Max Payne 3

This game blew my expectations right out of the water. To start with, the fluidity of the game-play is the first thing that struck me. A few people here have said the movement is sluggish, but to that minority i have to disagree!
I loved max payne's 1 &2, so I'm sure like most who are fans of the series i had high expectations. Therefore, i am pleased to announce that the campaign definitely lives up to the hype. It is really engaging, with a deep and thourough story line and plenty of action.

I was a massive fan of the first two games. Max Payne 2 especially, is one of the few games I have completed several play-throughs on. It's not like the game changed for each play-through, it was just fun to charge into room after room and cause beautiful, choreographed chaos. I was really looking forward to Max Payne 3.

I picked it up on Friday evening. However by Sunday afternoon it was already bagged up and sold on eBay. A massive disappointment. Why?

Firstly I think it has suffered from something that the recent Duke Nukem suffered from: What was cool and new 10 years ago, isn't necessarily cool today just because you have given a new generation of hardware a crack at blood, violence and bad language. I know I shouldn't have expected more, but after one hour of diving into room after room, hitting bullet time button or shoot-dodge button, it just didn't give the same thrill. Adding fancy kill-cam slow-motion deaths for the last bad guy standing was an attempt to help lift this, but sadly it doesn't last long. I could feel the novelty bleeding off with each room I walked into. Also be warned that if the plot and character development are your thing, be prepared for A LOT of it. Perhaps as much time watching cut-scenes as there is gameplay here.

In previous games, until the enemies had line-of-sight on you they didn't know you were there. You could use the third-person perspective to plan how you were going to take the room down. You could hear them chatting, figure out where they were, and use the tools at your disposal to pick your fight. In Max Payne 3, they always know you are there, they have X-Ray vision at times, and you have no opportunity to do anything other than hit the bullet-time button in panic to them running around a corner in a scripted event. It's same each time. In Max Payne 2 I remember that if I re-played a room, the enemies within wouldn't necessarily do what they did previously.

There was also no time to explore the well crafted environment. Rockstar have spent a lot of time on each locale, and even hidden "Golden Gun" items to find. But should you dare take any time to look for them, it cues an annoying narration from Max saying something like, "I knew that if I didn't hurry, it would all be for nothing". Consequently if you don't trot to the next copy/paste gun fight, it fails the mission for you. Thanks for that Rockstar. Why hide items then punish you for looking for them? Why make such nice backdrops and locales then force us to rush through them? Why try to keep the pacing up by hurrying you along, to then make you sit and watch a lengthy cut-scene? It made no sense to me.

Then there is the cheapness. Not talking about the production value, which is very high. Clearly a lot of work went into this game. I'm talking about the cheap deaths. I'm not sure why so many reviewers haven't picked up on this. Maybe they had the aim-assist lock-on turned on. I think in a game that is only about shooting, why have the game do the shooting for you? So I always have that turned off. Sufficed to say for someone who is no stranger to shooters, plays them regularly, and plays them on the harder settings, I died a hell of a lot in this game. It was usually from Max being so awfully slow at getting back into cover after a cinematic shoot-dodge. That left me reluctant to use them as more often than not, it meant certain death for me instead of the advantage it's supposed to be. Other times the game would spawn enemies behind me, simply to justify the use of the "look behind you" dedicated button. However when those enemies one-shot you in the head before you know they are there, it becomes tiresome. You also can't afford to walk through every door backwards in case this is going to happen, as you just get shot by the people you are backing into. I know games are supposed to be tough. They have gotten too easy of late, but the final straw came about 3 hours in.

By this point I was already tired of the game. Regardless of how the plot turned out, I knew what to expect by now. It auto-saves me in a doorway I can't back through. There are enemies surrounding me with automatic weapons with flashlights on so they are hard to pin point individually. There are about 12 of them. I have only one piece of cover, and if I use it they immediately throw grenades in, forcing me out of cover. If I run and gun, I die. If I try to use cover, I die. If I try to keep moving (Max moves like he's wading through treacle) I die. If I shoot from cover, moving when the grenades appear, I run out of bullet-time before half way through the bad guys, and I die. If I use shoot-dodge, I can take out 4 or 5 mid-air, and in the following fumbling around on the floor trying to stand back up, I die. I am quite a patient guy. At first I was thinking, "OK I'm missing something here. They will be one route/tactic to take that is clearly better than the others. I just need to find it." I must have spent 3 straight hours re-trying this one section. Say an average of 3 minutes per attempt, that's a lot of tries! After three hours I finally make it to a check-point. I have no health left, 2 bullets left and no pain killers. The gate I walk though closes behind me, sealing me off from the enemies I had not killed. Great I thought. Check point reached. I when through the next door, and was instantly shot in the head from a hidden assailant 15 feet up in some scaffolding. Serious it was the instant the doors had parted. I stood zero chance of using cover, dodging, bullet time...Then I find out the closing gate was not a save point, and I am back in the doorway of doom and I'm expected to do it all again. And I just didn't WANT to. There was nothing driving me to try harder. Maybe I'd have eventually cracked it, but by the time this big fat slab of cheapness had descended on me, my enthusiasm for the game had simply drained away.

At this point I fired up the laptop and started writing my eBay advert. Thankfully 10 minutes later it had sold. I'm only about £7 down for 4 hours of entertainment, which is not bad by today's standards, so the game gets a star for production value, a star for the (short-lived) novelty value, and a star for overall value as I was able to claw back the £30 of the £37 I spent on it. Can't speak for the multiplayer, but if that is not your bag, I strongly recommend you wait until this game has reached the bargain bin before giving it a whirl. It is definitely not worth the full asking price. I suspect the majority of it's appeal will be to the people too young to legally play it.

Tell you what, if you want a solid third-person shooter with excellent productions values, solid cover mechanic, bullet-time effects and is an absolute blast to play, check out Vanquish. It is the best game nobody ever bought, as there was next to no promotion for it in the UK. You should be able to pick up a cheap copy by now (2010 game) and I promise you it leaves Max Payne 3 for dead. It's pacing is absolutely mental. The boss battles alone are simply epic. It is quite simply, fun.

I think the trouble with gamers these days is that it's all about the Multiplayer. I can remember the days when the reward for completing a Megadrive game was a long cut scene at the end/after the credits. The only thing that counts these days is multiple prestige bragging rights against your virtual friends with the only reward being obesity, pale waxy skin and hard skin on the thumbs, oh and palms because you never leave your bedroom to get a girlfriend. And even if you did you wouldn't know how to interact with them because you normally only converse via Tweet or message "Friends" on Facebook.

I applaud Rockstar for actually making a game with a single player story and the cut scenes to support it rather than the usual lip service given to a campaign in the knowledge that most will just go straight to the multiplayer anyway. Cough "CoD". I admit that it's been such a long time since there's been a game with a narrative that it took me a while to get used to the cut scenes but when you do it is like playing a movie. The graphics are some of the best I've seen for some time, especially when you get out of the dark and into the Favela with Max's Hawaiian shirt.

If I had to be critical, yes you could say it is repetitive, shoot badies then cut scene but take away the cut scene and you have the formula for 90% of the games out there. The choice of weaponry isn't as good as CoD or GoW but this is supposed to be a washed up cop in Brazil against Favela gangs so they're not going to have AUG's and drones are they?

In summary if CoD multiplayer is your thing maybe this isn't for your. If you like Unchartered or similar give it a shot.