Review: Max Payne 3

Reviewed on PC.

Like the game I examined in my last review, Hitman: Absolution, Max Payne 3 is an entry to a beloved series that considerably changed key elements in the hopes of appeasing a modern audience as well as long-time fans. Unlike Absolution, I think Max Payne 3 got it right. Released nine years after the previous entry, 3 was the first Max Payne title developed by Rockstar Games.

In Max Payne 3, you obviously play as the eponymous hero, who flees America to work  in Brazil as a bodyguard for the wealthy Rodrigo Branco. After Branco’s wife is kidnapped, Max tries to get her back, and things progressively get grimmer from there. While the story is mostly straightforward, there are points when things can get a little contrived or confusing; when several different private military corporations turned up, I found it a little hard to keep track of their motivations. The story avoids the tongue-in-cheek moments and meta-humour found in the first two in favour of a gritty thriller style indebted to film directors like Michael Mann and Tony Scott. While the story is just okay, the vocal performances are great across the board. James McCaffery returns as Payne, delivering every line with pitch perfect sarcasm. However, the dialogue varies in quality, and while there are memorable lines like “I had killed more cops than cholesterol”, you are sometimes thrown headscratchers, like Max comparing being shot at by a helicopter in Brazil to “Baghdad with G-strings.” The story is where most problems with this game arise, since the cutscenes – while masterfully acted, directed and animated- can be extremely long, frequently interrupt gameplay and are often unskippable. I think it’s great how the game has an initial load screen and then you can potentially play through the whole thing with seamless transitions between gameplay and cutscenes, but seeing the same scenes after multiple playthroughs can get tiring, and the fact that a cutscene is sometimes played for an action as mundane as pressing a button or opening a door just hurts the flow.

The gunplay in Max Payne 3 is amazing. Aiming is smooth and accurate, thanks to the dot reticle and every weapon being precise. Bullets have a real impact, and clear headshots will always kill enemies (your head is just as vulnerable). The physics cause enemies believably stagger back when hit and collapse when killed. Combined, these elements would form a pretty solid third-person shooter, but once mixed with the series’ signature slow-motion dives, it becomes a phenomenal experience. For those that don’t know, Mr Payne has the ability to fling his body to the ground, which causes the world around him to slow and allows him to shoot accurately with reduced risk to himself. In Max Payne 3, you can shootdodge as much as you want, but if you collide with a hard object mid-flight, time will return to normal and Payne will unceremoniously clatter to the ground while the goons shooting at him laugh. Whether you bump into something or not, once Payne is on the ground, you can continue shooting until you choose to get up. A successful shootdodge where you glide across the room and kill multiple enemies, then drop to the ground and finish off the survivors is immensely satisfying. In addition, a bullet cam triggers under certain circumstances, showing your rounds hitting the enemy, similar to V.A.T.S in the newer Fallout games, and the developers had the genius idea to let you keep firing your gun with one button and slow down time with another while the cam is active. This leads to some pretty hilarious moments as you can manipulate the second an enemy realises they are fucked. The game includes a cover system, but it’s rudimentary, lacking options for turning corners or switching between pieces of cover, and hiding in cover will usually result in enemies throwing grenades or flanking you, encouraging you to play aggressively and take risks. In a similar vein, your health is restored by consumable items, and you take a lot of damage, meaning the game retains the punishing difficulty the previous games were known for. The shooting is kept fresh by the game providing new locations to stage the gunfights in every chapter. Some of the more notable locations include a nightclub, an office, a graveyard and an airport. Each of these levels has has different guns available, which encourages you to experiment and adapt to their nuances.

On the technical side, the game is really well optimised and is well suited to a mouse and keyboard control scheme, making the PC version the definitive version. The graphics are great, with detailed character and weapon models, but the nearly flawless animations steal the show, particularly the brilliant weapon switching and holstering, where Max will carry a two handed weapon in his offhand while holding a sidearm in his right.

The music is another massive strength. Rockstar brought in noise rock band Health to create the soundtrack. The result is an astonishingly good blend of electronic and ambient tracks that gradually build over the course of a level, and the tracks mix with the on-screen violence to create a kind of dreamy atmosphere. In the final chapter of the game, a vocal track, ‘Tears’, is used to punctuate the action, and this is one of those game moments that sticks in your mind for a long time.

The game is occasionally let down by glitches. The physics can screw up when you collide with something during a shootdodge, leading Max to bizarrely flail around in mid-air. The laser sights on some of the later weapons don’t show up on targets, ironically making them far less accurate than your standard reticle. Once half of the environment failed to load and then an empty car drove to Max to offer him a lift – the detective intended to be at the wheel had also not appeared.

