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[PC] [360] [PS3] Max Payne 3

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[PC] [360] [PS3] Max Payne 3

Unread postby Carceri » 29 Sep 2012 02:15

[Post split off from the Max Payne 3 thread: http://culture.vg/forum/topic?f=1&t=3557 -icy]


I've had my eye on this thread for a while and I'm a little surprised no-one has any thoughts to share on the game post-release. In the mean-time I've been working on a review that's been sitting on my hard drive for a while, I'd appreciate any feedback on it. It's a little longer than I'd like, and I'm still wavering between 3 stars and 4 stars.

Max Payne III is a great third-person shooter that threatens to be depreciated by an uninteresting story populated with forgettable, superficial characters, taking place in an equally forgettable location. Rockstar gives action fans significantly better violence and bloodshed to chew on with their great use of the Euphoria engine, an entirely enjoyable action game, but they fall short of delivering a comprehensive experience in same the ballpark as the memorable and engrossing ones that Remedy Entertainment gave us with Max Payne, and Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne.

What Max Payne 3 does, the few specialised mechanics it works with (as with what little the other two worked with, when compared with all other third-person shooters and action games we've seen in the last nine years) are as excellently done as ever. The Euphoria animation engine is one of the biggest attractions of the game, and it certainly raises the satisfaction from gratuitous violence to a whole new level. It's one of those rare moments in my personal history of gaming (among which include marvelling at the gory locational damage of Soldier of Fortune, and the captivation from throwing my ragdoll avatar's corpse tumbling down a spiky pit in Unreal Tournament 2003) where I've seen my gleeful savouring of inflicting tremendous violence on the human body taken to new high. Everyone's gotten a good taste of the Euphoria engine from Grand Theft Auto IV principally, where it was kind of entertaining and goofy but by no means to be taken particularly seriously, as everyone staggered around like they were drunk clowns when they bumped into stuff, or when bullets bumped into them. Few such shenanigans can be found in Max Payne 3's implementation of the engine: shots to the abdomen will have an enemy keeling over in pain screaming, hands will fluidly, hopelessly grope towards a shot in the throat. Remember those bits in action movies where the hero riddles a mook with, like, a million rounds from his uzi, and the guy stands there for half and hour doing this gruesome little dance? Well you can do that in Max Payne 3, and it looks and feels entirely organic. You can blast people over railings and off roofs, and it never gets overly-familiar because of the engine's versatility. Enemies don't spontaneously lose control of their bodies the moment the fatal blow is delivered, they collapse from the weight of their wounds as copious amounts of glistening blood spurt out of them. And sometimes they don't die, they'll just be knocked on their feet and either get up after a period of stunning or writhe in agony. The days of pumping bullets into foes with the only response being a momentary flinch are truly over. Put simply, it's really awesome to kill stuff in this game.

The way you do that killing looks great too: Max shifts his stance according to how you're aiming, he lowers his weapons when you're not in a fight, he moves in and out of cover pretty fluidly, he'll pop painkillers on screen. The animation in the game is all pretty seamless and it's come a huge way from its predecessors where Max's entire body would rigidly swivel uniformly to where you were aiming to go from “idle” frames to “shooting” frames. It's now quite a bit less frustrating trying to kill people from a distance with small arms because you can now properly zoom in with your weapons. And Max finally has a melee animation that doesn't blow! When you're close enough in range Max will pistol-whip a foe a couple of times before gruesomely filling their faces full of lead (you can hold the trigger down as long as you want too), and enemies can do the same thing to you. Among the more impressive achievements of animation in the game is the way guns are handled. Unlike the other games in the series, Max can carry three guns maximum. You can carry two of any sidearms (most pistols and submachineguns) that you pick up, which will be shown either to be held by max or holstered on his body, and you can carry one longarm (shotguns, rifles, etc). If you're picking up a weapon while moving you'll drop into a roll to keep your momentum. What's particularly nice is the way the longarms are handled, because Max, not having space on his body to store them, will hold it in one hand while you use a pistol (and this will show up in cutscenes) or simply drop the gun if you start dual-wielding (and you can dual-wield whatever sidearms you pick up in whatever combination). What's especially awesome is that if you're reloading a handgun while holding your rifle, Max will tuck the rifle under his arm in order to free his hand. These nuances coupled with the restricted, on-screen “inventory” system (although, unfortunately, there's still a very prominent weapon-wheel that appears when selecting weapons) are a greater step towards maintaining your investment in the game and the weapons you choose, an improvement over having a plethora of guns to be pulled out at whim from some mysterious extra-dimensional space, as was the case with both Max Payne 1 and 2. The list of guns is much longer and more varied this time around (everything from revolvers to a couple of light machineguns make an appearance), and you'll see different weapons coming and going throughout the game. More importantly, they're all viable, accurate and great fun to use (although there's still no rival to dual submachineguns), well-modelled, and they sound satisfyingly “punchy” coupled with the painful sounds of bullet impacts, they're a big step up in comparison to their predecessors in 1 and 2. All of this often comes together beautifully in the game's many “bullet-cams” where you get to watch as your bullets travel through the air to make individually discernible holes in your victims. On the tail end of all this is another element that Rockstar has introduced to the weaponry, the use of attachments, although they don't significantly affect the gunfighting through single-player.

