Dylan: I’m three chapters into my Max Payne 3 replay. I’ve chosen Hard and Free Aim and it’s almost a different game. Bullet time is a precious resource that is rarely given and every firefight is a crazy, shoot-dodging affair that often requires several retries. But man, when it all goes right it’s just so damn awesome. I love this game, flaws and all and I can’t wait to keep replaying it and maybe, just maybe, tick off all its achievements.
Patrick: You can’t deny that objectively it’s a very well put-together game. I’ve never seen the RAGE engine look so beautiful, the levels are intelligently constructed and both the sound design and music score are utterly phenomenal. Yet… I’m just not convinced by Max Payne 3. For everything that it does absolutely right, it just doesn’t feel like Max Payne. Sure, you have James McCaffrey’s excellent voice work and there’s bullet time, but something feels fundamentally off. I can’t help feeling that this would have been a much better experience if Remedy had stayed at the helm.
Dylan: I love Remedy too, but my memories of Max Payne are tempered by the ravages of time, so to me this still feels Max Payne enough, although I will admit that it feels a little too much like a blend of Red Dead Redemption and GTA IV. There’s no escaping the big rubber Rockstar stamp here. From memory, bullet time itself is handled a little differently. In the Remedy titles, you could aim in real-time despite time itself slowing down, but in MP3 you are also limited to slow-mo aiming, which often doesn’t quite give you the advantage that you might hope for.
Patrick: I played Max Payne 2 again in the lead-up to this release and it astonished me just how little it had aged. Sure, some of the textures are pretty bland now, but the all-important gameplay is still perfectly pitched. I know that Max Payne, by necessity, had to change to fit into today’s gaming market, but I just question whether Rockstar is the right developer to make those changes. After all, they’ve never exactly been known for their silky-smooth controls and flowing action, have they? That’s the biggest problem here – the action just feels clunky to me, displaying none of the balletic brilliance I’ve come to associate with the franchise.
Dylan: I agree, it’s a game that can be difficult to come to terms with. It is obviously designed with soft-lock in mind, which makes free-aim a true challenge to use properly. There’s also no extra experience to be had beyond bullet time itself. In GTA IV and RDR, there was this wonderful body-part-switching element that allowed you to master headshots. That aim-and-upward-flick was glorious and added an extra layer to everything. In Max Payne 3, you have shoot-dodge and bullet time but no real aiming mini-game to engage with. It becomes about clearing each set-piece as quickly as possible.
That said, I have connected with the game quite deeply. To me it feels like something to be mastered. Sure, you can snap to cover and kill each goon methodically, but can you do it with style? Can you shoot-dodge down those stairs and take out all six enemies with headshots? When you do this, it’s amazing and truly satisfying. Although I do kind of wish that the level design leaned more to such moments. There are far too few instances of long staircases or escalators to soar down.
Patrick: I agree, the “sailing down stairs” moments are a very special kind of amazing, though maybe that’s highlighted by their only occasional appearances. For me though, the cover system and the painkillers are two clear indicators for the confused nature of Rockstar’s approach – they want to have it both ways. They want to make an old-school, traditional Payne game (ooh, that’s a cool rhyme…) but with modern conventions, and the two just simply aren’t compatible.
Prior to release, the developer said that they had gone against the regenerating health trend because they wanted players to take bigger risks and create more explosive action. That’s all well and good, but the combination of the cover system, enemy design and the lack of a quick-save feature totally undermine it. The quick-save present in the original games meant you could wander into a room full of goons safe in the knowledge that a reload was mere seconds away, if need be. The checkpoints here are oddly spaced, so taking risks will lead to many, many deaths that throw you back, often several firefights. It’s aggravating. Also, I don’t know about you Dylan, but in the last third of the game I found that the only way to deal with the insane number of heavily armoured henchmen was to bunker down behind something concrete and then pop out in bullet-time, head-shot a few guys and get back into cover again. Not exactly “explosive action”, is it?
Dylan: Same, that last third will be challenging on the higher difficulties, but I get the feeling that that’s what Rockstar was aiming for, the last part of the game to be experienced in cinematic slow motion. You raise very good criticisms. The health thing really does seem like it was a design holy grail – they couldn’t not have that recognisable picture of Max in the corner filling up with red damage. Rockstar seem aware of their strange checkpointing and difficulty spikes too, giving you some extra painkillers if you die a few times in the same spot.
I’ve established that I love the game, but let’s keep on the critical path. What did you think of the overused film glitches and on-screen quotes? I have a theory that this style was used to make the game appear less like the upcoming GTA V. I didn’t really like the on-screen quotes, although I thought that the way the graphics glitch during gameplay was cool. Almost mirroring Max’s drunken, drug-addled state and enhancing his status as an unreliable protagonist.
Patrick: It took me a good two-thirds of the game until I realised that the on-screen quotes were trying to imitate the graphic novel sequences of the originals. It’s not a particularly effective device; if anything it highlights some of the occasionally cringe-worthy dialogue. I definitely get the aesthetic Rockstar was going for, that Michael Mann/Tony Scott “sun-bleached noir” thing, but the visual style is just a bit too hyperactive for its own good. It can’t settle for more than a few seconds, everything has to be constantly split-screened, frozen, packed full of grain, desaturated… there’s simply no consistency. It’s cinematic, but in a really empty, vacuous way.
The key to a unique visual style is knowing when to employ it. We all know 24 for its split-screens, but at some of the most powerful moments in the show the editors avoid the use of the split-screen. It heightens tension, confounds audience expectations and creates highly memorable narrative moments. In short, these sort of approaches need restraint and subtlety, not exactly qualities that Rockstar is known for.
Dylan: It’s not a subtle sledgehammer, that’s for sure, but it’s my Game of the Year so far. I’ve only played a few rounds of multiplayer and it seems alright – crewing up would be more fun if I actually played when others were online, but alas I am a day gamer. Even without that arm of the game I think I’ll be busy for weeks to come replaying it on harder difficulties and taking on the Arcade modes. I’m leaning very much towards a 9/10, but I don’t think you’ll let me, Patrick. Should we assign separate scores or shall we wrestle a middle ground?
Patrick: I know it sounds like I’ve been rather down on Max Payne 3, but I did enjoy my time with it – I just wish I had been playing the wonderful Remedy-developed MP3 in my head, one packed with wacky dream sequences, frequent bursts of Norse mythology and some good natured fourth wall breaking. This isn’t bad, but make no mistake, it’s a Rockstar game dressed up to look like Max. I don’t think we’re going to find a middle ground for the score to be honest, so I’m just going to go ahead and call this one a 7/10. If you’re a really big fan of the first two games you should probably knock an extra point off, because there’s very little here that you’ll recognise.
Verdict: Patrick says 7, Dylan says 9 – who do you trust with your life when the going gets tough and a slow motion jump through the VIP window is needed? Hmm?