kinda hit a wall with this in act 2. jumping from fight to fight is boring and not fun, i never care that much about combat in these games, so ... fuck my drag i guess. The tone is generally so tightly managed that the occasional glimpses behind the curtain (karlach says "body horror" ... Get that dr horribles bullshit OUTTA HERE!!!!!!) to remind u this a game by bisexual musical theater nerds are extra sobering. i HATE games where none of your companions have an actual sexuality and kinda exist for you to pump and dump. it feels like gross, immature wish fulfillment. tell the player "no" sometimes; consequences are good, and i dont just mean “questlines.” is this a brothel w puss for sale or a NARRATIVE ADVENTURE? only lae'zel REALLY compels but she is great

The number of times this game hands control of a character over to you, just to make you walk them forward 20 feet so the next cutscene can happen, but also you’re forced to walk (or even crawl!) slower than anyone’s ever walked (or crawled!) in the history of the universe so that it takes an entire minute of my life to traverse those 20 feet, and also there’s absolutely nothing else of interest happening around you during that minute, there’s just some person or thing on the other side waiting for you to finish approaching...yeah that’s some groundbreakingly stupid game design right there

But man the stuff that’s good is so good

The £0.79 I paid feels like the right price for this. Not in the cost = value sense - I have paid far more for games I've appreciated far less - but as a symbolic act that forms part of the Dog Days experience's larger whole. From the moment I clicked on the Steam launcher, the game started its audio-visual assault - taking over both my monitors, refusing to run in borderless or windowed mode, crashing to desktop when I tinkered with the AA settings, running my modern raytracer rig hot before I'd even seen the main menu. It was every Fuck You that Backloggd had promised me it would be, and I hadn't even clicked on "Start campaign" yet! Wow!

This may all sound like facile shithousery, but there is something kinda special about a game with Square Enix and IO Interactive title cards trying its absolute hardest to assault you through the screen. Title screens are an important part of the Gaming Experience, and the Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days title screen is no exception - hitting you with a barrage of low-kbps door-knocking sound effects, poorly-mixed raindrops and presumable Chinese swearing. Two paragraphs in and I haven't even pressed the Any key yet - that's how you know this is a game worth talking about! Yowza!

At the time this game was released, I was all over the cover-shooting scene - Gears, Ghost Recon, Uncharted, Vanquish - the whole hole-hiding lot. Gears of War 2, was, and still is, a 5/5+10/10 Certified: Awesome banger in my eyes. Landing an active reload and separating a locust's chest from its dick and balls will always feel (Marcus Fenix voice) Nice! to me, But could I have handled this game back in 2010? You've all heard of the Cool Ranch Dorito Effect, but this game is the Moldly Stale Nacho Cheese Dorito Effect - an alluring flavour so overpoweringly awful that you can barely handle the taste. But something about it just keeps bringing you back... This is Woke Up This Morning (Nightcore Remix) in video game form. Awesome!

It blows my mind that this game has splitscreen co-op. It does not blow my mind to learn that the splitscreen co-op is apparently broken in all sorts of offensive and ridiculous ways - it's so perfectly fitting in so many many ways that elude elucidation. It's now a Life Goal for me to play through this thing in splitscreen with a buddy while we're both spun out of our minds on something or other. It would whip so much fucking sack. I feel like splitscreen Dog Days would function as a drug in and of itself. Even if I wasn't blitzed, I feel like it would still give me a hangover the next day. Can you imagine two guys doing that sprinting animation at the same time while overlapping "SHT YOU CNT!!" "FCK PSS!!" audio files play at different levels over the top of each other and six other stock uzi sound effects of variable volume? It would be sick! Fuck yeah!

It always kinda bothered me when people told me No More Heroes was "belligerent by design" as part of some larger Art Game whole - it was just boring as hell! (Travis Touchdown voice) Fck off! Even if it was intentional, No More Heroes always had its sneakers halfway into its player-hostile concept. Kane & Lynch 2, by contrast, is completely unafraid of confrontation with the player on the other side of the keyboard/gamepad. Like killing people, do you, nerd? No More Heroes 2 (released the same year as Kane & Lynch 2) tried to take the antagonistic nature of the series further towards real meaningful stuff, but it looks like Little Baby Shit in comparison to Dog Days. Suda51 apologises for wounding you. IO Interactive interactively pisses in your wound - and maybe fucks it too, before crashing to desktop! This* is how you challenge your player about all their endless killing and collecting. God damn! Are you enjoying yourself?