Aside from the way weapon storage is handled (and who knows, maybe in Max Payne 4 we'll work up to having, heaven forbid, shoulder straps on guns) and how the guns work, there's the matter of one of the core mechanics of the franchise, shootdodging. Let there be absolutely no doubt: this is the finest instantiation of the mechanic in the series yet. The duration of the dodge is longer, the corresponding stylish animation more pronounced. Max will grunt with effort as he throws himself into the air, and more impressively, he'll pivot his body realistically mid-dive to where you're aiming. More importantly, if you aren't paying attention and shootdodge straight into a wall you'll pay for it, because Max will faceplant the wall and tumble to the ground, disrupting bullet-time. That's right, you actually have to pay attention to your surroundings before you shootdodge now, so no shootdodging into a wall and hanging there for however long. Oh, and remember all those times post-shootdodge that you hammered the controls and inwardly screamed GET UP GET GET UP GET UP as enemies took free potshots at Max's prone form? This was partly addressed in Max Payne 2 where you'd stay on the ground so long as you kept firing, but now it's a little more nuanced because Max's prone stance respects the surroundings he landed on and it has momentum if you jumped from a height or down a slope. The system has its oddities though: Max can reload his dual-wielded weapons mid-dive, along with, I shit you not, popping the occasional painkiller.

Bullet-time itself hasn't received quite as much attention, which isn't to say it needed much. Rockstar's take on bullet-time is closer to the first game's rendition than the second game's. In some ways, that's a little disappointing. In Max Payne 1 bullet-time amounted to little more than slow motion, although there was nothing particularly wrong with that, it was good for what it was. Max Payne 2 tried to build on that by having the effect of slow motion become more intense as you dispatched more and more enemies while in bullet-time. Further, Max could now do quick reloads while in such a state, elaborate little flourishes that had the camera panning around Max as he spins and waves his arms around, emptying his guns. One small problem with the way bullet-time was handled in Max Payne 2, however, was that Max himself didn't slow down during it, so this undermined the overall sense of slowdown as you zipped around your slowpoke enemies. Rockstar has played it safe by avoiding these particular mechanics and sticking mostly to the first game's use of bullet-time, although the speed of Max's reloading in bullet-time is reminiscent of how it's done in 2.

