Max Payne 3

I'm a huge fan of the "film noir" genre.  Amongst my favorite movies are The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca (which isn't really film noir, but is darn close, in my mind), and Blade Runner.  I'm also a fan of attempts to do fun things in video games, and for a while the biggest "fun thing" that games were messing around with was "bullet time."

You know "bullet time."  It's that thing that happened in the Matrix movies where time slows down and you see the path of every bullet.  It can also be referred to as "John Woo Time" because he tends to use it a lot, as well as spending enough money on doves to satisfy every wedding in twenty states.

So, what happens when you take a grim, gritty film noir character like Max Payne (not the movie one) and put him in a place of sun, beaches, and bikinis?

You get a frustrating but fun game experience, is what you get.

Set in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Max Payne 3 occurs several years after the end of (obviously) Max Payne 2.  Max, having had his life dumped on for two entire games and suffering enough personal tragedy to make Gollum look like a petty whiner, has abandoned the life of being a cop (or really anything resembling one) and is now a bodyguard for the rich and frivolous.  Assigned to watch over a wealthy family involved in business, politics, and seeing how high certain members can get, Max is present when a series of attacks on the family start occurring, and gets drug deeper and deeper in to the shady underbelly of paradise.

First, let's talk about Max.  I love a good redemption story, and considering Max spends about half the game being a drug-addled drunk, watching him slowly find his resolve, his determination, and (eventually) himself makes for some good storytelling.  He has the same classic flaws, especially when it comes to women, so we get enough "classic" Max to see how he reached such depths and is now just coasting through life without really being sure what day it is or even what town he's in.

If I have one small issue about Max, it's that he's constantly negative.  I get he's a film noir character, and that the game revolves almost entirely of people with guns coming to see how many holes they can punch into you with bullets until you look like a sheet of cheesecloth that went through a wood chipper...but I realized after killing my thousandth guy with a gun that Max is still talking about how ineffective he is and how he's just "a drunk."

If I could reach through the television and slap a character, I would seriously do it to this guy.  I've killed more people than Jonestown.  I'm pretty sure I killed more people than the HMS Titanic.  Hearing Max complain about how he's just "a drunk" when I'm wading through gang members, crooked paramilitary officials, and many other groups of armed individuals like a walking death just makes me want to say "I'm sorry, are you not leaving enough of a blood trail behind you?  I'm pretty much just letting you use a pistol this whole game against Kevlar suits, flak jackets, armored vehicles, and the like, and you're still going through them like paper cut-outs.  You're shooting grenades in midair, man.  You should be going "HELL YEAH, I'M THE BADDEST THERE IS!  I AM JUSTICE GIVING FLESH AND A LUST FOR BLOOD!""

But instead, it's just "this is what the family gets for hiring a drunk has-been."  ...and this is immediately after I held off several armed assaults that would make Die Hard go "...that's rather excessive."

Setting-wise, the graphics are gorgeous.  Going from the hang-outs of the upper crust to the lowest of the city slums is extremely well done, and even smaller stages set in places like the Panama Canal or back in New Jersey during flashbacks are extremely detailed and creatively laid out.  There were very few times I wasn't able to make out what was going on around me, and I could easily pick out bad guys from a distance even on my old non-HD television.

The amount of weapons can feel a smidgen excessive at times, as I found myself constantly circling back and forth among people I killed trying to figure out whether I wanted more power or more ammo, and then trying to figure out which guns use the same ammo so I could stack them together.

Now, I will say that I died a lot.  I must be terrible at this game, considering that I barely used some of the game mechanics such as the trademark "slow motion dive with bullets flying" move, because I found that I tended to either clip something that knocked me out of my graceful dive and left me lying on the floor between guys with guns, or I'd start it right when everybody started to duck, so I'd glide gracefully through the air with nobody to shoot at.

One mechanic I did like was the game's attempt to save you from ignoring your health.  If you have a "health pack" (read: painkillers), and your health runs out, you get a chance to shoot the guy who last put a bullet in you.  If you miss too many times as you move in slow-motion, or your gun runs out of ammo (which happened to me a lot because I'd get shot in the middle of a reload), you die.  If you hit him, it kills the bad guy in one hit and you regain a large amount of your health.

If you don't have any pills, you just die.  This also happened a lot, often because I'd be surrounded and trying to pick off guys on one side of me when someone behind me stood up and put a bullet in the back of my brain.

There's also a few moments that the game automatically kicks in the slow-motion, usually when your character is falling from somewhere high or hanging from something, giving you a chance to kill a whole bunch of bad guys before the game has you land.  These moments are a lot of fun, as there's usually something exciting happening around you (a collapsing water tower, being pulled up by a rope to an elevated platform), and it gives it... I don't want to say a "cinematic" feel, but it lets the game designers really flex the amount of detail work they put into scenes, and the effort shows.

I have one big complaint, though.  If a game is going to give you laser sights on weapons partway through the game, give us a chance to either turn them off or have there still be a dot at the end of the laser.  I kept throwing the guns away and sticking to my pistol because the beam fades to a point so thin that it's rather difficult to tell where the barrel is pointed at.  I would frequently empty a clip at a bad guy just to realize that the green line going into his chest wasn't my laser sight, but was just how his armored vest was stitched, and I was seriously harassing the potted plant right behind him.  And then my face would get shot off.

Plus, they tend to put the laser sights on the guns that either have the worst accuracy when firing rapid rounds, or the most kickback (who puts a laser scope on a shotgun that doesn't fire slugs?).  Meaning you might get one shot lined up, but then you may as well rip it off and put it on your pistol for all the good it'll do you.

But you can't, so, just stick to the pistol.

The game did get frequently frustrating until I figured out the few areas that the game was "broken" enough to let me kill all the bad guys without dying (spoiler alert: apparently those gates they pull across airport terminals are bulletproof and grenade-proof), but even I have to admit that as I was wading through yet another small army of people, I couldn't help but wonder if it was really likely, for instance, for this one street gang to have hundreds of guys willing to die at my hand before they go "look, we lost four hundred people to this one white guy and he's still coming, I say we cut our losses and move to Argentina."  It started to feel like a bit of a grind after a while, especially once I got used to the weapons I wound up using the most through the game.

Oh, and on a side note, I don't mind the game setting up a situation for me to lose a weapon so I'm just left with my pistol on a new stage...but doing that to me when my pistol was out of ammo leaving me with no way to do anything was just cheap.

Overall, I recommend playing it just for a game that takes place somewhere outside of your typical adventure game.  Plus, you might even pick up a few new words, since most of the characters speak in Portuguese.  I had many characters in the game nickname me "Filho da puta" which I can only assume means "scary man here to kill us."

...I could look up the translation, but no matter what it says, I like my translation better.