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Platform: PC Download | Edition: Standard
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Product Description
Platform: PC Download | Edition: Standard
From the Manufacturer
For Max Payne, the tragedies that took his loved ones years ago are wounds that refuse to heal. No longer a cop, close to washed up and addicted to pain killers, Max takes a job in São Paulo, Brazil, protecting the family of wealthy real estate mogul Rodrigo Branco, in an effort to finally escape his troubled past. But as events spiral out of his control, Max Payne finds himself alone on the streets of an unfamiliar city, desperately searching for the truth and fighting for a way out.
Featuring cutting edge shooting mechanics for precision gunplay, advanced new Bullet Time (R) and Shootdodge (TM) effects, full integration of Natural Motion's Euphoria Character Behavior system for lifelike movement and a dark and twisted story, Max Payne 3 is a seamless, highly detailed, cinematic experience from Rockstar Games.
In addition to an expansive single-player campaign, Max Payne 3 will also be the first entry in the series to introduce a thorough and engrossing multiplayer experience. Max Payne 3 multiplayer brings the same cinematic feel, fluid gunplay and sense of movement of the single-player game into the realm of online multiplayer. Using the fiction and signature gameplay elements of the Max Payne universe, Max Payne 3 features a wide range of new and traditional multiplayer modes that play on the themes of paranoia, betrayal and heroism, all delivered with the same epic visual style of the single player game.
A feature debuting in Max Payne 3 and carrying over to Grand Theft Auto V and future appropriate titles is Crews, which go beyond traditional online clans by allowing players to join large public Crews or simply create a private Crew that members can customize. In this way, Crews help players keep the fight alive from match to match - and even across titles - through the Rockstar Games Social Club, which will keep track of Crew stats, including Feuds.
FEATURES:
- Developed by Rockstar Games for a seamless, highly detailed, cinematic experience
- Advanced Bullet Time and Shootdodge and Final Kill-cam mechanics for stylish shooting action
- Cutting edge aiming, targeting and animation processes for precise, fluid gunplay
- A dark, twisted story chronicling the return of Max Payne, one of the most iconic characters in videogames
- Tight integration between Natural Motion’s Euphoria Character Behavior System and a brand new iteration of the Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE) for lifelike movement and a new level of environmental awareness
- A wide range of weapons rendered in incredible detail: hammers cock back, shells eject from the chamber and each bullet is individually modeled from the split second it’s fired to the moment of impact.
- Advanced particle physics and destructible environments set the stage for dramatic and chaotic gun fights
- New to the series, a compelling and addictive multiplayer experience to match the dark and relentless atmosphere of the single-player game
System Requirements
| Minimum Specifications: | |
| OS: | Windows 7 32/64 Service Pack 1, Windows Vista 32/64 Service Pack 2, Windows XP 32/64 Service Pack 3 |
| Processor: | Intel Dual Core 2.4 GHZ - i7 3930K 6 Core x 3.06 GHZ / AMD Dual Core 2.6 GHZ - FX8150 8 Core x 3.6 GHZ |
| RAM: | 2GB - 16GB |
| Hard Drive: | 35 Gb Hard Disk space |
| Video Card: | NVIDIA® 8600 GT 512MB VRAM – NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 680 2GB VRAM / Radeon HD 3400 512MB VRAM - Radeon HD 7970 3GB VRAM Sound Card: 100% Direct X 9.0 compatible – Direct X 9.0 compatible supporting Dolby Digital Live |
| Additional Info: | Initial activation requires internet connection and a valid Rockstar Social Club account (13+ to register); Online play requires log-in to Rockstar Social Club (13+); software installation required including GameShield IronWrap; DirectX and Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 SP1 Redistributable Package (x86). |
For more details, you can visit the official website.
Legal:
2004 - 2012 Rockstar Games, Inc. Rockstar Games, Rockstar Studios, Max Payne, and the Rockstar Games R* marks and logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. in the U.S.A. and/or foreign countries.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
127 of 156 people found the following review helpful
By AM
Platform for Display:PC|Edition:Standard
Fun:
2.0 out of 5 stars
When Remedy originally sold the Max Payne franchise to Rockstar, I was worried. The GTA franchise is a huge seller; let no one accuse Rockstar of not knowing how to make a popular game, but Max Payne had always been an extremely distinct, special experience, the kind of thing generally best left with the creators, I feared. The game is finally out, and my fears have been realized. There's no question Rockstar made a real effort; Max Payne 3 is absolutely not a quick cash in--but it's also not Max Payne.