I was gonna do a paragraph where I lamented the fact that the game lacks that final furlough of audio/visual/gameplay polish to complement the art vibe that almost takes this to 5 Star Status, but in the process of writing this I realised that the game just wouldn't land the same if you could actually hear the music or think clearly over the sound of a shotgun getting stuck in an audio loop. If I'd been able to clear the rooftop chase the first time without being wiped out by a fucked up ragdoll distracting me and causing me to run into a glitched-out cop who couldn't find cover, I wouldn't have been half as aware of the artifice of video game running-and-gunning-and-murdering. Holy shit! Am I enjoying myself? No! Five stars!!!!

maaaan i really wanted to get into this but its mostly another nah from me. Little Hope still on top, I'm afraid, and its not a high peak! i feel like a lot of people are going to prefer this to the prior episodes bc it doesnt klutzily trauma metaphorize/bad tripify most of its horror away, but it kinda replaces that genre-disinterested sloppiness with several sins i might find even less tolerable. REALLY hated the sanctimonious and frankly gross both sidesy iraq war enemy of my enemy shit starring a truly heinous and visually indistinct cast that's not even fun to root against. sadly the legitimately fun stunt-casting of Ashley Tisdale is mostly wasted, as her role feels pretty joyless and minor and whatever happened with her wonky bobblehead character model animation is deeply rude to her tbh!! still some camp value to be derived from her wannabe The Descent cosplay bits but eh). The creature design is a huge step down from Little Hope in terms of conceptual inventiveness and setpiece choreo imo, and all the relationship/personality stat mechanics are back to feeling mostly pointless and unintegrated into anything structurally valuable. The pacing might also be the worst in the series... after a splattery and fun enough second act closer, the game totally flatlines during its pre-finale with some awful and overlong attempts at relationship building/EXPLORATION OF "THEMES", and the plodding infodumpery is just a mess. Pretty sure the overall playtime is comparable to the rest of the series at around 4-5 hrs, but the group i was playing with all got so fatigued at this point that any atmosphere completely deflated and things really began to feel bloated and tiresome. The whole escape/epilogue is an enormous whatever.

Idk, at this point it feels fair to say that doing a one year production cycle for these wildly ambitious, modular, and asset intensive games is unrealistic and borderline harmful to the team--I am rooting for this corny lil studio and think theres a lot of talent here but its clear they're not being given the time to script, sequence, and execute any of these potentially fun ideas with the care they deserve. Cant imagine the stress Covid placed on top of this already untenable work pipeline! Its just awful to think about and I feel bad even critizing something that so clearly suffers from being a product of directorial ignorance and project management bordering on abuse. I still value this series as enjoyable enough little spectator-friendly B games to get drunk and play through with friends--its still a rather untapped niche and this team does have an undeniable signature I find charming despite it all--and I might be being especially hard on this one bc the character i played literally did almost nothing aside from that snoozeville "breathe slowly and dont get detected" button press minigame for the entire story! Still leagues better than man of medan even so. I really recommend that anyone with brain worms like me who still inexplicably wants to endure each installment of this series check out Supermassive's way less visible murder mystery side game Hidden Agenda because, while still a mess in many ways, its absolutely superior to any of these!

The fact that Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days has to get described as some kind of """anti-game""" because the taste makers and machinations of big-Video Games have decided for you, or through you, that feeling disempowered and disoriented are inherently non-video game feelings (they're not, and calling it an anti-game is cope against this conservatism) just goes to show that gamers and the games they play and the games that are made for them are most of the time absolutely the tackiest, kitsch ♥♥♥♥. I don't want to hear anyone tell me about what makes the latest Sony movie video game exclusive the vanguard of this industry's accomplishment and cultural worth when Kane & Lynch 2 gets denigrated as either a ♥♥♥♥ game or a anti-game.

Y'all have never played a damn game in your life, is what it really sounds like. This one, and the first, however, slap. So maybe start here.

there's a lot said already abt the hypnotically repulsive audiovisual presentation with the frantic camera and barebones controls, it made me feel tweaked out and paranoid in a horrifying way and it rocked, but the thing worth talking about for me is the structure of this game, how vitally spartan its character is. how utterly, necessarily devoid it is of much sympathy for its leads. i skimmed through a playthrough of K&L1 after playing this, which i have no desire to ever play, and it just felt very of its time. a pair of antiheroes make a huge mess of things and argue incessantly and ruin lives but you gotta love their camaraderie and attitude!! and then the women in their life dare to nag nag nag at them about all the fucked up shit they get put through because of them until they inevitably get shot, because they talk too much

the second game inherits their disgusting personalities and their capacity for misery--in fact increases that aspect to a fever pitch--and you might look at it as just following in the boring footsteps of its predecessor with a more interesting aesthetic going for it. but the difference is how unsettlingly off things feel from what you'd expect. the cutscenes are so curt, there is hardly any kind of relatable stakes for the characters other than some vague deal to further imperialism (they dont care abt that part obviously why would they). everything happens with hardly any dramatic rhythm, just hot headed banter and death, with things getting worse and worse. the misogyny is still here but even that has a different tone; the women in kane and lynch's lives this time become little more than convenient excuses for them to continue their evil rampaging, not the motivation to do better that they probably tell themselves they are to help them sleep at night. they're in a hell of their making.

