This review contains spoilers
I don't know how you manage to make a gameplay loop such as the bullet time in Max Payne so fucking frustrating. Even the original two games weren't this hard, as for some reason they have completely neglected one of the coolest gameplay features in favour of making another GTA game where there is also bullet time, I guess. Bro, it's Max Payne; I want to fly around every corridor and headshot fools, I don't want to fucking sit in cover because I'm getting shot by twenty enemies at once in the middle of a fucking maze like pier where I'm constantly flying into the water and being banged by an enemy that isn't even there because for some reason they designed this game in a way where using the main gameplay feature is a hindrance. Unless of course you randomly don't die and just climb up a ladder like nothing happened. Or a shootout in the Brazilian favela, where your enemies are vertically opposing you and your only real choice is to hide in cover and peek out every now and then. Or how about being pinned down by a sniper and your literal only option being to sit in cover while your AI companion is supposed to cover you so you can move up. I say supposed to because he seldom actually does it. Meanwhile you're hit with the same exact checkpoint over and over again, while your companion says "iF I LaY dOWn CoVEr cAn YoU MovE uP On HiM?!". Yes, I could, IF YOU WOULD ACTUALLY LAY DOWN THE COVER. I'm sorry, but what business does this have being in a Max Payne game? Even if I did totally misrepresent that moment and messed it up because I didn't know the key to take cover, scratch that, why is there even a 'cover' button??
And speaking on this section of the game where you're in a flashback set before the main plot but after Max Payne 2, why wasn't this just the extended intro? There isn't much tension to be had when you know that yourself and Passos will survive and it would've been a neat way to reintroduce fans to the series, before uprooting the setting and story. I don't know, just an idea. To be fair, Max Payne 2 did start with the ending and then you would jump all about, but this just feels like it makes more sense to play in one stretch as opposed to cutting back to it for no narrative reason, aside from the section in Panama where it does work. Add in far too many pointless cutscenes that interrupt the flow of gameplay, and this is pretty much what a lot of people claim a series like Uncharted to be: nothing more than segmented and scripted moments of occasional gameplay, with boring and drawn out cutscenes. It feels so egregious here, it's like you shoot one room of enemies which takes 30 seconds and then there's a 15 second cutscene, like what is the point. At least Uncharted has full minutes long cutscenes that don't entirely break up the gameplay. It's so stop and start, the original games gave you far more freedom to play and then you'd get like a 2 minute stylish comic cutscene. I'm not exaggerating, it legitimately felt like one room, cutscene, one room, cutscene. The only reason I'm even in control of those moments where you walk into a door or slow walk towards your objective is because it's a game and I have to be in control, I guess. If the game is going to take away control so often, just do that and let me watch. And when you're sent right back to a checkpoint from 5 minutes ago, you have to replay unskippable cutscenes and unnecessarily long animations. Also that weird coloured filter haze shit is so random, I don't know why they thought that was a good choice as some way of conveying Max's constant hangovers and instability, it just looks tacky and ugly as all hell.
I know in my literal last review I said that I needed to meet Metro Exodus halfway in order to really understand why it was more open ended, but in this it's just actively making the game worse and less fun to play, so it's kind of hard for me to understand the choice to have me behind cover so often. The end fight appropriately cements this design choice, as you are forced into a glorified quick time event with a villain you literally meet once, so I had no idea who he was, firing rockets at you. It had potential to be fun, when you are able to time it right and fly around while shooting the rockets, but if you move too close or too far to the side, you seem to just get insta-killed. I chose not to shoot the guy because I just didn't have enough of a reason to actually do it, it's such a cliche and typical video gamey non-choice that literally only exists to give the player some agency, like just do it yourself man, have some conviction in your own damn story and stop trying to give me some transparent feeling of control. And also because the monologue max gives seems to imply that he shouldn't shoot him, so I just didn't. They even try and throw in some muddled 'White American Hero Saviour' angle at the end and it's just a bit jarring to me. Then the Victor Branco brother guy gets 'Epsteined' in prison after such an obvious reveal of him being the bad guy that I was sure they'd subvert it, and all they really do is throw in a random and completely unrelated twist where your pal Passos is actually evil but he isn't actually, then Max walks off into the sunset and that's pretty much your lot. The general trajectory of Max's character makes enough sense since you do spend the first two games downing pills constantly, so I don't really have an issue with that, but I do think Max's role in the story is far too passive and superficial, you could be playing as anyone else. They do try to make it more of a personal affair in the second half, but I just didn't really care for how it happens.