Gameplay: Max Payne 3's gameplay brings bullet time along from the older titles. It basically has to; Remedy invented the mechanic way back in Max Payne. It defines the series almost as much as the noir atmosphere. It still works, but I find that it's less useful defensively than it was in previous iterations. In Max Payne 2, I could turn on bullet time and clear a room, coming up smelling like roses. In MP3, I'm as likely as not to come up smelling like the blood leaking from multiple holes in Max's body. Whether this is because I die more quickly, or because I kill more slowly (enemies seem to survive body shots more readily in Max Payne 3 than before), I don't know, but the end result is that I almost always have to save my bullet time for shootdodging. It's not a gamebreaker, but it detracts from the experience.
The difficulty on the whole is drastically higher than previous Max Payne games, something I've seen noted in more professional reviews. Getting shot HURTS. As it should, certainly, but the damage accrues far faster than in the past, and painkillers are MUCH less common. A medicine chest on easy in Max Payne 2 could have 4 painkillers. I've never seen more than two next to each other in Max Payne 3, and never had more than three at a time available. In Max Payne 2, sometimes I actually got up to the cap, 8 bottles. Between taking damage faster, and having fewer opportunities for restoring health, the game becomes substantially more difficult than its predecessors. "Easy" isn't.
The direct result of this is that the player is often stuck watching the same cutscene multiple times, and putting up with death after death after death. (Who in the hell thought unskippable cutscenes were a good idea? You can't even quit the game while one plays!). I won't pretend to be a stellar player, but I don't usually have this kind of trouble in anything. Rockstar's apparent solution to the game being awfully hard is to respawn you with full health, and if you keep dying, throw you a painkiller or two to ease you through. This does help, but to get these nudges, you have to put up with quite a lot of dying.
Cover has been added to Max Payne 3, in the Gears of War sense. Press a button, get into cover. Aim, shoot, kill from cover. This is the first situation in which I feel Rockstar misunderstood what a Max Payne game is. You could call this modernization, but for me, the Max Payne games were fun specifically because I could run, dive, shoot, slow time, and generally kill everything in sight, without hiding behind a wall and picking off enemies from relative safety. Cover is realistic, but the Max Payne series was never ABOUT realism; it was a heavily stylized cross between film noir and John Woo.
The last gameplay gripe I have is simply that your weapon carrying in Max Payne is extremely limited. You can carry one or two pistol sized weapons, and one large weapon. Dual wielding pistols means you drop the larger gun, as it had been carried in your off hand. Again, realism where it's not needed. Having a small arsenal at your disposal in the previous games of the series is a dated style, but it's fun.
Graphics: I honestly have not got a single complaint about the game's graphics. Max Payne 3 is stunningly gorgeous; Rockstar's artists, animators, and engine programmers absolutely hit the ball out of the park. It's possible to grind the game to a very low framerate, even on a high end machine, if you turn on both MSAA and FXAA, but both aren't really necessary. Dropping one or the other can help a lot. Light works like it should, people look like they should and move believably, skin is well modeled. If there's anything about which one could complain it's that during cutscenes, the game can approach the "uncanny valley," where something looks so realistic it's offputting, because it's slightly inhuman.
Atmosphere and presentation: This is where Max Payne 3 really falls flat. Max Payne has always been characterized by really heavy "film noir" elements. These are completely absent from Max Payne 3. You do get Max's occasional self-pity, and drug/alcohol problem, but as portrayed here, they feel more like something on a modern crime drama than something out of an old detective story somehow set in the modern day. Previous games carried the deliberately cheesy, over-the-top element of film noir perfectly. Max Payne 3 makes the occasional allusion to it, but it's just not there. You get a tiny, tiny glimpse of it in a flashback about 1/3 through the game, but it doesn't last.