the bluntness behind the narrative helps make the bond between the two MILES more interesting. lynch's schizophrenia isn't exploited for :twisted: funny comedy this time but instead to render him as a pathetic crazed animal with a gun. and the stroke of genius of basically ignoring how K&L1 ends gives kane's more levelheadedness by comparison a delusional sociopathic underpinning. they scream at each other about how much they ruined each other's lives (much like the women they love in the previous game hmm [thinks really hard abt this]) yet at no point in the game does that tension come to a head between them like the first game would tease. it always evaporates away awkwardly. there's no bro moments of "heh you're alright" or anything like that ever in sight because they do not deserve that, they just drop their in-the-moment tantrum and go back to doing the only thing they ever know how to do. this is because, despite how they are unable to actually feel love or not destroy things, they ultimately understand each other better than anyone. they NEED each other so bad. AND YET!!! not even this is portrayed with much more than a kind of pity, if that, it's just a human tendency to prefer not being alone in your cosmic punishment. it's nothing to get too attached to.

if this game has anything that could be called a positive human emotion it wants to hone in on, it's this, and it is so incredibly compelling in its smallness to me that it sticks out beyond the rest of the genre subversion in the game to heighten it further. even a couple of rabid dogs will feel loyalty towards each other, when they know neither of them's going to heaven

"You need to replay Max Payne 3" gotta be in my top ten intrusive thoughts I've acted on, right up there with "fill your whole entire fridge with cans of NOS."

Unlike my fridge full of NOS, the compulsion to revisit this game wasn't as sudden as waking in the middle of the night, drenched in a cold sweat and driven by chemical dependency, though I suppose the fact we both nurse our problems rather than confront them does make Max somewhat relatable (well, that and the baldness.) Rather, Max Payne 3 has ended up in front of my face several times over the past few weeks by pure happenstance, with the untimely passing of James McCaffrey acting as the catalyst to sit down and start it up for the first time since 2012.

McCaffrey's performance is of course outstanding, effortlessly selling you on an older, even more broken version of Max from the second he sets foot in his clean new apartment. Monologuing about the need to move on and start fresh with a few cracks at the expense of his weight and the poor choices that have led him to Brazil. The scene devolves pretty quickly as Max sets aside unpacking and decorating for drinking, stumbling, and self-pity.

The strobing effects, neon after-images, and punctuation of key words and phrases cutting through the cacophony of visual noise places the player right into the middle of Max's delirium, and while I'm sure some people were upset that Rockstar pushed away from the film noir design of the previous games, I am 100% into this sort of Man on Fire "tape roll" editing style, and I think it's used to great effect, keeping the player spinning in Max's fucked up headspace.

Despite how fundamentally broken Max is as a person, there was some real risk in inadvertently casting him as the "white savior," but I think this trope is pretty effectively subverted. Max is notoriously bad at saving anybody, and in fact makes most situations substantially worse by simply being there, drunk on the job and armed to the teeth. He is unwilling or perhaps unable (again, due to his inebriation) to understand any language that's not New Jersey English, frequently resulting in misunderstandings and botched attempts at negotiations, resulting in the loss of human life. I don't see how Max hopes to save anyone when he intentionally blows up an organ farming operation without making sure anyone got out, or by shooting up an entire airport, later revealed to be avoidable had he simply taken a ride offered to him to go directly to the bad guy's private hanger. As he puts it, "I'm a dumb move kind of guy." Sure, he gets the bad guy in the end, but when the game is popping accolades for killing 1000 enemies, you have to wonder if the math shakes out.

The shootout in the favela, which occurs about halfway through the game, feels heavily borrowed from Elite Squad. There are a couple notable moments during this sequence that are lifted from the movie, but one thing Max Payne 3 lacks over Elite Squad is that element of humanization, particularly for those in the favela. There's plenty of lip paid to the class divide and the animosity the rich have for the poor, and vice versa, but the fast pace of the story and action doesn't really provide time to peel back those layers and examine them. That's not what Max Payne 3 is about, it's more action than drama, and to do so would also mean providing subtitles and having Max not go "huh, what?" and immediately shoot dodge into a wall, so Rockstar probably made the right call there, too.