Apart from these staple mechanics, Rockstar's own big addition to the game is a cover system, and it's a mixed bag as far as the pace of the game is concerned. On the one hand, being able to use cover is clearly a now long-established necessity in action games like this. Again, look at Max Payne 1 and 2: I remember a whole bunch of cheesy times where I've stood limply behind a wall, jogged out from behind for a few seconds to get shots off and ducked back behind it, and it looks so fucking terrible. That's not a problem any more, and it's enough to justify having a cover system in this game, along with the bare fact that there are lots of times where it's simply unavoidable that you're going to be using cover. Now, I do have something negative to say about all of this. I'm a little dubious about how cover is used in high-octane action games like the Max Payne series. It's always been a million times more thrilling to pirouette between a plethora of bullets in these games than it is to sit behind a piece of cover poking your head out and methodically dropping enemies like some high-brow equivalent of whack-a-mole. That should come as no surprise, the original inspiration for Max Payne, the John Woo films, aren't noted primarily for cover-based shootouts, they're known for amazingly balletic firefights. With all this in mind it's a little disappointing to see how much emphasis is placed on cover in Max Payne 3. You simply won't last very long if you're in the open much, especially on harder difficulties and further into the game when enemies sport armor and assault rifles. And this seems to me to encourage a play style that should be nigh-frowned upon by the developers of this type of game: spending most of the game shooting from behind cover. Playing the game this way is the absolutely shittiest way to do so because it turns it into a series of mediocre, monotonous cover-based tediumfests made all the more facile by being able to go into slow motion the moment you pop out to aim. The real substance of the shooting, the parts where you dive into a room and spray, like, ten goons in a hail of bullets at point blank while the air is thick with fragments of glass and wood splinters, all even before you hit the floor, is much more rare.

The game doesn't do much to make you want to play like that anyway: on the tougher difficulties it always seems like you never have quite enough bullet-time and you can't really dodge the bullets fast enough past the initial couple of seconds you're out of cover to make running and gunning a consistently viable strategy. Rockstar themselves don't ever try to up the ante on death defiance or shit-just-got-real moments in the game: they toss you a couple of fairly meager and unextravagant scenes where you're tumbling to the ground from out of a window, or on a rope or a boat or crane or whatever, and you have a handful of enemies to kill in the extra slow period as you fall, but it's all a little flat and it never ever comes close to anything remotely heart-rate raising. A decent comparison here is Stranglehold, which littered environments with this sort of stuff: you can run up handrails, hang from chandeliers, run across tables, lie across moving pushcarts, all of this integrated seamlessly into an average firefight while it's got its own little momentary scene in Max Payne 3. Not only that, Stranglehold punishes you for being shit at the game by chipping away at your health according to the amount of time you spend quivering behind cover like a bitch.

In lieu of any serious encouragement from the way the game is laid out, it's really down to how you invest yourself in the game in order to be able to get the most out of it. There'll be occasions where you're given plenty of cover to use and where it'll seem blatantly stupid and needless, not to mention probably fatal, to ignore it and throw yourself blindly into enemies. And of course, you'll probably die because you're outnumbered, although that's never much of an issue. This is because checkpoints are pretty generous. It's also because of Rockstar's other new mechanic, a “last stand” mode that activates if Max has painkillers and gets hit with a fatal bullet, whereupon super slow bullet-time kicks in as Max slowly collapses to the floor, letting you get in a redeeming shot at your attacker to keep going. This “last man standing” mechanic is sometimes helpful because there'll be times when you simply can't avoid some shots and they'll be fatal depending on the difficulty level(the two most notable of which are “hardcore”, which makes most shots pretty damaging and shotguns downright terrifying but lets you use “last man standing”, and “classic”, which is simply death on zero health without last stand, the tradeoff being that the guns are less damaging). I'm not particularly fond of “last man standing” overall because of a few reasons: the length of time it plays out is ridiculous, there's not even semblance of fast reactions involved, you could practically go to your fridge for a coke and back before Max finally flops onto the ground, and there are quite a few occasions where I haven't been able to line up a foe properly because of the camera placement or cover issues. Finally, if there's anywhere the animation falls flat it's here because depending on where you're shot Max will twist his body mid-fall in the most unbelievable manner to be able to aim where he needs to. Besides that you can't dodge many bullets (although by the same token you'll hit what you're aiming at far more easier than in 1 or 2 due to ballistics taking a more realistic model in this sequel), you might simply miss your shots or run out of bullet-time. All of this makes it difficult to mimic the scenes of your favourite heroic bloodshed movie. When you do pull it off and shootdodge into the middle of an office with debris flying all over the place, or when you strafe across a nightclub roof gunning thugs down like dominoes it's an awesome feeling, and it's the core of the shooting experience in the series. But if you play through the game relatively conservatively, which is often much the way the game seems to be nudging you to play and the way I suspect most people will initially play it, you're going to come out with an underwhelming action game experience in general.

