With it being almost nine years since the last Max Payne, many gamers were wondering why Rockstar was picking up the franchise. After all, no one was clamoring for another sequel and Max had a solid enough conclusion that it didn’t have to be continued. On the other hand, Rockstar’s summer releases for the past two years have been critically acclaimed and they were backing this new game with all of their resources, so it could very well have been a new classic. So, does this game prove that we need a new Max Payne game? Short Answer: No. Does this game at least provide a satisfying shooter experience? Well, the long answer to that question and the previous one will be after the jump but for now, with the strongest shrug of my shoulders, all I can say is… “Meh.”

Before I get to explaining myself, let me tell you my experience with the Max Payne series: which is none. I’ve read about the character, watched a few cutscenes from the games, and read the Characters with Character on Max Payne but I haven’t played either of the games. I say this so you’ll know that I’m approaching this as a review of a third-person, over-the-shoulder shooter; any discussion about Max Payne 3’s relation to the rest of the series will only be based on the limited knowledge I have on the franchise.

This is probably a good thing for this game, since, even with my limited exposure to the previous Max Payne games, I can safely say this is not a Max Payne game. For one thing, the style has changed severly from the past games. The comic book style panels? Gone. Occasionally the screen will split to show more than one angle but these moments are brief and pointless. Surreal nightmare levels? Gone and replaced with a couple levels in Hoboken where Max’s family and Mona are mentioned for all of two seconds. Cheesy but memorable metaphors and allegories? Nope, though there are a few similes and simple metaphors that Max doles out while drinking tons of scotch and plenty of lens flares and filters clutter the screen so it can technically be called neo-noire.

Honestly though, I’d be okay with this game being different if it was at least distinctive but, unfortunately, it isn’t. The plot is “Max goes to Brazil, he gets set up and goes on a bloody rampage to get revenge on the people who betrayed him.” This is such a cookie cutter plot that I think I saw flour on the game disks. For one thing, the protagoniist becoming the fall guy and then having to get his revenge is already an overdone plot but the game doesn’t try to change things up or even develop Max any. In this game, most of the enemies you fight are lost souls like Max, whether they are former cops who failed too many times and saw too much or gangsters in a town where they can be executed for just being poor… and the game does nothing with this. There are even people in this game who make stupid mistakes to try and save their families and the most this gets out of Max is just a shrug. This also makes the supporting characters weaker as, any time one of them dares to try and develop, the game kills them off or sends them away, never to be seen again.

The lack of effort in the plot really becomes troublesome though when it fails to develop the villains or even create character development. The game’s main villain is only in three scenes and he only says one sentence in each of them. If it wasn’t for the fact that the game kept dropping his name every few seconds in the last act, I would have forgotten who he was… which actually did happen for one of the two bosses in the game. Max suddenly knows all about a pig-nosed character I didn’t remember seeing before and the game treats their confrontation (which involves shooting the ceiling down on him) like some climactic duel of ancient rivals. The final boss wasn’t much better, though at least he had some real dialogue, despite not receiving any character development outside of “Evil for the Lulz.” The villains are also too over the top to be taken seriously. There is a point in the game towards the end where you find out the villains are running a massive organ harvesting scheme in addition to weapons dealing… in the same building with the final boss chiding Max on how, “This is the way things are done here, stupid gringo.”

Speaking of, “stupid gringo” is probably the best way to describe Max in this game, as he starts the game stupid and ends it being just as stupid. What do I mean? Well, apparently police are never trained in clearing rooms, as old Maxie keeps getting ambushed during cutscenes after he charges in guns blazing. Now, I know what you’re thinking: lots of games have protagonists who barge into rooms and get caught off guard. To that I have two points: 1. I’m supposed to take Max seriously as a character yet he never learns from his mistake, even after it gets people killed and 2: Max points out how stupid he is being during all of the scenes this happens in. Max will happily monologue about how stupid charging into a hostage situation with a raised gun is, and then do it anyway. At first, I had hopes this would work into some character growth as Max points out how sloppy he is due to his drinking; my hopes were that, after a point where he sobers up and tries to look like Walter White from “Breaking Bad,” he would start to act smarter and more like someone who has past experience with this kind of situation. Instead, he actually gets dumber, going into Sau Paulo’s slums (not knowing a word of Portuguese) dressed in a Hawaiin shirt and not getting help from his partner, Passos first. Even at the end of the game, when Max finally puts two and two together, he decides to stop the main villain, who is trying to leave the country in a private jet… by walking through the front gate. If I hadn’t read anything about Max Payne, I would think that Max was right in his belief that he should go and die in a fire fight as he’s clearly too dumb to live.