On the more mechanical end of things, Max Payne 3 carries over enough systems from the previous two games to feel authentic to the Max Payne experience and is otherwise just a very refined third person cover-shooter. A bit punishing, but in a way that feels satisfying. The action never dries out, and there's some really great set pieces, especially during the climax in the airport, which includes one of my favorite needle drops in games. At this point it feels trite to say a game feels like playing a movie, but Max Payne 3's action is paced in this very specific way that makes it feel like possibly the best translation of an action movie into interactive media I've come across.

Remedy has announced remakes of the first two Max Payne games, and I've been told there's plenty of allusions to the character in Alan Wake 2, potentially setting up something more. I haven't played that game and my friends have been careful to avoid spoilers until I do, so I really only know the vague points, like Sam Lake's character being voiced by McCaffrey. I'm curious where they go from here, though at the same time I don't want to speculate, as it feels a bit too callous to do so in the wake of McCaffrey's passing. Perhaps the best answer is to not do anything at all. Max Payne 3 is an excellent final chapter to Max's story and maybe my favorite entry in the series.

Max Payne 3 is a pretty contentious game among Payne Fans. A large part of that is due to being developed by Rockstar, who wrested control from my beautiful boy Sam Lake's hands, and to be fair, that's certainly a valid knock against it. Rockstar don't really understand the Vibe of Payne, even though that still varied wildly between the first game's apocalyptic nightmare and the second game's depressing fatalism. --Note: My review of MP2 was eaten by this shit website, so I am currently writing this in notepad, as I will do for all future reviews. I am not going to re-write the long-ass review I wrote. It's the best in the series. Play it. With the widescreen fix you can see Mona's boobs.--

The other major problem people have with it is something that's very easily fixed. I'm usually not one to say people are "playing the game wrong," but in this case, I think playing the game on Hard (ideally with mouse and keyboard) is absolutely essential. MP3 added the ability to take cover, and this, combined with the copious amounts of bullet time you get on Normal, causes people to devolve into Cover Shooter Mode, the absolute most boring way to play. On Hard, the bullet time gained DRASTIC goes down, forcing you to shootdodge everywhere constantly, as you still get slow-mo doing that no matter if you have BT in the gauge or not.

This is important, as MP3 utilizes Rockstar's amazing and hilarious Euphoria physics engine, from the days before they toned it down to make it "more realistic," aka "boring as hell." Playing this properly, Max is constantly slamming his noggin into walls, tumbling over tables, and crumpling into a pretzel after jumping down stairs. You really should only be taking cover when reloading and/or contemplating where you want to dive to next. In another important innovation, now he doesn't automatically get up after diving, something that often got you killed in the previous games. Now you can just lay there and pump bullets into guys until the coast is clear. One weird change is that Painkillers fully heal you, but also allow you to revive by shooting an enemy if you would be killed when one's available. This also gives you most of your health back when you revive, so there's no real reason to use them normally, especially since most enemies will murder your ass real fast on Hard anyway.

Even with that strange choice, it's the best that a Rockstar game has ever played, and it's baffling how everything learned here apparently went out the window with subsequent titles.

So it plays great. How's the story? Eh, it's alright. It's an obvious departure from the tone of the first two, though I don't think it's as far removed as some people say. It's often said that the Max in this game is barely the same character as he was in the first two, though I disagree: In the first game, he was a psychotic dumbass, and in the second, he was a depressed, horny dumbass. Now he's essentially a combination of the two, drunk and rage-fuelled, continuing his tendency to make bad decisions and not know when to stop. If you really want a canon explanation for why he's this way in 3 (even though they repeatedly mention Max's AA sessions in 2), just imagine this moment late in 2 is responsible, like Homer's brain crayon.

The actual story itself is the bigger issue: I can understand wanting to do their own thing, which in this case means mostly just doing a pastiche of Man on Fire, but it's not as propulsive as the previous games. It goes on a bit too long, but it's adequate, and Max has plenty of good lines. McCaffrey's performance here is his career-best, which isn't a small feat. I especially appreciate that Max has unique dialogue for almost every painkiller stash you can find. It's also a game that understands that short people are inherently evil. This is something understood by many of the greatest pieces of art, made by those with true insight into the human soul: Twin Peaks. Leprechaun 4: In Space. Collateral.

Max Payne 3 is absolutely a worthy end for the trilogy. Would I prefer if Remedy had made it? Yeah, probably. But this is what we got. I'm okay with that.

9/10