulty to be the perfect challenge.

 

[Diminished Capacity]

I only watched the cutscenes on youtube, so I can't comment on the gameplay. Having played the first 2 in the series, I decided about 6 months before release that this wasn't going to be a game that I'd play. Not because I thought it looked bad, but I'm just done with the series.

I thought that the story was interesting enough to watch, but not so great that it'd be something that I'd re-visit or would need to have in my collection.

With the grainy filters, shaky cam, themes, and recurring text on screen for emphasis, this is a game that really wants to channel the movie "Man on Fire".

It's a great movie, so at least the game is emulating something worthwhile.

 

[ThatDarnCoyote]

I loved Max Payne 3. Best game of the year so far.

The new setting was a gamble, but it paid off in being absorbing and convincing. The gunplay was realistic enough to be visceral and compelling, and unrealistic enough to be fun at the same time.

My one complaint was that Max himself too often seemed to act stupidly for the convenience of the plot. He barely resembled the sharp undercover cop/homicide detective who single-handedly battled two different massive criminal conspiracies to the death and won. Some of this can be put down to the fact that by the third game he is a deconstruction of the unflappable action hero, a broken, depressed man addled by years of booze, pills, and self-hatred. Some of his behavior can be explained by a serious death wish, but they still pushed it a bit.

 

[Lovely Mixture]

Only watched a playthrough of it, but from what I saw it kept to Max Payne's nature and I liked the look of it, plus it had a lot of details. I imagine longtime fans of the series might be annoyed about the total change of setting, but the problem is that the first two games were barely connected by their characters and pretty much ALL of them (except Payne) died in the second game.

Two things bothered me
1. That flashing.
2. The total absence of the comic book style scenes, I was hoping they would at least be getting a cameo.

Too many cut-scenes though. Way too many, and almost all can't be skipped.

That's a cardinal sin of gaming. Why the fuck do developers still think this ok?

 

[Lazy]

Too many cut-scenes though. Way too many, and almost all can't be skipped.

That's a cardinal sin of gaming. Why the fuck do developers still think this ok?

Supposedly, it's because they hide loading times behind the cutscenes; you can skip them once it's finished loading, but usually they're 90% over by the time this finally happens.

Personally, I have a hard time buying that excuse. It may not reach Metal Gear Solid level extremes, the cutscenes are pretty damn lengthy and I can't think of a good reason for it to take that long to load.

 

[johnnnny guitar]

It's not as good as the first 2......

BUT the first 2 were some of the best shooters ever and the third one while not having as much Noir elements or a story as good as the original games, I feel the game was one of the best I played this year and still had good Noir elements and a good story and it would have been my favourite shooter of this year if I hadn't played Spec Ops:TL even though Max Payne 3 had better shooting mechanics.

So in Short Great but not as Great as the First 2, the best shooting gameplay this year and my third favourite game this year.

 

[unstabLized]

So. Many. Freaking. Unskippable. Cutscenes. Everything else? Fantastic in my opinion, but the cutscenes piss me off SO MUCH. First time, I'll watch. Second time,where I want to just go shooting things up, I don't want to watch again.

 

[OldDirtyCrusty]

...I believe both possible endings Max makes it clear at the end that he has come into acceptance with the death of his wife...

Isn`t there something about how he fooled himself being over the deaths of his family in MP3? With all the circumstances and the way he behaves he`s in a deep depression without his family, his job and his little alcohol/pill-problem. I`ve read many times about people complaining that MP2 ending is ignored but i don`t think that this all matters much in regard to MP3. Both endings of MP1&2 are right after the events of the game and show Max in a kind of reliefed mood. Let a bit of time pass (it could be even day) and the old feelings could strike back at full force. With Max having lost everything, nobody to turn to and nothing to do, it made perfect sense to me seeing him sitting in a bar drinking his life away.

What really strikes me is that the series is over now. Where do i get my bullettime fix now? There`s no other game that handles it like this franchise.

 

[Blarkuntvhite]

It's fun, but it's the kind of game I play once.

The combat is rather repetitive and there's far too many long-ass cut scenes to warrant a second playthrough.

 

[ThriKreen]

Personally, I have a hard time buying that excuse. It may not reach Metal Gear Solid level extremes, the cutscenes are pretty damn lengthy and I can't think of a good reason for it to take that long to load.

Like I said earlier, it's a technical design issue. They blew their resource budget allocating so much to the graphics (texture sizes, model poly counts, animations, object density in said level).

So to balance it, actual gameplay elements, the level design and such, is much smaller compared to other games. So they have to break the levels up into smaller chunks and mask the loading between them with said unskippable cinematics.

I played it on the PC and even with a RAID0 games drive, where it loads almost instantly and I don't have a 256 or 512mb RAM limitation, the game being a console port I still have to sit through the cinematic because it's timed and hardcoded.

 

[OldDirtyCrusty]

Personally, I have a hard time buying that excuse. It may not reach Metal Gear Solid level extremes, the cutscenes are pretty damn lengthy and I can't think of a good reason for it to take that long to load.