Now, while I could go on and whine about the story more (like how an entire act of the game makes no sense, as the villain is trying to desperately kill a character who is absolutely no threat to him and only gets one of his employees to betray him as a result), it’s time to talk about something that at least is okay: the gameplay. Max Payne 3 is for the most part your average third-person, over-the-shoulder, cover-based shooter, a genre that’s become more common than dirt, but it does mix thing up by having Max Payne’s trademark bullet time and bullet dodge abilities. To be fair, the gameplay does cover-based shooting right by having most of the cover you find be easily flanked or even destructible. This keeps you from hiding behind the same box and forces you to make desperate runs through kill zones. The fact that there is no regenerating health (painkillers of course being the equivalent of a health pack) makes it also have a refreshing sense of difficulty in a genre that can sometimes fail to provide a challenge.

Unfortunately, there were several decisions that keep the gameplay from really growing on me. For example, the game has its checkpoints too distantly placed. Towards the end of the game, you will have to survive several firefights to reach a checkpoint, sometimes having to retread upwards of 15-20 minutes to just get shot in the head right as you reach the last enemy in an area. The game also glorifies the last kill in an area, going in for a bullet cam where you can watch an extremely brutal close-up of your bullets tearing the emey to shreds… but it’s actually a bad idea to keep pumping bullets into an enemy, despite the game’s encouragements, because you could be in a fire fight two seconds later and this game does not hand out ammo easily, making this little spectacle pointless.

Speaking of pointless, there is also the item collecting in the game, which involves finding golden gun parts and finding clues. Every level has two guns to find, each split up into three pieces. If you manage to find all the pieces, that type of gun will appear gold and you’ll be another step closer to getting an achievement. It ends up just being a sad reminder of the golden guns in Red Dead Redemption, which were actual signs of your skill as a player. You can also find “clues” which pretty much involves you pressing “Y” when you’re next to a suspicious object, making Max tell you stuff you already knew. Unfortunately, Rockstar forgot that if you want to have items to collect in a game, you need to let the player actually explore the level. Instead, you will be fighting the cut-scenes in the game and running around during fire fights, since this game loves to lock doors behind you, or make Max trigger a cut-scene if you are even twenty feet away from a door, making it impossible to spend time searching for items, though considering how little they impact gameplay, they aren’t really worth the effort.

Yet another thing that wasn’t worth implementing was the annoying or cliché variations on the gameplay. While I do have some complaints with the core gameplay: laser sights being worthless unless you have a 42″ television on your wall due to how tiny the beam appears on the screen, how the enemies take a ridiculous amount of damage to take down… unless you shoot them in the leg, arm, or shoulder, the fact that the game steals your weapons every ten minutes, or how it’s silly for enemies to die in one shot during the “last stand” minigame, even if you shoot them in the foot, it is overall solid. However, there are points where the game tries to shake things up and fails miserably. For example, there are two sniper escort missions in the game. Remember that scene in Resident Evil 4 where you had to snipe cultists who were trying to kidnap Ashely as she impotently ran around? Imagine that, but lasting ten times as long and ending in an instant game over if the enemy gets within 20 feet of the character you are escorting. Another annoying thing is the use of quick-time events, which only happen twice in the game and seem shoved in because the developer ran out of ideas. I actually don’t mind QTEs that much, but a a game needs to have them occur throughout the game so we learn to expect them. Having only two events in a 10-14 hour game just confuses players and makes another wise professional looking game seem tacky.

Then there are the moments where the game tacks in a new type of gameplay that feels so overdone that you can predict every twist that will happen. For example, there is a scene where you will be on a high speed boat chase and you can just start checking off the boxes as you play. Are there an unbelievable number of smaller boats coming out of the woodwork to ram into us? Check. Is there a section where we get stuck and have to protect the boat while the engine gets repaired? Check. Do we ramp off of something and fly through a metal shed? Check. The game doesn’t even try to put a spin on these segments to make them more interesting and it helps drag the gameplay down to mediocrity. This can also be seen in the areas you go to in the game. While you do go to many different places (like a night club, an office building, a burning office building, slums, an airport terminal, etc.) they all feel like they were just ripped out of better games.