Max Payne 3

I've never really been a huge fan of Max Payne. I played the first game and I couldn't finish it. Something about a burnt out cop fighting bad guys sounds interesting. Something about that burnt out cop doing a dramatic narration the entire time just sounds depressing. Something about that cop going through bullet time without any explanation... well that just sounds dumb. The game was suppose to be a noir game... but wanted to be a hardcore shooter. One or the other game. One or the other.

And then there was the movie...

The more I think about this movie, the more I want to watch it and just review it and remember how horrible it is. Mark Wahlberg... a shitty plot... just so many things about this movie that is so stupidly bad... I might have to download that soon and watch it because its a movie I'm sure Mark Wahlberg wants to forget, and fast.

But I don't forget bad movies. I just have rediscover them...

Definitely in December I will be revisiting Max Payne and giving you my take on it.

But back to the point.

I'm not a huge fan of Max Payne. I'm not wild about the style, I'm not wild about the character, I'm not wild about the game.

But for some reason, possibly the price, I thought it would be a good idea to buy Max Payne 3.

I knew the background, mainly from the movie unfortunately. Max Payne was an NYPD detective who's wife and kid are murdered. He's just a depressing guy to say the least. And by god, is that not prevalent in Max Payne 3.

My god, how many times in this game am I just watching Max drink. He just sits in this shitty apartment and drinks for a good five minutes at a time. Nothing comes of it, there's not much development except for some depressing inner dialogue.

This was kind of the inbetween cutscenes that I think were only used as like loading screens before the next level loaded. These scenes were boring and long.

But all that said, Max Payne 3 is a fun game.

What a difference between the first game and the third game.

Somehow they managed to make an entire game that just seems to be the same exact location over and over of this dank and dark interpretation of New York... or New Jersey, something like that.

It was boring and just gave me a headache when I played it a couple years ago.

Suddenly, the locations are given a facelift in the 3rd game.

But they don't really forget where the game came from. The game has levels where they flash back to Max's time in New York. If someone was nostalgic about the old Max Payne, Max Payne 3 has that element to it.

But its a small element and I'm glad. I like the New Jersey levels in 3, but many times I was just waiting to get back to the levels in Brazil.

But what is the story?

The game takes place 9 years after the last game (as if that mattered to me) and Max is working private security for a rich family in Brazil known as The Brancos. There are flashbacks to show that he was recruited for the private security job from a man names Raul Passos after he needed to get out of New Jersey from threat of the mafia.

The game begins at a party Max is running security for when a group of armed men come in and try to abduct his boss and his wife. While they fail the first time, a level later they kidnap Rodrigo Branco's wife, Fabiana at a night club. After multiple attempts to get her back, and multiple gun battles later, Rodrigo Branco is murdered. Max must then go on his own to find Fabiana and Rodrigo's killer. All the while, he uncovers a plot on a larger scale including police corruption and conspiracy that leaves Max as a one man army in the middle of South America.

Consider that my spoiler free review. If you haven't played the game and want to know what happens in the story without me telling, I suggest you leave now and play the game as soon as you can. It really is a fun time.

But as far as the spoiler review goes.

Everyone dies in this game!

Seriously, Max Payne cannot win in this game. I know the game is suppose to be a noir style game and noir never ends in a necessarily happy ending. But damn, everything Max tries to do in this game just blows up in his face, and it happens very quickly. You think Max Payne's life was shitty at the beginning of the game, you just watch this guy go farther and farther down the drain and its just depressing.

And that's something that might turn you off of the game. Throughout, the game, Max is doing a monologue that is just down right depressing. If that's not your thing and you want some kind of happiness in a game, this one is not for you. It is however, a little bit brighter (literally) than the previous Max Payne games and that's a relieve on this end.

While the story is depressing, it is good.

Like any good mystery, its multilayered. The game starts out with you fighting gangs and very local enemies. It then just layers on each other as the actors of the story come out. Paramilitary, police, etc. It just builds on itself until the final show down.

Now is it pretty obvious who the bad guys are from the beginning? Yes. Are their motivations clear? No they're not. You could maybe guess that Victor Branco is a bad guy but you don't know why he would want his brother killed. It also doesn't help that Max's narration has a lot of foreshadowing in it. Its not very hard to guess that Max is going to get screwed.

However, the noir narration part of the story isn't as distracting as I thought it was going to be.

While we're talking about things that I thought were going to bother me, I should probably talk about the bullet time element of the gameplay.

I've never understood why Max Payne seems to be The One or live in his own little world of being able to manipulate the Matrix or something like that but for some reason, this guy can slow down time, giving him more time to shoot his enemies with complete percision.

Now Max Payne isn't the only game that has had an unexplained bullet time. Red Dead Redemption has its Red Dead vision or whatever that is that allows the player to tag targets and shoot them all. Now I'm not saying the bullet time of Max Payne isn't a fun element, I just don't think it makes much sense.

Its not too distracting in the game, at least not after multiple hours of playing, its just still strange to me. However, I've recently started to realize the style of game Max Payne really is.

Its not a realistic shooter. The same way its not a realistic story or takes a normal style of story telling. Its over exaggerated and sensationalized. and that's something you have to be clear about before you play this game.

 Though it is sensationalized and ridiculous in some parts about it, it does play that line of being realistic and ridiculous very well.

There is a great theme throughout of class divide throughout the game. There's a great part of the game where Max is walking through the Favela and he points out the fact that he's been behind the glass until then. Its time to get into the actual Sao Paulo and actual Favela.

Now of course its a ridiculous and almost offensive representation of the Favela, but there's an element of truth in the things that are said in the game and its a good combination of over exaggeration and truth.

That ridiculousness is masked well enough with the well done environment and storyline that you just kind of forget that Max is unexplicably The One.

One thing that I must suggest with this game is that you should play the game all the way through in a very short time. My first run through with the game was fragmented over the span of a month between playing. Now there are a lot of characters in this game, characters that show up in the beginning and then don't show up until half way through the game. 

An example of this is Wilson De Silva. APPARENTLY, he showed up at the beginning of the game

 along with a lot of other guys who showed up later.

Playing the game fragmented made me forget that I had ever seen this guy, among others before. Suddenly when they show up again, I had no idea who they were. And suddenly Max is really angry at them, acting as though he had seen them before.

While I had totally forgot about them and didn't have the foggiest of ideas of who they were.

That doesn't make these characters bad. They're just a little forgettable unless you play the game very consistently.

It was kind of fun playing through the game again and seeing these characters who I saw near the end of the game and suddenly realized that they were in the beginning of the game again. Maybe I wasn't paying attention but I had alot of connecting moments and suddenly the game was making more and more sense.

Even when the game wasn't totally clear, the gameplay and collectables made the game a lot of fun to play. While Max Payne, in my opinion isn't the most dynamic character. I thought this portrayal was very good and a lot of fun.

Overall, the game was fun. The story was interesting and again, multilayered, and multilayered well. That with the action and the gameplay, the game is a very good installation of Rockstar's collection. Its not surprising that Rockstar brings it again and Max Payne was just down right fun.

But what do you think? Do you prefer the dark and dank original Max Payne or the updated 3rd installment? Comment and Discuss Below.

I'll leave you with this. In case you weren't interested in the storyline of the second Max Payne, here is the plot in 60 seconds. Its a fun video. Enjoy!