The game also has two scoring modes, the recurring “new york minute” time attack mode and a basic score-based mode. They're both pretty peripheral and redundant because neither of them are particularly conducive to engaging play: although “new york minute” encourages you to be speedy, and that encourages moving and fighting at a fast pace, it leaves little room to savour the gunfights. You'll also get the most points from solely headshotting enemies and going out of the way to melee them, which is fucking retarded, it looks ridiculous, so fuck that. Score attack follows pretty much the same pattern and similarly dumps on the way the game plays out: avoid filling enemies full of gaping holes with your dual submachineguns and keep your shots (only one shot, mind, we don't want to lose that super epic combo multiplier by missing with the others) restricted to the head for SUPER MAXIMUM PRO POINTS in this game about excessive, lavished bloodshed and destruction. Again, fuck that, that's not what anyone is playing a game where you dual-wield submachineguns and dive back and forth around a room for.

Rockstar have finally found a good use for all their hard work towards realistic and believable characters (i.e. shooting them), and I'm glad to say that the character modelling is just as impressive as the animation. All the faces are splendidly detailed and animated, and Rockstar have paid special attention to a number of admirable little things, like how Max's clothes crease as he moves around, with bullet wounds received that show up on your clothes in cutscenes, the sweat on Max's face, the way your enemies' faces twist into agony as they die, all of this sort of thing Rockstar has done pretty well in Max Payne 3. But there's inspiration lacking in the big things. Take the level design for instance, most of it's downright bland. Now, parts of Max Payne 1 and 2 were by no means amazing romps to play through: I've never found the warehouses and industrial areas of Max Payne 1 particularly attention-grabbing, nor did I when they used the same types of areas in the sequel. In spite of the mundaneness of the areas in both games, it was both the consistent attention to theme and detail, and the little twists going on in the levels, that made them as successful as they were. The subway tunnels of Max Payne 1 features, for example, an impromptu escort sequence, and then lands you abruptly into the middle of a bank heist. In another level you fight your way to the occult ritual grounds of a lunatic mobster in a gothic nightclub. In another level you're trying to find evidence in an exploding, underground military bunker. Yet another level and you're jumping from one elevator to another in a corporate building trying to dodge machinegun fire from a helicopter, and shooting out tripwires before they run into your elevator. Max Payne 2 wasn't quite as ambitious in its design but it still had its moments, and the levels it did have in general had a good amount of detail put into them in everything from having npcs you could meet and fight with, to the amount of dialogue and conversations you could overhear with enemies. In addition to this, both games had rich levels dedicated solely to plot exposition: both have awesome, surreal dream sequences while the second game in the series gives you a journey through a macabre themed fun park with all kinds of cool shit (it had those dinky physics puzzles, you know, when physics puzzles were still novel enough to be nifty little diversions in games), all of which was tied together superbly by the themes and plot of the game. There's no such attention to detail in Max Payne 3, and although I'm willing to forgive some of this because of the pacing of the game (which is faster than both predecessors, and a lot of times the game constantly urges you to keep moving, whether through implicit time limits or through impatient companions, which is fairly appropriate as far as I'm concerned, as the game is action-based), the outcome in this area is a loss in some particularly smarting ways.

To my mind there isn't a whole lot to the action in the Max Payne series beyond its core shooting mechanics, which aren't particularly complex overall as far as action games in general go. It makes sense that Remedy put an extra effort into level design in 1 and 2, in everything from puzzles and occasional platforming segments to little touches like the tv episodes. All of this, and Max Payne's exceptional story, buffers what would otherwise be somewhat above average shooters. With Max Payne 3 these concerns aren't such a big deal, considering the quality of the shooting, but all the same, little such attention is to be found in Max Payne 3. There's little to interact with or explore in 3's levels, the most important feature being the 'clues' you can collect: every now and then you'll come across small objects you can “use”, upon which the camera will focus momentarily and a little more information about the story is briefly revealed through voiceover narration by Max, It's an efficient means of conveying information about the plot, but it's not particularly rewarding (because, as I'll argue later, the plot itself is pretty basic). Even if they had slowed down the pace, though there's little reason to, and populated the levels with this stuff, I doubt I'd be inclined to bother with any of it because the design of the levels often isn't interesting enough to warrant exploration. Besides 'clues', the other reward for straying off the beaten track comes in the form of collectable 'golden gun' parts that, when fully collected, swap out the normal gun for a golden equivalent that deals 10% more damage with an increased ammo capacity. The golden colour of the gun is thankfully optional.

