Although you’ll kill hundreds of people in Max Payne 3, it remains a grisly business throughout. The game’s kill camera - another one of the game’s many visual flourishes - tracks the final bullet from Max’s gun to its intended target, but it never sublimates the violence. This isn’t only tackled in the main story, but also in nice scraps of incidental narrative recovered in clues dotted about the meticulously-crafted environments. It touches on the disparity between rich and poor, and how resentment and desperation can fester in the slums and the penthouses alike. Yes, it focuses on some of its most visceral manifestations – ragged bullet wounds, charred flesh, dismembered limbs – but it also peers into the unseen causes that lie behind such acts of violence. In fact, it lingers on violence, but not in a tawdry or sensational way. You can’t cowardly hide behind a pillar waiting for you health to return – it won’t, and the pillar will crumble. But the inclusion of a non-regenerating health system does a great job of forcing you to play like a desperate man on the edge. It’s a little disappointing for a game that invests so heavily in the development of its protagonist not to reflect this at the level of gameplay: Max has no new abilities available to him that aren’t there from the start. They’re simple mechanics, but once you’ve mastered combining them, the action and destruction you can orchestrate is breathtaking. The game’s fully-destructible environments really intensify firefights – seeing the air around you slowly woven with spiralling bullets, fractured glass, and plumes of shredded paper is genuinely thrilling. Max’s signature time-bending moves – Bullet Time and Shoot Dodge – return, and are easy to pick up and master. It keeps things straightforward and uncluttered. And if you choose to dual-wield, you’re forced into dropping the larger, potentially more powerful weapon. Although there are a range of distinctive weapons in the game, you can only carry two side-arms and one two-handed weapon at any given time. Ultimately, it’s a trade-off, and if you buy into Max’s plight, cut scenes become engrossing, and it’s joy to see them bleed seamlessly into the furious action. And it’s easy to see how their frequency may prove too intrusive some players might feel that control is being taken away from them too soon or given back a little too late.
Consequently, the game is heavily punctuated by cut scenes – some brief, some quite long. It’s not that Max Payne 3’s gameplay is substandard – far from it – but it’s always firmly in the service of its overarching narrative. Maybe that’s a tacit criticism in itself. Throughout the game, you're never sure if Payne's searching for absolution, trying to save another man's wife, or if he's really on a protracted suicide mission, trying to embrace his own destruction.Īlmost half-way through this review, and I’ve yet to mention gameplay. It’s gnarled and bitter, as you would expect – he effortlessly delivers the script’s many Chandlerlisms with calloused cynicism – but it’s also a surprisingly nuanced turn. And nowhere is this better exemplified than in James McCaffrey’s standout performance as Max Payne. Max Payne 3 does the latter – it’s a game that is fully literate in the genre of which it strives to be a part, and judged on those terms it’s one of the finest executions of game noir to date. If you’re not a fan of genre fiction, you might find the supporting cast risibly generic, the plot a bit flimsy, but there’s a marked difference between using archetypal characters because you’re creatively spent and deliberately tapping into a rich tradition. The non-linear narrative, the cast of suspicious characters, a plot twisted by deception and corruption – it’s all present and correct.
#Max payne 3 reviews series
But it’s not just stylish gloss – like everything in the game, it feeds into the characterisation of Max, emphasising his jaded disconnection from the world around him.ĭespite swapping the shadows for the sun, the series hasn’t lost its hardboiled heritage. Initially, it all seems a bit much, too noisy and distracting, but after a while you acclimatise and it becomes part of the game’s distinctive texture. The change of location is underscored by a raft of cinematic effects: scan lines, chromatic aberration, shifting film stock.
0 kommentar(er)