I think the problem here is two fold: First, the setting change is ill-suited to noir. Sunny Sao Paulo, Brazil is full of flashy nightclubs, bikini clad women (boobs in a Rockstar game? WHO'DA THUNK IT?), and a culture so far removed from traditional noir that it just doesn't work. Boobs for the sake of titillation and change for the sake of change just don't really work very well. That the game is PACKED with untranslated Portuguese doesn't help either. I'm all in favor of native language use, but there's so very much dialogue that's lost on most players that opportunities for good writing are missed by players who can't understand the language. Subtitles are just captions in Portuguese.
Second, Rockstar's writers just weren't up to the task. Max Payne and Max Payne 2 were deliberately kitschy, as noir generally is, but Max Payne 3 tends to fall back on crude rather than clever. During the opening cutscene, the player hears a line similar to, "I wouldn't know good from bad if good were feeding the poor and bad was bangin' my sister." Remedy didn't feel the need to resort to bawdiness to make the over-the-top metaphors common to the noir style. There's a time and a place for everything, but when continuing one of the best, if not the best, third person shooting franchises in history, a little more respect for origins is called for. If you can't maintain the style, hire someone who can.
Presentation is a real sticking point. Max Payne 1 and 2 did have cutscenes here and there, but much of the game's narrative was carried out in highly atmospheric visual novel pages on screen, with appropriate narration. It's hard to overstate just what staying in this heavily atmospheric style added to the game. If nothing else, they provided the series with a strong sense of identity. That identity was lost with Max Payne 3's presentation. Cutscenes are how ALL plot exposition is handled, and those cutscenes are absolutely packed with some of the most obnoxious camera filters I've ever seen. For no apparent reason, in a scene where Max is completely sober (and even if he weren't, the scene is third person and not from his perspective anyway), colors are randomly separated into red/blue/yellow, looking almost like a shoddy kids' 3D glasses effect. In other places, color is strongly desaturated, or the view is de-interlaced (think scanlines, like a really old arcade game). Words that Rockstar felt were important get plastered on the screen for an instant, but this provides no real impact--like the other effects, it's jarring, and detracts from cutscenes, rather than creating atmosphere.
Overall: The package, taken as a whole, is a relatively playable game, with real bright spots here and there. Unfortunately, those bright spots serve more to show the player what could've been than to truly improve the game. Rockstar took one of PC gaming's most respected modern franchises, and I honestly believe they tried their best with it. Unfortunately, their best seems to have required a "go with what you know" approach that makes Max Payne 3 feel more like a linear, third person shooter Brazilian GTA side story than a true Max Payne sequel. Max Payne purists, those who loved the game for the narrative and portrayal, and Max Payne as a character, should probably keep your distance.
Gameplay: Max Payne 3's gameplay brings bullet time along from the older titles. It basically has to; Remedy invented the mechanic way back in Max Payne. It defines the series almost as much as the noir atmosphere. It still works, but I find that it's less useful defensively than it was in previous iterations. In Max Payne 2, I could turn on bullet time and clear a room, coming up smelling like roses. In MP3, I'm as likely as not to come up smelling like the blood leaking from multiple holes in Max's body. Whether this is because I die more quickly, or because I kill more slowly (enemies seem to survive body shots more readily in Max Payne 3 than before), I don't know, but the end result is that I almost always have to save my bullet time for shootdodging. It's not a gamebreaker, but it detracts from the experience.
The difficulty on the whole is drastically higher than previous Max Payne games, something I've seen noted in more professional reviews. Getting shot HURTS. As it should, certainly, but the damage accrues far faster than in the past, and painkillers are MUCH less common. A medicine chest on easy in Max Payne 2 could have 4 painkillers. I've never seen more than two next to each other in Max Payne 3, and never had more than three at a time available. In Max Payne 2, sometimes I actually got up to the cap, 8 bottles. Between taking damage faster, and having fewer opportunities for restoring health, the game becomes substantially more difficult than its predecessors. "Easy" isn't.
The direct result of this is that the player is often stuck watching the same cutscene multiple times, and putting up with death after death after death. (Who in the hell thought unskippable cutscenes were a good idea? You can't even quit the game while one plays!). I won't pretend to be a stellar player, but I don't usually have this kind of trouble in anything. Rockstar's apparent solution to the game being awfully hard is to respawn you with full health, and if you keep dying, throw you a painkiller or two to ease you through. This does help, but to get these nudges, you have to put up with quite a lot of dying.