The original games had a lot of bombast, but they also had boat loads of charm, even the flaws became endearing in a way or were at least easy to ignore because of how authentically written and made the game was; just a little side note, but part of my preference for Max Payne 1 over 2 was the face model of Max himself, I loved that it was the writer's face pulling all these goofy expressions, where in Max Payne 2 he looks a little more like generic Jack Action-Man. That's actually a wider issue I have with games and the constant need to have the protagonist looking like a model, especially when they are written to be disheveled and broken like Max in this game. Despite his professions of grey hair (which he literally doesn't have, and then he's bald for the second half of the game anyway) and inability, he still looks incredibly good for a man of his presumed age and health, what with being a hardcore addict. Video games in particular have a real issue with men not being allowed to have bad hairlines. Yeah, I know your family died and you're a drunk and you're an addict, but bro your hairline is clean though. I'm not just saying this because my hairline is almost certainly going to recede in the next five years or so, but it's a real life thing and I genuinely can't think of any main male protagonists that have receded hairlines, even when they are at an age where they would presumably have some recession. I know some never do, the lucky bastards, but take someone like Joel from The Last of Us. Man has a twenty year old's hairline and he's at least late 30s in the first game alone, like come the fuck on guys, why do they do this? Like imagine if after the 20 year jump, his hairline was just utterly clapped and he looked as old as he felt. Instead, he looks barely any older and even his younger brother Tommy has more recession than him, maybe because he isn't the protagonist? Though I have noticed in life that the younger brother generally does have the worse hairline, which is also definitely true for myself and my own older brother! I guess us young'uns get all the bad genes. Anyway, am I the only one who has noticed this? I want my hairline representation, damn it! And the only characters that ever seem to have wacky hairlines are the villains. Sure, some characters like Sam Drake from Uncharted 4 or Dutch van der Linde from Red Dead Redemption 2 have some semblance of recession, more so Sam, but you never see any truly horrifically receded hairlines. Anyway, just a thought I've had for a while. Tangent over.
The two prior games were also very silly and self-aware, but this in comparison just feels cynical and fake, trying to seem like more than it is. One example is how in a part of the game you end up in the Brazilian favela, and then a strip club. The original Max Payne games are quite horny, especially 2, but in a mostly nodding way. Here, there are just several random cuts to women mostly naked and I think that kind of says it all. There's also, as you leave the club, a really random and bizarre cutscene you can activate with some creepy guy who is there having sex with prostitutes who are implied to be underage and I was just baffed at why that was even in there. Does the game think it's funny, that classic and biting Rockstar satire that definitely isn't really trihard? Is the game making a point on how messed up it is that that happened at all? Am I supposed to feel bad, even though I just massacred another room full of coloured people but let the white American pedophile go free? I wanted to write out 'Max Payne 3: Ethnic Cleansing' as an edgy joke, but maybe it would've sufficed. (Been watching a lot of Sidemen Cards Against Humanity lately, my god you'd get cancelled so quick now for the cards they used to get). You spend a good chunk of the game killing poor minorities while protecting a rich family and I can't tell if I'm supposed to feel justified in my killing. That kind of tonal and political clash really doesn't make sense in a game where I just want to go full matrix and fly through the air while mindlessly killing people, but instead I'm now questioning if I'm supposed to have fun at all, which is something I would otherwise praise if it felt like it meant anything at all. As mentioned, they do make mention of Max being this badass, white American hero, but they don't do anything with it and the mention of it is just strange. I can give credit for attempting a more serious and brutal story, but I just don't see the point of it in the end. Am I just reading into it too much, as a white man who has no knowledge of what he's talking about? Probably, okay, time to go back to the hairline thing.
