Game review: Max Payne 3 for Xbox 360

I picked up Max Payne 3 the day after it released, but I only played the first few levels before I lost interest and wandered off to do something else. I think my lack of focus was inspired partly by Max’s narration, and partly by the mind numbing focus on killing and doing nothing else. But I decided that since I paid full price for the game, I might as well make an attempt to play it through at least once. For most of the game, I had to push myself to finish. It’s not a bad game, nor even a hard game. But it is monotonous, and that boring pattern isn’t help by the too chatty star.

Rockstar really needs to hire a writer. I know, I say this with every game I’ve ever reviewed for them, but really, they’ve only got one schtick, and they’ve been beating that cynical pony from the day they opened their doors. The hero is always an amoral asshole who hates everyone and everything. Max Payne is more of the same, but he’s especially annoying because he narrates the games like “I hate this place, these people, my job, my life, this drink, myself, and that guy over there…oh wait, that’s a mirror.” I probably might have liked this game more if Max would ever shut up and stop whining about everything is stupid. And really, he’s a hypocrite, because Max Payne is the dumbest person in the whole game. You think I’m kidding, but most of the plot revolves around Max being a moron.

I lost track of the number of times Max did something in a cut-scene that put me in the middle of a gunfight, and these decisions always lead to someone else getting killed or kidnapped. By the halfway point, Max has done a pathetic job as a security guard, seeing as how his boss and half the boss’s immediate family have died horribly. Despite having a history of making lousy choices, Max just keeps on piling on his mistakes. At one point near the end, while killing something like 500 cops in a police station, Max laments that this plan hadn’t been thought out clearly, but that it was too late now to change it. But it’s not that the plan wasn’t thought out clearly. Saying this would imply that the stupid motherfucker ever rubbed two brain cells together before he ran off to kill more people. Even when we learn who’s really planning these killings, Max needs a local cop to explain everything to him, because he’s too fucking stupid to spot the blatantly obvious.

So yeah, I hate the story in Max Payne 3. No shock, since Rockstar has yet to write a story that I didn’t hate. “But Zoe,” you say, “if you hate them so much, why do you keep buying their games?” It’s a fair question, and what happens is two weeks before they release a new game, all the game sites start pumping out trailers talking about the technical aspects of the game. I look at the bright, shiny, pretty pixels, and my inner critic is drowned out by my inner gamer nerd yelling, “So pretty! Must have!”

This is something consistent with all Rockstar games. They make really detailed worlds that feel authentic. Whether I’m in an office, a yacht, or a Brazilian back alley, Max Payne’s game world is gorgeously crafted. As usual, I would frequently stop just to do a slow pan around to admire all the details. Hubby gets tired of me telling him to turn and look, but I can’t help it because Rockstar makes pretty games, possibly the prettiest and most detailed games in the world.

There’s no map this time, at least as far as I could see in the menus, but given the extremely linear design, there’s no need for a map. There were only a few times when I got lost trying to sort out where to go next, and in one case, the problem was I’d failed to notice that a set of compressed canisters were blocking a door. I walked the level four times, and then looked at the blocked door and thought, They’ve never set up anything this obvious before, but would they really change strategies this late in the game? Yes, they really did, and it is the only time in the whole game when you open a door by blowing up the obstacles in front of it.

The combat system is…it’s interesting. The usual weapon wheel is back, but this time, you can only carry two side-arms and one rifle. You can dual wield the two side arms, but only if you put down the rifle. It’s limiting, but I kind of liked it. I also liked how each weapon had different reloading animations and times. My revolver carried a much bigger kick than the semi-auto handgun, but Max has to load each chamber one at a time, so it’s a bit scary to do when you’ve got an army rushing up on you. But it felt right, and I think it’s one of the things that made the fights interesting even when they were repetitive and mind numbing.

That’s the real problem with the game play, in that there’s no much else to do except kill stuff and watch Max stumble through cut-scenes until he finds some new army to murder. Although there are clues to pick up in levels, and some golden gun collectibles, the vast majority of the game is all about murdering wave after wave of people. There’s several armies worth of people to kill, and I got achievements for killing 1,000 people and firing 10,000 rounds of ammunition somewhere around the middle of the game. Near the end, I started commenting, “Eh, Stallone and Schwarzenegger are at this point going ‘Okay Max, maybe this is a little overkill now.’” It’s monotonous and dull, and none of this is helped by Max’s constant whining. I didn’t like any protagonist from the other Rockstar games I played, but I have now developed a new appreciation for the fact that they didn’t narrate their every action. Sure, they were still lecturing others about their bad habits, but at least they’d shut up and let me enjoy the scenery sometimes. Here, if I stop a few seconds, Max will complain “I didn’t have time to stop an admire the view.” No, fuck you, Max. If I’m going to be stuck with your whiny ass for forty-eight hours, I’m going to need to stop and admire the view to make up for your constant bitching.

This game uses motion capture for the character’s facial expressions, but the weird thing is, in a lot of the scenes, the faces look more like some kind of claymation than a 3D model. They emote better than any character from a Bethesda game, and the voice acting isn’t bad. Still at times the cut-scenes were distracting because instead of focusing on what was being said, I was staring at the faces and making a list of everything that was wrong about them.

The controls are pretty smooth, and even in the most chaotic battles, I had no trouble keeping track of what to press. Oddly enough, even though I had the option to slow down the game and do that John Woo style “shootdodge”, I rarely used it. I’m sure it might have helped in the more intense battles, but even knowing it was there, I tended to ignore the ability. I guess maybe it just made things feel too easy.

So I close out this game feeling the way I do with most of Rockstar’s titles. They are hands down the best company at making detailed, authentic game worlds, and they do a great job with music, the sound effects, and the overall presentation. They make controls that are easy to understand so there’s rarely any times where I might die because I pressed the wrong button. But where every game falls apart for me is in the story, and this story may be the most nonsensical entry from Rockstar thus far. Max is unbearably stupid, and his actions should have resulted in him being tortured and executed. But he gets to walk off into the sunset, supposedly redeemed despite him murdering a few hundred cops.

So once I again, I feel like I want to issue two scores. On the technical aspects, Max Payne 3 earns a full five stars for being so fucking pretty and playable. But that story…holy shit, it’s awfully stupid, and I want to give it one star. So mixing these two extremes, I give the game three stars. And yes, I can predict that whenever Rockstar releases another game, I’ll buy it, and I’m sure I’ll once again lament their piss poor efforts at writing. I just hope that one day, I’m proven wrong, and they’ll have a plot put together as flawlessly as their meticulously detailed worlds.