Aesthetically speaking, a lot of the levels in Max Payne 3 are simply ugly. And this should be little wonder because the levels are based on places in Brazil that themselves are ugly. The favelas are already dirty, jumbled-up shanty towns, they don't need any help looking bad. And yet Rockstar have succeeded in making some of those places out to be even more filthy than they already are. They went one step worse in their rendition and painted everything in a disgusting coat of shit brown (this on top of a godawful dusty brown filter already), threw confusing lights and wires around everything and litter all over the streets. All this amounting to the effect that you have these hideous, messy shooting galleries through which to navigate and it's a complete eyesore to pick out enemies. Not all levels are like this but they certainly don't get much better: it might be understandable and somewhat “redeemable” if there was some powerful theme tying the levels and their design together, as there is in 1 and 2, but there's nothing like that going on in Max Payne 3. Max gets drunk in his apartment, cut to a generic night-club with annoying music, Max gets drunk in his apartment, cut to a football stadium, Max gets drunk in his apartment, cut to a flashback. Funnily enough, it's in his flashbacks that I think some of the best levels can be found. Max's battle through a New Jersey cemetery evokes some familiarity and great memories from the other games (you can visit the graves of Vinnie Gognitti and Nicole Horne) and it's framed by pumping, haunting music (the score of the game is another big step up from its predecessors and generally quite pleasant, although it only reaches its peak maybe once or twice, both here and in a later airport level). So the levels are generally disappointing: they don't have the same degree of detail, the same puzzle and platforming reprieves, and they don't reward exploration in the same way that Max Payne 1 and 2 did. That's not so much of a problem when you consider how captivating the action is, but it certainly represents a broad area of design that's needlessly gone without sufficient attention.

By now you should have guessed what the biggest criticism of Max Payne 3 is, and why it can be seen to be a letdown compared to the other games in the series. The story is simply leagues below that of 1 and 2, in virtually every respect. Some structural choices concerning plot are understandable: the graphic novel slides that did the heavy work of progressing the story in 1 and 2 have been dropped in 3 for pure in-engine cutscenes, which is a little disappointing for fans because the slides were interesting and typically well-done, but I can appreciate that it reduces the disconnect between player and game ultimately. If there's any sort of analogous effect in this game it's the annoying, shallow, vivid flashes of colour and scanlines that appear during cutscenes, along with occasional split-screen camera effect and text pop-ups, but none of it's done particularly well or inventively. The absolute worst of these effects is a white flash on the screen that goes off to confirm that you've killed an enemy, each and every time. My best guess on the reason why any nitwit would actually think this would be a good idea is that the Euphoria engine could conceivably make it hard to tell when an enemy is wounded and not simply in a dying slump. I GUESS THE CROSSHAIR CHANGING COLOUR WHEN HE DIES ISN'T MORE THAN ENOUGH, RIGHT? Back on point, however. Rockstar have gone one further with cutscenes in Max Payne 3, because they also serve as loading sequences, which means that you won't see many loading screens while playing the game: it's all a fairly smooth and seamless narrative, and this certainly helps to alleviate the sort of ills I've been talking about. Unfortunately, not all the cutscenes will be ones that you'll always want to sit through: some of them are simply boring, and downright intrusive. You'll get through maybe 5 goons in a single area before another cutscene kicks in. One area in a football stadium, for example, kicks into one after you kill a couple of guys simply in order to let your partner comment on how well-equipped your enemies are, as though it wasn't obvious from the way they looked. Shortly later, another cutscene will be used to show Max running through sniper fire to get to a security room, all of which could have easily been done without taking control away from the player. There are numerous little annoying sections like this where all the player may want to do is keep shooting, where it's more appropriate to up the ante than to lay on a bit more of the plot. Even so, the problem isn't so much that there are so many of these cutscenes, it's that the story being conveyed in them is entirely passable.

