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.
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.