Im very conflicted on this game

I think this game is aesthetic perfection and original, ahead of its time in terms of subject matter and cinematography, I justdon't know if this is the correct medium to tell a profound story. sure, its subject matter is profound, and it's handled with grace and ellegance, but I just can't say it's a very fun game to >>play through. map progression here is far too cryptic on a first playthrough, and it takes a lot of getting used to. maybe this is my fault, because it's so different from other games and other games have dumbed me down to the point where I would never expect an outside-of the-box solution for certain things. I don't mind spending 20 minutes figuring out a puzzles, which are the most enjoyable aspect of the game beside it's atmosphere, however the way to progress through the game has had me looking up guides up up until i realized that this is just the way these games are and i should be thinking about out of the box solutions, which quickly became puzzles in of themselves. I realized this about halfway through the game, but it made the first half a bit of a nuisance for me. There are a lot of unintuitive roadblocks such as putting a damn juice box in a garbage chute in order to progress to the next area, and this is far from the only example. Some of them are doors that blend into the environment such as the entrance to the Motel. I can't put to words how frustrating it is to have to pause my game, pausing the stellar atmosphere, and breaking my immersion in the process because there is seemingly no other way to move forward. However it was also incredibly rewarding to piece some of these things together, of course a melting wax onto a horse-shoe with a lighter was the only way to make a makeshift handle for a certain door!

As far as it being a horror survival game, I have to laugh at the people who swear up and down this is not a combat focused game, especially when there are frequent BOSS FIGHTS and enough ammo drops to comfortably take out every monster you run into. This is one of the weaker examples in the entire SH series where it feels like the horror survival aspect was just tacked on because they didn't just want to make a walking simulator. it's not exactly an action shooter like resident evil 4 but you have loads of ammo and more than plenty of heals at all times and there is no meaningful strategizing when it comes to ammo and heal preservation. I know this is only something nerds care about but Resident Evil 1-3 all do a far better job of making a game feel like an actual game with well thought out item management and an ENGAGING gameplay loop. And at the end of the day, since this is the medium they chose to tell this story with it's kind of incomplete imo with somehow has worse combat than the first entry.

I don't like boss fights in a game that is not built around engaging in combat, but as a last ditch effort means of defense, so it makes me question why they are even included when they are mostly awful. The most notable one for me is the first Pyramidhead boss fight, in which you just run around him in a circle, and shoot mindlessly. It's an intensely boring sequence which sucks any and all suspense out of encountering Pyramidhead, and maybe should've been a more subdued looming presence relegated to only appearing in cutscenes up until the end.

I genuinely see the charm and I like the Characters, with the exception of Angela who is voice acted awfully. This is not necessarily an issue with other characters like Maria or Laura or Mary. The characters do have more depth than in Silent Hill 1. The implication that the town is essentially a sort of purgatory is such a viscerally interesting concept, and it's lead to lots of fan speculation. I love open ended games and this is by far one of the best examples of it.

SPOILER ALERT:


I have to talk about the letter at the end of the game from Mary. We heard a snippet of it in the intro and in the trailers but hearing the full thing after learning what James had done was just devastating. The only part in the entire game where the voice acting isnt (some might say deliberately) bad is in the final and complete letter from Mary to James, the weight it was delivered in is the finest voice acting I have ever heard in any piece of media let alone videogames. It was so sincere and profoundly delivered and was written in such a heartfelt and genuine way that I couldnt help but have tears well up in my eyes

As much as I love the 'white guy in 3rd world shithole' trope, the highest rating i can give this thing is 3.5 stars. From my perspective, two glaring issues are stopping this game from being truly great. The one I take biggest issue with, is that this game is literally 50% movie. it is momentum breaking and it seriously hinders the great pacing this game could've had, even on a first playthrough it can be a slogfest. and I understand the game is set up this way to seamlessly hide load times but it hasn't aged well. I played this on PC and there should've been a way for me to be able to skip cutscenes instead of waiting for when the game would've finished loading on a 7th gen console. My second biggest issue with this game is what is now the standard Rockstar formula of game design , the cover based shooting. Cover based shooting feels like a chore in most games but it feels especially sacrilegious to implement this mechanic into a max payne game. It is however brief (thank God) in contrast with future titles.

Writing-wise Max is overindulgent in his pessimism, the point is to highlight how much he has fallen off, but it becomes overbearing quickly. At the time of finishing the game I had no idea what the hell he was fighting for, I could only take hearing 'im an old fat bitch' so many times before I just shook my head. I have mixed feelings on this story overall because Max as a character actually has some of his best moments and one-liners here. The overall plot seems episodic, like this is just what Max has been up to, instead of being definitive. This is an entirely self contained story, similar to the previous games but narrower in it's overall conclusion. This ending (without spoiling anything) is just like welp... now what.
Long gone are the days of cheesy writing in Max Payne, this title offers a much more grounded, deadly serious story and I love that aspect of it, but it could've been structured better, and it could've been a lot less self-loathing.

Onto the strongest component of this game, the gameplay!
Since this game is literally, unironically half movie, half game I had to devote a bit of the review to the movie aspect, however there is a game here! This has the butteriest shooting in a 3rd person shooter full stop. One shot headshots, that is the gameplay loop here and God damn is it engaging. It's mechanics is where the game has aged it's best (there is a bit to critique here) you are a 200 pound middle aged man and the game is not going to let you forget that for better or for worse (Max will literally remind you himself every step of the way) When it comes to bullet time you will more often than not rely on the dive because the bullet time meter depletes far quicker than in other max payne games, but even if its depleted you can still enter bullet time by doing the dive (just like the previous games) And if you collide with an object while youre in mid air, your animation and bullet time will be interrupted, however you can abuse this and use it to your advantage because his recovery animation is often quicker than waiting for him to complete his animation of getting up off the ground.

Something I felt was lacking from combat, is since this game throws a huge number of enemies at you, this is the game where the absence of throwables is felt the most. In previous Max Payne games you could get away with never using them since their range was so limited, but since there is a lot more here in terms of mechanics and obstacles, I would've liked to see throwables especially in the sequences where you have to take cover. Another thing I sorely missed was the 360 reload animation in bullet time from MP2, I know it wouldn't work with this games version of the bullet time but it felt like such a good way of showing the evolution of Max Payne's skills haha plus it was flashy as hell.

This is a fun game with some hinderances, I still believe it should be experienced though, and something I didn't touch on was how authentic the setting felt. They put a ton of work into making the areas the player interacted with felt alive.