Review: Max Payne 3

Max Payne 3 is a third-person shooter for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC. It was developed by Rockstar Vancouver.

Max Payne taking cover behind a column.

Ex-cop and permanent pill-popping alcoholic Max Payne has taken a job body guarding the prominent and influential Branco family in Sao Paulo. Things look bad for Max when Fabiano, wife of the Branco family patriarch Rodrigo, is kidnapped by a street gang for ransom. Max goes to rescue Fabiana, but gets sucked into a conspiracy involving the entire Branco family and its enemies.

Max Payne 3 is a fourteen level long game that goes through several lovely and not so lovely Sao Paulo areas, with occasional trips to the past to explain how Max got from New Jersey to Sao Paulo. Levels are nonstop gunfights, broken up by cutscenes and Max’s internal monologue.

Max can hold two handguns and one larger gun. Max can hold onto all three guns, and dual wield the two smaller guns, but drops his larger gun when he does. I suppose it is more realistic that he can only hold onto so many weapons, but geeze Max, buy a back holster.

Max’s biggest advantage over the legions of gang members and other thugs he runs into is his ability to enter bullet time, speeding up his reaction time so he can fire and move faster than his enemies, picking them off while they practically stand still. The amount of bullet time you have, represented by a meter, is limited, so you have to use is sparingly. The bar is refilled by killing enemies, but not by much.

You can activate bullet time regularly or briefly while shootdodging.

Max can take cover behind things, which is activated with a button press. From behind cover you either aim around or blindside fire. The game will sometimes not know what you want to take cover behind though, and leave Max exposed. Max is also sometimes picky about what he can take cover behind.

Max’s health is replenished by consuming painkillers found in level. Levels usually have just enough painkillers lying around to get you through, so you have to be careful.

Combat is challenging, but not unreasonably so, which is why it is the most entertaining part of the game. Enemies know to duck behind cover, flank Max, and close the distance between them and Max. Their aim is really good too. A few will run out in the open, but most know to fire from behind cover. More important is how weak Max is. Enemies can be taken down by a few gunshots, but Max is not much better. You have to be very economical with your bullet time and painkillers.

I never felt that the game was unfair. Whenever I died it was because of my own stupidity and bull-headedness. Eventually I started being more careful about running into every room and was more accurate with my gun when I entered bullet time. I still screwed up and died a lot, but I did improve.

The only time the game felt unfair was when I would run out of ammo in the middle of a fight. There were a couple of times when I would have no ammo and painkillers, and all I could do was die.

An interesting little detail: Max shaves his head halfway through the game, and it grows back over the second half.

I did not care about most of the story. I did not care about anyone in the Branco family and its multitude of problems, and a lot of the time Max did not seem to care either, which made it difficult to get invested in the family as they got into bigger and bigger trouble. Max cared about Fabiana, but that is because he has “need to save people” problem. Max’s personal problems are more interesting, but those are only discussed in a couple of levels.

It was frustrating how many times Max would go through an entire level, killing everyone, only to screw up at the very end for whatever contrived reason and let the bad guys get away. It was a really cheap way to prolong the story. There is a plot twist two-thirds of a way through that was a little too preposterous. The narrative also got preachy at times, going on and on about how the rich constantly abuse the poor of Sao Paulo and how middle class America just sits by and watches.

I also found the levels to be boring. They looked nice and most of the time did not appear to be the same reused level design, but they were just boring places, like an office, or a bus terminal, or the Sao Paulo slums. The really interesting levels were in the New Jersey slums, which are so much cooler looking than Sao Paulo slums.

There is an online multiplayer mode, stuff like deathmatch and team deathmatch. There were other modes, but I had to complete a series of “Rookie” objectives first to unlock them. If you do well in multiplayer you earn experience points and money, which you use to buy stronger weapons and bonuses for your character. I wanted to play rookie deathmatch, but no one was on, so I had to play regular deathmatch, where guys who had already unlocked everything hunted me down with rocket launchers. If I had put in enough time I could have slowly gained my experience points until I had unlocked everything too, but I did not have the patience.

There is also an arcade mode, where you can play through old levels on a time attack or score attack mode. It was a fun diversion, and a more exciting way to play the game again than just doing the single-player mode again.

Max Payne 3 is a decent game with fun gameplay, but it lacks in other aspects that might make the game boring if you start to find the gunfights a little repetitive. You will have fun playing it, but the game could have been so much more memorable.