Despite the fact it wrenches control from you constantly, I fucking love this game. I appreciate the fact that instead of shoehorning in a bunch of mechanics or lowering the difficulty to appear ‘modern’, it focuses on doing one thing supremely well: stylised shootouts. If you don’t think the game is true to the character, just consider it a dumb fun action game with a similarly moody protagonist, because Max Payne 3 is so damn enjoyable.

Recommended? Yes

Review: Max Payne

Reviewed on PC

I sat down, gazing at the evidence in front of me. Was I a crack PI, following the last few breadcrumbs from the trail? Maybe an ex-cop revisiting the case I never solved? No. I was a twenty-something loser, hoping to escape the dullness of the world by playing early 2000s bullet time shooter Max Payne. Sinatra’s baritone danced in the background as I clicked play.

In Max Payne, you take on endless waves of mobsters to avenge the murder of Payne’s wife. A pretty straightforward revenge plot, but it’s delivered in a unique way. The story is mostly advanced via graphic novel panels with voice-overs. These panels feature many of the developers and their friends as the characters, since this was a project with budget and resource limitations, and the result of this is they often look goofy no matter how dark the dialogue is. Payne himself is played by the game’s writer, Sam Lake, who pulls some of the weirdest faces I’ve ever seen. The contrast in writing and visuals can be a little jarring, but there is an obvious element of self-awareness and a meta narrative running through the game, so the sometimes inconsistent tone is eased with humour. As for the writing itself, it establishes a strong noir atmosphere, drawing heavily from staples of the genre. I am also reminded of Die Hard, with Payne’s squinting expression, final level reminiscent of Nakatomi Plaza and knife-edge shootouts. Max is voiced by James McCaffrey, who has a fitting monotone and his long metaphor-heavy monologues are always a pleasure to listen to. The other actors are more on the cheesy side, as was common around this era, but the main villain also turns in quite a good performance.

Max Payne is notable for being the game that popularised bullet time. Press the right mouse button with a direction and Max will fling himself in a direction in slow motion, allowing for a cinematic streak of headshots as you dive into a wall. It never gets old, which is good because the majority of the game will be spent popping through doorways to surprise mobsters. I think tactical shooters would be a lot more amusing if you could breach a room by having a whole squad dive in with dual SMGs. The bullet time doesn’t feel overpowered, since bullets move like projectiles in this mode, meaning you have to lead your shots. The game is also very difficult and you can be killed easily, which ties in with the idea of Max going up against ridiculous odds. This is fine, since the game accommodates fuck-ups by snapping you instantaneously back to your last save with a button press. The running and gunning is great, but like many games of its time, it has awkward platforming elements. The worst examples are in the ‘dream sequence’ levels, which include running along and jumping between rails thinner than the character model. Another gameplay issue which tripped me up was the fact you have to click after selecting a weapon to equip it, which might not seem like much, but often meant I would get confused for a second before being blown away by a goon’s shotgun.

As expected, it is not the most visually arresting game on the market. Max Payne’s character model in particular is slightly scary, featuring Sam Lake’s face screwed up and then reproduced with the technology of the day. Animations are clumsy, my favourite being the weapon drawing one, where a character will hold as little of a pistol as possible, like it’s covered in faeces. The game also includes clunky in-engine cutscenes, which stand out even more when they are contrasted with the elegant graphic novel scenes.

The soundtrack is generally good. The theme song is an appropriate slow jazz track and the graphic novel cutscenes feature a variation on it that mixes very well with the voice-overs. Elsewhere, the music seems to draw from a rather eclectic range of film score influences: ‘60s spy guitar riffs, late ‘70s horror ambience and the synthesisers and electric drums of ‘80s action films. In many settings such a variety might feel uneven, but these inspirations fit well with the content of the game. The soundtrack is let down a little in the combat encounters that feature high tempo metal tracks, which make the game smell of cheese a bit too much along with reminding you of the game’s release year.

On the bug front, the most serious issue I encountered was a point where a cutscene focused on the enemies ahead of me, but then returned to gameplay with the camera still fixed on them. This is potentially gamebreaking, and the only way I could get around it was memorising the path backwards and keep moving until the camera returned to me. When I initially launched the game, I found there was no sound other than an occasional bitcrushed fart when rapidly firing a weapon. This is apparently an issue with the Steam version of game running on newer operating systems, which can be fixed with a download from the Max Payne community guide page.

Max Payne is still a lot of fun sixteen years on. The bullet time mechanic thrown into a frenetic and relentless shooter makes for engaging gameplay, and wrapping the experience in a strong narrative and thematic focus makes it easy to overlook the issues caused by its age and budget limitations.

Recommended? Yes