Max Payne 3

I found this game to have a severe problem with flow or pacing. It was almost unbearable.

First the positive aspect. The graphics were awesome for its time. They had limited RAM but the pre-rendered reflections were very realistic and the closest it can get to raytracing. I don't know if the Rockstar proprietary engine had physically based rendering, but every surface is pretty realistic. The character models are all very good. The animation system is realistic and this is one of the problems. At times it smooths the transitions between each state in a way that makes it hard to escape gunfire. For example: you jump and then collide with furniture. The animation tries to be as realistic as possible, making it hard to escape incoming bullets. In overall, Max Payne 3 is a technical achievement.

The action can be divisive among players. MP3 is clearly an evolution because they made ultra-realistic and soft animations and with more processing power and more RAM compared to the previous games they could make larger scale combat scenes. It can get quite repetitive and I felt it, much like many commenters out there. I think that the aim was oversensitive and made the game much harder than the previous games. The cover system works pretty well and I don't have any criticism towards it.

I can't state that the new Max Payne characterization was better or worse. One thing is for sure: they've abused metaphors. Max Payne's english isn't easy. He's always abusing metaphors and figures of speech. They made his personality pretty pessimistic, negativistic and cynical. Which more or less aligns with his name and the tone that they wanted for the game. I'm sure that not everyone liked Max's lines. In hindsight, Max has already lost his family in the first game. In the second he loses Mona. What more is there to lose in the third game? His sanity by drinking to death?

The plot is a take on both the previous Max Payne incarnations. You have corrupted politicians, corrupted police, gangs, multi billion companies and family dramas. Nothing new which wasn't already seen in the previous games. For me the plot was hard to grasp because it has so many turns and twists that I could not follow it properly. They've followed a non linear structure that made the game really confusing for me. There are some flashback sequences that take Max to the past, to New York city, to pay homage to the previous games. I really liked the flashback sequences with the snow and this probably owns to the nostalgia factor.

The level design is extremely linear and this was a negative point for me. There are a lot of areas that, once you go past a door, there is no returning and missed collectibles cannot be retrieved. I don' know if this is related to the limited RAM available in consoles at the time, but the game has an absurd number of cutscenes just for doors. I wouldn't be surprised if they are hidden loading screens. If you've played the previous games you'll notice that a lot of levels are homages to locations from MP1 and MP2. For ex: the hotel near the end of the game has the same inner decoration from the hotel in MP1; the police station was a level in MP2; the swamp and river parts resembled the docks in MP1; Max apartment building returns, albeit it's not exactly the same building from MP2; among many other references.

Despite the technical achievements, the storytelling and game's flow are such a drag. First, Remedy inserts mini shows in their games with scattered TVs in the levels and they create points where the whole game is halted for the player to watch something else. MP3 continues this thread. The comics return, but are now in game cutscenes with real-time graphics. In a way they are much less intrusive because they are now shown with real-time graphics and not static images and panels. However, my lord... why did they choose to insert so many cutscenes in the whole game? Holy *! This is what almost ruined the game for me. Why interrupt the game's flow with cutscenes every 5 minutes??? The game is also constantly interrupted if you decide to examine every collectible. I'm not a die hard fan of Valve and HL2, but the cutscenes in first person that leave the player free to walk around or at least move the head are the polar opposite of the excess of cutscenes that force you to stop playing and watch. Looking back it's funny how both Max Payne 1 and 2 had a lot of interruption too, but at the time I didn't think it was bad. Maybe the scale of things, the animations, the newer tech, exacerbated an already existing issue from the previous games.

I didn't think that the sequence where Max is shot and losing blood was any better than the nightmare sequences from the previous games. In the previous we had a dream world with hallucinations and distorted environments. Now we just have real world, fuzzy vision and Max's monologues. It's just one sequence and the way it starts felt so forced. In the police station level Max hands himself over, is beaten, not handcuffed and then, he knocks down two officers and escapes. The game's plot seemed so stupid for doing that. For comparison, in the first game Max wakes up tied to a chair and this happens after he is drugged. In addition, there was the baseball bat. It felt much more coherent.

When I finished this game I was left with a strong feeling that they tried to make a cinematic experience. Something like a combination of "Die Hard" and "Mission Impossible". Specially because they abused bullet time in pre scripted sequences. For ex: Max breaks through a window and you have some seconds to take down multiple enemies before the bullet time is over. They abused the classic "Hollywood lies" such as bullets being able to cause the explosion of car's tanks, a bus' hull protecting Max from gunfire from ten or more guys outside or jumping off a tram in motion without breaking any bones. I'd highlight the abandoned hotel building near the end of the game. Max plants bombs to bring down the building and they took bullet time to the next level, literally. Max detonates the bombs and there is enough time for him to fight some more foes, chat some more, cutscenes, then he escapes with an helicopter right before the whole building explodes.

Rockstar made many goofs with their depiction of Brazil and the portuguese language. About the language, I think that they watched the movie "Elite Squad" and "Elite Squad 2", which depict corruption and drug traffic in Rio de Janeiro. If you are familiar, Brazil has differences in idioms, slangs and overall culture when you compare different regions. They didn't make a good translation because they apparently confused portuguese and spanish. One example is right in the beginning. When the security guard shouts "Tranquila!", this is a word in both portuguese and spanish. But to say "tranquila" to mean "calm down" is used in spanish, not in portuguese. The way the gang members talk sounded more from Rio de Janeiro than from São Paulo.

The environment art did capture the overall look of a brazillian slum. However, there is a graffiti which reads "Ogum". If you know more about Brazil and criminals, you'll know that there is prejudice or religious intolerance among them. In Brazil, "Ogum", is a deity in some african religions. Look, criminals such as drug dealers and gangs that dominate slums tend to call african religions evil and abominate them. The criminals and drug dealers are mostly followers of Jesus Christ and/or forms of protestantism.

Another goof is the Tiete River. That level was depicted as a swamp or marshland. Look at the trees, they placed palm trees. Do some google map research and São Paulo is not a coastal city. The heavy rain and wetland they made in the game resembles much more Vietnan, Thailand, Philippines or other countries from Southeast Asia. Or, speaking of biomes, resembles much more a tropical rainforest and São Paulo is thousands of miles away from the Amazon rainforest. It reminds me of the movies "Rambo" or "Predator", which obviously don't take place in Brazil. The Tiete River itself is also not many km wide in the real world.

In Brazil, when a person is placed inside a pile of tires and then burned, they literally call it "microwave". The movie "Elite Squad" has a scene which shows it in action, another reason for me to believe that they drew inspiration from that movie. I have no idea why, in the game, Rockstar decided to call it "legendary execution" in a literal translation from portuguese.

Another weird literal translation was "crachá preto". "Crachá" is badge in english and "preto" is black in english. The literal translation created a name for a criminal organization which sounded very underwhelming.

Bugs:

• The last stand to save yourself is not perfect. Sometimes there is some object or wall in between you and the enemy, or Max is reloading and the reload animation takes all the available time, making it impossible to save yourself
• Some game freezes
• When Max is in the bus defending from waves of enemies. After the waves ended the game didn't progress and forced me to replay the same part

I didn't play the multiplayer and I can't say anything about it.