fucking stunner from start to finish. today exists John Wick but 12 years ago Max Payne perfectly blends John Woo gun-fu with Tom Clancy esque military tactility to create the perfect third-person shooter. a noir game with the pompous thematic seriousness and grounded mechanics of a The Last of Us with a DOOM-like sensibility for cartoonish over-the-top mayhem; often an abandonment of reality in favour of action set-piece that live to be referred to as "badass". it is a game about a desperate, broken man, trying to find himself amidst the chaos his poor choices have led him to; it's also a game about human trafficking where you dive in slow motion to take on a shooting gallery Brazilian thugs and goons while HEALTH's "Tears" blares more than triumphantly through the speakers. it's a fucking art piece of action gamemaking; a drunken heavy spectacle of masculine pride and self-loathing. a game that makes me happy to be a worse person so that I can die alone and feel cool about it.

somehow I doubt i'll ever play a game I like more.

I played a little bit of The Crew 2 last week, simply because I thought it was worth it for the unique map and the nice looking car interiors. I thought it was relatively good enough if it's stretching itself thin in every direction by featuring such a large map and cluttering it with way too many diverse vehicles. If it it stripped itself it down to solely cars, I thought it had the makings of a world class driving game (albeit maybe not a world class racing game) in the mold of its spiritual predecessor, Rest Drive Unlimited.

Motorfest is closer to that game. It's mostly cars. It's a smaller map. It's kind of a more direct Forza Horizon (FH5) clone but that's okay because again, Test Drive Unlimited walked so Horizon could run. I think the driving and car handling is way imporved. The map is stunning. The destructible environments make race events less of a curse than in The Crew 2. And this game just has a sense of fun and frivolity that Horizon is missing. All the little unique playlist touches are gorgeous and nice to play through. The festival environment in this game spreads itself much broader. The whole map feels closer to the tone of the Hot Wheels DLCs and the game is better off for it. I'm sure I'll get bored at some point but this is the antidote to the modern racer right here. A better Need for Speed than Unbound. A better festival racer than Horizon 5. Just stunning.