If it's one thing that made the Max Payne games what they are, it's the stories they told. Max Payne 1 was a conventionally-structured revenge story that was well-developed for what it was: everything from norse mythology and the occult to grandiose conspiracy theories and various pop culture references got thrown into the mix without the narrative coherence so much as batting an eye lash, and Max's quality deadpan narration verging on the poetical, coupled with a large cast of interesting characters, all of which contributed towards a relatively exceptional story that flew in the face of its own seeming ridiculousness. Max Payne 2 went on to build on this singular achievement with a more mature effort that took its cue less from straight-up action flicks and more from noir film, resulting in a great combination of both. It also brings back a lot of the characters we got to know to in Max Payne 1, particularly Mona Sax ,who serves as Max's love interest in 2 and a fulcrum for much of the story. Max's narration is top notch and even if his model isn't the same lean and hungry figure it was in 1, he cuts an older, equally imposing figure in the sequel. By all means this would be a tough standard to live up to for any sequel, but it's like Rockstar were barely even trying to retain any one of these aspects that made the previous two games so enjoyable.

And here's where we finally get to primarily why Max Payne 3 is a good shooter, but underwhelming as a sequel, unlike Max Payne 2, which improved on its predecessor in virtually every way, from implementing a whole new physics engine to delivering an even better story. I have to say, the initial premises of the game struck me as interesting, setting Max as a washed out bodyguard for the rich of Brazil, while struggling to get over his past is a pretty brazen departure from either other game. At this point I'd say that most people (including myself) were expecting something along the lines of Man on Fire or City of God. No such luck with that, lol. What we got was a straightforward, no-frills kidnapping and betrayal story. Most of the twists can be seen coming a mile away, spoiler: big bad rich people are behind it all being helped by corrupt cops. There's very little beyond that, and certainly no conspiracy theories around to help thicken the plot. None of the characters are particularly memorable, from the few good guys encountered, among which are Passos, the ever-present companion with generic dialogue and the occasional mildly entertaining witticism, and Da Silva, the One Good Cop on the Force and Max's saving grace, a poor, straightfaced substitute for the devious and inscrutable Alfred Woden. Concerning the bad guys, there's a number of throwaway henchmen, without the memorable traits of previous villains like Jack Lupino, who're used primarily as sacrificial lambs for occasional boss-fights rather than any having significant build-up or integration into the plot, along with mean, bad rich Brazilian people, and Rockstar's essential Token Arrogant Rich Asshole. Okay, the story is pretty bog-standard and lacking ambition, but even the most dismal and banal story can be made bearable with the right narration. Max's eloquent voice-overs lended a particular charm to the stories of Max Payne 1 and 2, can it maybe lift 3's story up too? Nope, it appears Max's grasp of the language has gotten a little rusty, curt and unrefined in the space of the nine year gap in sequels. That's understandable from a design point of view, there aren't any more static, graphic-novel slides where Max can soliloquise for however long at his discretion, the dialogue has to be snappy and short to keep in time with the cutscenes and the action. However, it certainly doesn't excuse the shoddy work they've come up with to fill the gaps in Max Payne 3, among which include such howlers as “this place was like Baghdad with g-strings”. Max himself is much less an endearing character in this game: his current metamorphosis is probably the worst one yet, a bald, bushy-bearded bungler on the pudgy side (although to be fair, Max is still decently handsome in the earlier periods of the game when he's sporting dapper suits and not hideous tourist shirts and filthy wifebeaters). It's generally hard to feel much sympathy for the guy this time around, as he fucks shit up constantly, he's got addiction problems, and the grief he got his addiction issues over in the first place never gets much attention, so what you've effectively got as a protagonist this time around is a kind of cranky bum who happens to be an insanely good gunfighter. My excuse is that I've gotten to know the character over two games already, but if I were someone just coming into the series, my impression would be that I'd have the guy forgotten about wholesale not long after the credits. And that's a far cry from the spirit and impact of the game's predecessors. To be fair, Rockstar have tried their hand at sober storytelling for some time now (perhaps to the detriment of other areas in their game design), enough to be fairly competent at it, and it would be misleading of me to say that what they offer us here is a bad story, or one that you can't take seriously. In comparison to the work of Remedy on the series that claim might indeed hold, but otherwise one can say that the game's story is generally acceptable for what it is. It never gets the chance to become stale or boring, never lets up on the action long enough to give you sufficient time to reflect mid-game on it, because, as I said earlier, Rockstar's approach to cutscenes and game loading in Max Payne 3 makes level transitioning and plot progression pretty seamless.