Like I said earlier, it's a technical design issue. They blew their resource budget allocating so much to the graphics (texture sizes, model poly counts, animations, object density in said level).

So to balance it, actual gameplay elements, the level design and such, is much smaller compared to other games. So they have to break the levels up into smaller chunks and mask the loading between them with said unskippable cinematics.

I played it on the PC and even with a RAID0 games drive, where it loads almost instantly and I don't have a 256 or 512mb RAM limitation, the game being a console port I still have to sit through the cinematic because it's timed and hardcoded.

It`s an odd (dumb) design choice on Rockstars part. Just select the second checkpoint in "chapter select" for the story-mode. I play it on PS3 and the loading for the level alone is 25-30 seconds. I`m no programmer or coder but if i´m able to skip levelparts and select single checkpoints and just have to wait 30sec max, i should also be able to skip the cutscenes right from the beginning (or after the first playthrough, whatever).
It`s not really an issue to me but it`s a bit more work to quit a level before the end cutscene starts, then going into the main menu, using chapter/checkpoint select for the next level and then finally start the next level without the first lenghty cutscene. Fun-fact it`s still much much faster this way if you just want to shoot.

 

[ducktapemax]

i thought it was fun and i still like the multiplayer.

 

[4RM3D]

Playing Max Payne 3 kinda made me feel like playing Dragon Age 2. Max Payne 3 is no longer Max Payne (just as Dragon Age 2 is no longer Dragon Age). So, when you go expecting another Max Payne style game, you might end up disappointed. If you just look at Max Payne 3 as another action shooter, then the game is decent enough. But that was not enough for me. The game had too many issues, from the small annoying ones to the big structural issues. The big ones are already mentioned here, but there is a small issue that hasn't been mentioned that annoyed the hell out of me. That's the fact that after every cut scene (and there is 1 every 10 minutes) you automatically switch back to pistols. And to make things worse is often you get thrown right into the action and have to switch weapons again and again and again.

 

[an annoyed writer]

You want a one-two punch in the gut? Play Max Payne 3 and Spec-Ops: The Line in quick succession like I did. You will be running for the hills and to the nearest place of safety you can think of. If Max Payne's excessively detailed violence and melancholic take on story and characterization aren't enough to floor you, Spec Ops certainly will. It's like Max fires enough bullets to let Spec ops in close, then Spec ops proceeds to punch and kick you until every bone in your body is broken into at least 17 different fragments. I mean ouch. That is one nasty dynamic duo. But it's important somehow. Games don't have to be fun to be worth something.

As for thoughts on Max Payne 3 specifically: I like it. I was a fan of the first two games, and the fact that Max has descended to new lows is no surprise. While the Brancos were hard to give two shits about, that was kind of the point: Max just wanted to get paid boozing at new bars, maybe pushing off some members of the crowd that got too close. He never signed up for the whole Harvesting fiasco. The point of everything the game was trying to do was to get you in Max's frame of mind. And for the most part, he hits all of the right notes of a melancholic depressive man who has not only hit rock bottom, but tunneled beneath it. Yes, that does include the whole "never wising up to prevent his fuckups" thing, because that's how a melancholic depressive's thought process works: they work themselves into a rut that gets extremely difficult to work themselves out of. That's why Max himself introduces the concept of losing the ability of telling right from wrong in the very opening of the game. How do I know? Because I AM a melancholic depressive who's made a few too many bad decisions, and wound up on the wrong side of a gun because of it. Hard to empathize with my ass. It takes a certain kind of person to empathize with Max, and apparently there aren't that many. Frankly, that's a good thing.

 

[Swifty714]

It wasn't a bad game in any sense. It definitely had the Rockstar charm sprinkled about it. Since other people have already expressed my opinion, i'll talk about the multiplayer aspect, which no-one has seemed to cover yet.

If you've played Red Dead Redmption, Max Payne 3's multiplayer is basically a direct rip from it, glitchy ragdolling and all, With a little bit of COD and GTA:4 mixed in. My biggest complain has to be how they implemented bullet time into the multiplayer. Bullet time will almost always lag the entire lobby. Which can, and will, screw you over immensely, especially when your in the middle of a gun-fight. A mechanic MP:3 borrows from another game, is it's kill streak mechanic. Most of it is balanced, except for the Firepower streak. Players can get Mg's and grenade launchers, which will always wreck your shit as soon as you pop around a corner, Walk down a hallway, or even spawn!

Basically, the multiplayer is a Frankenstein patchwork of mechanics, borrowed from other games.

 

[paranoiachii]

I liked it, as an avid player of the first two, I was shocked when the cutscenes came in instead of the Graphic Novel sections. But in saying that it is only trying to make the game appeal more to the gaming public. Sure people don't like it, as seen above, but they have the technology and they used it. I personally don't see the problem in that.

All things considered I was very hyped up for the game and I was not disappointed. This is my opinion I am not trying to start anything! :L

 

[TheCommanders]

I liked the first half, but by the end I was shooting at indistinct blobs in the distance, and it became a bit of a headache.