Not to say it's all bad, though I've taken a long time to get here, and that arguably makes it more annoying because this very obviously is not a shit game, it just happens to be riddled with issues. When you are actually able to do bullet time and are in mostly buildings or open spaces where you can fly around, it is still fun because of course it is. In fact, there was one specific moment I had that was genuinely one of the coolest things I've ever done in a game and all it was was me in a last chance, close to death state where you have to get a kill to survive, but because of my being shot I was turned the wrong way. So I just start shooting and Max does a full 360 rotation and at the last possible moment I shoot the guy in the head and get the kill. I'm straight up spinning around with bullets flying around me, and then right as I land the shot Max does a fucking backwards kick flip and I land on the ground, it was fucking insane. I also had one moment where I fired a rocket launcher, then switched to my pistol and headshotted two guys all in one motion. The fact I can detail that so clearly is a testament to how memorable and fun it is. There's even some decent challenges that breaks things up a bit, even if it's a bit strange that you have to shoot people in the arm as one of them. I also do kind of like the added realism of jumping into something and it ruining your bullet time, the way you ragdoll, that was a neat addition. So when it works, it's just more Max Payne which I enjoy greatly. But when it doesn't work, it feels like a GTA game with a Max Payne skin which makes sense because Remedy didn't make this one and it's pretty apparent.
I maintain that Rockstar's best game is Bully, not really related at all but Bully always deserves a mention. Shoutout Bully. Also, fuck this Rockstar social club bullshit. Literally couldn't play a singleplayer game because of it, like how fucking inept can they be. Though to be fair, I was never so invested that the game forcing me to stop felt like a major issue.
Overall, despite my seemingly overwhelming negativity, I did enjoy this game more than I didn't, which feels weird to say given how negative I have been, but I suppose it reminds you that there is a lot more nuance to these things than "this is good", or, "this is bad". I guess? After all, it's hard to completely ruin or neuter gameplay as dynamic yet simple as this. Either way, I haven't played a game in a while that has left me this in thought and writing this all out makes me inherently feel very passionate about the game, so that's definitely worth mentioning. Something to fill the void, I suppose. I tabbed out several times to take notes, which has all kind of amassed into this mess. The gameplay is still fun as it is and it is technically a very well made game, even if without the bullet time mechanic it would be another forgettable third-person shooter. It just gave me a lot to think about and a lot of my conclusions weren't massively positive, but it is certainly a more complicated and controversial game than the first two, whatever that is worth. This review is also the closest you will ever get to me saying "this is a good game, but a bad insert game title game", which on the surface I understand but also find to be really stupid. ANYWAY. Finally glad I finished this game, I started it literally six years ago and never played the other two, but I'm finally done now. Thanks for reading the extensive and fucking so overlong garbage, I feel silly putting this out there but I suppose no one's going to read it all anyway. Loophole.
And speaking on this section of the game where you're in a flashback set before the main plot but after Max Payne 2, why wasn't this just the extended intro? There isn't much tension to be had when you know that yourself and Passos will survive and it would've been a neat way to reintroduce fans to the series, before uprooting the setting and story. I don't know, just an idea. To be fair, Max Payne 2 did start with the ending and then you would jump all about, but this just feels like it makes more sense to play in one stretch as opposed to cutting back to it for no narrative reason, aside from the section in Panama where it does work. Add in far too many pointless cutscenes that interrupt the flow of gameplay, and this is pretty much what a lot of people claim a series like Uncharted to be: nothing more than segmented and scripted moments of occasional gameplay, with boring and drawn out cutscenes. It feels so egregious here, it's like you shoot one room of enemies which takes 30 seconds and then there's a 15 second cutscene, like what is the point. At least Uncharted has full minutes long cutscenes that don't entirely break up the gameplay. It's so stop and start, the original games gave you far more freedom to play and then you'd get like a 2 minute stylish comic cutscene. I'm not exaggerating, it legitimately felt like one room, cutscene, one room, cutscene. The only reason I'm even in control of those moments where you walk into a door or slow walk towards your objective is because it's a game and I have to be in control, I guess. If the game is going to take away control so often, just do that and let me watch. And when you're sent right back to a checkpoint from 5 minutes ago, you have to replay unskippable cutscenes and unnecessarily long animations. Also that weird coloured filter haze shit is so random, I don't know why they thought that was a good choice as some way of conveying Max's constant hangovers and instability, it just looks tacky and ugly as all hell.