That's where we come to the end of the line. Max Payne 3 has a superb set of shooting mechanics and an absolutely awesome physics engine with which to use them. The shootdodge mechanic is bigger, better and more stylish than ever, a cover system has been added, there are more guns that look and sound better, enemy deaths are entirely more gratuitous. All of these additions and refinements result in a game of firefights that will have you on the edge of your seat no differently than your favorite action movies would. On the flip side of that, some important parts of design are lacking in attention, in everything from the ugly levels, the uninteresting plot and underdeveloped characters, to the intrusive cutscenes and irritating graphical effects that constantly threaten to disrupt your engagement. If this was a slower and less mechanically polished action game we'd have some significant problems on our hands (hence, again, why I encourage you to play this game hard and fast). Similarly, if Max Payne 3 wasn't the third entry in an already illustrious series of games my criticisms would be less severe, for what that's worth. Fortunately, it's fast-paced and thrillingly violent enough to stop you from dwelling on any of its major issues too much. It may be somewhat of a trial for big fans of the series to forgive Rockstar's handling of Max's story, but I suspect that the moment those fans, or any action fans in general, get their hands on a gun in the game(make it two for good measure) and start shooting, the adrenaline will pump just as hard as it did (if not harder) in Max Payne 1 or 2, and any good action game.

****
Last edited by Carceri on 05 Oct 2012 01:53, edited 6 times in total.
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Carceri
 
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Unread postby icycalm » 29 Sep 2012 02:38

Carceri wrote:It's a little longer than I'd like, and I'm still wavering between 3 stars and 4 stars.


Never sacrifice thorougness for brevity. This is a mistake I often made early on. Some games simply warrant lengthier examination and analysis, and no one who loves videogames sufficiently will balk at reading a few extra paragraphs or even pages if he deems worthwhile the analysis you are offering. Just wait until you see my reviews of GTA3 and Civilization!

As for the rating issue, do the following exercise which I recommend to people who haven't got used to rating yet, or who are wavering on a specific title. List five games you deem worthy of five stars. Then five you deem worthy of four, then of three, etc. stars all the way down to one star. Then take a look at your list and, by comparing the pleasure you've got from the other games in each group, see which group corresponds more closely to the pleasure Max Payne 3 has given you. That's the only thing that matters in a rating: the overall amount of pleasure.

Do this exercise in this thread so that everyone can see it and get a better feeling for what three or four stars mean to you, and I will post more comments on your review later on.
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icycalm
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Unread postby Carceri » 29 Sep 2012 14:24

Okay, here I go:

*****
Gears of War
Deus Ex
Metal Gear Solid 3
Max Payne 2
Half-Life

****
Far Cry 2
Dark Souls
Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines
The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth

***
Alpha Protocol
Skyrim
Mass Effect
Crysis 2
Grand Theft Auto IV

**
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4
Fable
FTL: Faster Than Light
Minecraft
Receiver

*
Passage
Canabalt
Flow
Nidhogg
Stallions in America

I'd peg Max Payne 3 at about four stars, among games which I find outstanding and highly recommended on either the mechanic or aesthetic side (or both), but where I think there's still room for significant improvement in some important respect.
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Unread postby icycalm » 29 Sep 2012 21:16

The problem is that your review still reads like a 3-star review. For 4 stars I would expect at least half of your wordcount to be positive, and even gushing in places, yet the most you can offer to hype the game is the odd mildly positive sentence here or there. You are not making anyone excited at all, and that is the point of a 4- or 5-star review.

If you still feel that 4 stars is what you now want to give it, there is one way of mitigating the situation: delete, or at least modify the SOF/UT comments in the last paragraph (which basically make out the game to be forgettable), and include at least half a paragraph of BUT comments. I.e. "but the shootdodge mechanic is still awesome and unique among third-person shooters, hence if you've played MP1 and 2 and still want more -- as you should! -- you have no choice but to play this game". Stuff of this nature, you get me? The kind of stuff we'll have to add at the end of the Blazblue review to sell it for a 4-star game.

But I understand your dilemma. You would really want to give the game 3.5 stars, but my scale won't accommodate that. I sometimes run into this issue too -- and Josh and zinger have also had this problem. But if I included half stars in order to solve this problem that pops up only about once every 20 or 30 reviews, I would be creating an order of magnitude more problems by making you question all your OTHER scores, the ones you are sure of, with the possibility of modifying them up or down by half a star, in order to be more "accurate". So trust me that this dilemma you now have, though unpleasant, is the best solution to a tough problem, and try to figure out if Max Payne 3 is closer to Far Cry 2 in quality, or to Crysis 2 -- and if necessary modify your review accordingly.

I also have a couple of other issues with your analysis, but I'll bring them up after you're done with the rating issue.

And if you feel like posting any more reviews in this forum, go right ahead. Your sensibility to aesthetic and mechanical issues, and the way they interact and contribute to forming your overall opinion of a game, seems to be very close to mine, so I'd particularly like to see reviews of Fable, Crysis 2 and Max Payne 2 from the stuff that you listed (Max Payne 1 I am keeping for myself :) -- but anything you feel like writing will be received with gratitude and interest here.
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Unread postby Carceri » 30 Sep 2012 01:29

Thanks for the feedback. You hit the nail on the head over wanting to give the game 3.5 stars, but I can imagine the headaches that sort of system would cause for everyone.

I've edited my review such that my language is less negative in many places and the main criticisms I have are more peripheral in two ways: Firstly, I've tried to emphasise that you won't be inclined to notice the poor narrative elements and level design because the game moves at a fast pace, and you'll be too captivated with the shooting and action in general.

Secondly, I've tried to discriminate a little harder between the failings of the game as an action game and as a continuation of the Max Payne story. Besides that, I've tried to present the conclusions that I've come to from failings of the latter as more specific to the story rather than a condemnation of the whole. If I were to give you the revisions in a nutshell, it would be "yeah, the level design and the plot is disappointing, but you won't really notice it because the action's so good".

Besides that, I've tidied up the grammar and I've added a couple of small points that I initially forgot to mention. I've spent a small amount of time talking about the guns and how they sound, I've tried to sell the engine a little harder, and I've covered some mechanics I previously left out (zooming with weapons, bullet-cam, attachments). Lastly, I should mention that I haven't gotten around the multiplayer aspect of the game, and I don't intend to. I initially heard good reports about it but much of the praise has since petered out.
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Unread postby icycalm » 07 Oct 2012 01:11

Which version of the game did you play?
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Unread postby Carceri » 07 Oct 2012 02:53

PC
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Unread postby icycalm » 07 Oct 2012 03:41

And the PC version has checkpoints?
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Unread postby icycalm » 07 Oct 2012 04:11

I googled it and yes it does:

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/s ... ?t=2658477

And apparently no quicksave. And you did not deem this omg unprecedented design decision worthy of comment. See that's why I say everyone ends up getting exactly what they deserve. Just as your own appreciation of games (and by "your" I mean every gamer's whose handle is not icycalm) is scattershot and crude, so too is the appreciation of the people who have been tasked with reviewing games for you. Moreover, so too is what you take away from my reviews. All the finer points of the analysis are lost to you guys. Sure, some of you manage to grasp a little more than others (and you, Carceri, are certainly among the former group), but all of you when all is said and done are so far below me it seriously makes me wonder why I bother writing up reviews at all. Sometimes it really astonishes me that you guys manage to even play the games at all.

Anyway, I don't want to be too hard on you. You did analyze far more than the average person, after all, and who knows, perhaps this is your first review. But seriously dude. This is probably the most noteworthy aspect of the entire game. And you DID play Far Cry 2 -- which is notable also because the console versions are far more fun than the PC game precisely because of the checkpoints. But anyway.
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