I know in my literal last review I said that I needed to meet Metro Exodus halfway in order to really understand why it was more open ended, but in this it's just actively making the game worse and less fun to play, so it's kind of hard for me to understand the choice to have me behind cover so often. The end fight appropriately cements this design choice, as you are forced into a glorified quick time event with a villain you literally meet once, so I had no idea who he was, firing rockets at you. It had potential to be fun, when you are able to time it right and fly around while shooting the rockets, but if you move too close or too far to the side, you seem to just get insta-killed. I chose not to shoot the guy because I just didn't have enough of a reason to actually do it, it's such a cliche and typical video gamey non-choice that literally only exists to give the player some agency, like just do it yourself man, have some conviction in your own damn story and stop trying to give me some transparent feeling of control. And also because the monologue max gives seems to imply that he shouldn't shoot him, so I just didn't. They even try and throw in some muddled 'White American Hero Saviour' angle at the end and it's just a bit jarring to me. Then the Victor Branco brother guy gets 'Epsteined' in prison after such an obvious reveal of him being the bad guy that I was sure they'd subvert it, and all they really do is throw in a random and completely unrelated twist where your pal Passos is actually evil but he isn't actually, then Max walks off into the sunset and that's pretty much your lot. The general trajectory of Max's character makes enough sense since you do spend the first two games downing pills constantly, so I don't really have an issue with that, but I do think Max's role in the story is far too passive and superficial, you could be playing as anyone else. They do try to make it more of a personal affair in the second half, but I just didn't really care for how it happens.
The original games had a lot of bombast, but they also had boat loads of charm, even the flaws became endearing in a way or were at least easy to ignore because of how authentically written and made the game was; just a little side note, but part of my preference for Max Payne 1 over 2 was the face model of Max himself, I loved that it was the writer's face pulling all these goofy expressions, where in Max Payne 2 he looks a little more like generic Jack Action-Man. That's actually a wider issue I have with games and the constant need to have the protagonist looking like a model, especially when they are written to be disheveled and broken like Max in this game. Despite his professions of grey hair (which he literally doesn't have, and then he's bald for the second half of the game anyway) and inability, he still looks incredibly good for a man of his presumed age and health, what with being a hardcore addict. Video games in particular have a real issue with men not being allowed to have bad hairlines. Yeah, I know your family died and you're a drunk and you're an addict, but bro your hairline is clean though. I'm not just saying this because my hairline is almost certainly going to recede in the next five years or so, but it's a real life thing and I genuinely can't think of any main male protagonists that have receded hairlines, even when they are at an age where they would presumably have some recession. I know some never do, the lucky bastards, but take someone like Joel from The Last of Us. Man has a twenty year old's hairline and he's at least late 30s in the first game alone, like come the fuck on guys, why do they do this? Like imagine if after the 20 year jump, his hairline was just utterly clapped and he looked as old as he felt. Instead, he looks barely any older and even his younger brother Tommy has more recession than him, maybe because he isn't the protagonist? Though I have noticed in life that the younger brother generally does have the worse hairline, which is also definitely true for myself and my own older brother! I guess us young'uns get all the bad genes. Anyway, am I the only one who has noticed this? I want my hairline representation, damn it! And the only characters that ever seem to have wacky hairlines are the villains. Sure, some characters like Sam Drake from Uncharted 4 or Dutch van der Linde from Red Dead Redemption 2 have some semblance of recession, more so Sam, but you never see any truly horrifically receded hairlines. Anyway, just a thought I've had for a while. Tangent over.
The two prior games were also very silly and self-aware, but this in comparison just feels cynical and fake, trying to seem like more than it is. One example is how in a part of the game you end up in the Brazilian favela, and then a strip club. The original Max Payne games are quite horny, especially 2, but in a mostly nodding way. Here, there are just several random cuts to women mostly naked and I think that kind of says it all. There's also, as you leave the club, a really random and bizarre cutscene you can activate with some creepy guy who is there having sex with prostitutes who are implied to be underage and I was just baffed at why that was even in there. Does the game think it's funny, that classic and biting Rockstar satire that definitely isn't really trihard? Is the game making a point on how messed up it is that that happened at all? Am I supposed to feel bad, even though I just massacred another room full of coloured people but let the white American pedophile go free? I wanted to write out 'Max Payne 3: Ethnic Cleansing' as an edgy joke, but maybe it would've sufficed. (Been watching a lot of Sidemen Cards Against Humanity lately, my god you'd get cancelled so quick now for the cards they used to get). You spend a good chunk of the game killing poor minorities while protecting a rich family and I can't tell if I'm supposed to feel justified in my killing. That kind of tonal and political clash really doesn't make sense in a game where I just want to go full matrix and fly through the air while mindlessly killing people, but instead I'm now questioning if I'm supposed to have fun at all, which is something I would otherwise praise if it felt like it meant anything at all. As mentioned, they do make mention of Max being this badass, white American hero, but they don't do anything with it and the mention of it is just strange. I can give credit for attempting a more serious and brutal story, but I just don't see the point of it in the end. Am I just reading into it too much, as a white man who has no knowledge of what he's talking about? Probably, okay, time to go back to the hairline thing.
Not to say it's all bad, though I've taken a long time to get here, and that arguably makes it more annoying because this very obviously is not a shit game, it just happens to be riddled with issues. When you are actually able to do bullet time and are in mostly buildings or open spaces where you can fly around, it is still fun because of course it is. In fact, there was one specific moment I had that was genuinely one of the coolest things I've ever done in a game and all it was was me in a last chance, close to death state where you have to get a kill to survive, but because of my being shot I was turned the wrong way. So I just start shooting and Max does a full 360 rotation and at the last possible moment I shoot the guy in the head and get the kill. I'm straight up spinning around with bullets flying around me, and then right as I land the shot Max does a fucking backwards kick flip and I land on the ground, it was fucking insane. I also had one moment where I fired a rocket launcher, then switched to my pistol and headshotted two guys all in one motion. The fact I can detail that so clearly is a testament to how memorable and fun it is. There's even some decent challenges that breaks things up a bit, even if it's a bit strange that you have to shoot people in the arm as one of them. I also do kind of like the added realism of jumping into something and it ruining your bullet time, the way you ragdoll, that was a neat addition. So when it works, it's just more Max Payne which I enjoy greatly. But when it doesn't work, it feels like a GTA game with a Max Payne skin which makes sense because Remedy didn't make this one and it's pretty apparent.
I maintain that Rockstar's best game is Bully, not really related at all but Bully always deserves a mention. Shoutout Bully. Also, fuck this Rockstar social club bullshit. Literally couldn't play a singleplayer game because of it, like how fucking inept can they be. Though to be fair, I was never so invested that the game forcing me to stop felt like a major issue.
Overall, despite my seemingly overwhelming negativity, I did enjoy this game more than I didn't, which feels weird to say given how negative I have been, but I suppose it reminds you that there is a lot more nuance to these things than "this is good", or, "this is bad". I guess? After all, it's hard to completely ruin or neuter gameplay as dynamic yet simple as this. Either way, I haven't played a game in a while that has left me this in thought and writing this all out makes me inherently feel very passionate about the game, so that's definitely worth mentioning. Something to fill the void, I suppose. I tabbed out several times to take notes, which has all kind of amassed into this mess. The gameplay is still fun as it is and it is technically a very well made game, even if without the bullet time mechanic it would be another forgettable third-person shooter. It just gave me a lot to think about and a lot of my conclusions weren't massively positive, but it is certainly a more complicated and controversial game than the first two, whatever that is worth. This review is also the closest you will ever get to me saying "this is a good game, but a bad insert game title game", which on the surface I understand but also find to be really stupid. ANYWAY. Finally glad I finished this game, I started it literally six years ago and never played the other two, but I'm finally done now. Thanks for reading the extensive and fucking so overlong garbage, I feel silly putting this out there but I suppose no one's going to read it all anyway. Loophole.