Cover has been added to Max Payne 3, in the Gears of War sense. Press a button, get into cover. Aim, shoot, kill from cover. This is the first situation in which I feel Rockstar misunderstood what a Max Payne game is. You could call this modernization, but for me, the Max Payne games were fun specifically because I could run, dive, shoot, slow time, and generally kill everything in sight, without hiding behind a wall and picking off enemies from relative safety. Cover is realistic, but the Max Payne series was never ABOUT realism; it was a heavily stylized cross between film noir and John Woo.
The last gameplay gripe I have is simply that your weapon carrying in Max Payne is extremely limited. You can carry one or two pistol sized weapons, and one large weapon. Dual wielding pistols means you drop the larger gun, as it had been carried in your off hand. Again, realism where it's not needed. Having a small arsenal at your disposal in the previous games of the series is a dated style, but it's fun.
Graphics: I honestly have not got a single complaint about the game's graphics. Max Payne 3 is stunningly gorgeous; Rockstar's artists, animators, and engine programmers absolutely hit the ball out of the park. It's possible to grind the game to a very low framerate, even on a high end machine, if you turn on both MSAA and FXAA, but both aren't really necessary. Dropping one or the other can help a lot. Light works like it should, people look like they should and move believably, skin is well modeled. If there's anything about which one could complain it's that during cutscenes, the game can approach the "uncanny valley," where something looks so realistic it's offputting, because it's slightly inhuman.
Atmosphere and presentation: This is where Max Payne 3 really falls flat. Max Payne has always been characterized by really heavy "film noir" elements. These are completely absent from Max Payne 3. You do get Max's occasional self-pity, and drug/alcohol problem, but as portrayed here, they feel more like something on a modern crime drama than something out of an old detective story somehow set in the modern day. Previous games carried the deliberately cheesy, over-the-top element of film noir perfectly. Max Payne 3 makes the occasional allusion to it, but it's just not there. You get a tiny, tiny glimpse of it in a flashback about 1/3 through the game, but it doesn't last.
I think the problem here is two fold: First, the setting change is ill-suited to noir. Sunny Sao Paulo, Brazil is full of flashy nightclubs, bikini clad women (boobs in a Rockstar game? WHO'DA THUNK IT?), and a culture so far removed from traditional noir that it just doesn't work. Boobs for the sake of titillation and change for the sake of change just don't really work very well. That the game is PACKED with untranslated Portuguese doesn't help either. I'm all in favor of native language use, but there's so very much dialogue that's lost on most players that opportunities for good writing are missed by players who can't understand the language. Subtitles are just captions in Portuguese.
Second, Rockstar's writers just weren't up to the task. Max Payne and Max Payne 2 were deliberately kitschy, as noir generally is, but Max Payne 3 tends to fall back on crude rather than clever. During the opening cutscene, the player hears a line similar to, "I wouldn't know good from bad if good were feeding the poor and bad was bangin' my sister." Remedy didn't feel the need to resort to bawdiness to make the over-the-top metaphors common to the noir style. There's a time and a place for everything, but when continuing one of the best, if not the best, third person shooting franchises in history, a little more respect for origins is called for. If you can't maintain the style, hire someone who can.
Presentation is a real sticking point. Max Payne 1 and 2 did have cutscenes here and there, but much of the game's narrative was carried out in highly atmospheric visual novel pages on screen, with appropriate narration. It's hard to overstate just what staying in this heavily atmospheric style added to the game. If nothing else, they provided the series with a strong sense of identity. That identity was lost with Max Payne 3's presentation. Cutscenes are how ALL plot exposition is handled, and those cutscenes are absolutely packed with some of the most obnoxious camera filters I've ever seen. For no apparent reason, in a scene where Max is completely sober (and even if he weren't, the scene is third person and not from his perspective anyway), colors are randomly separated into red/blue/yellow, looking almost like a shoddy kids' 3D glasses effect. In other places, color is strongly desaturated, or the view is de-interlaced (think scanlines, like a really old arcade game). Words that Rockstar felt were important get plastered on the screen for an instant, but this provides no real impact--like the other effects, it's jarring, and detracts from cutscenes, rather than creating atmosphere.
Overall: The package, taken as a whole, is a relatively playable game, with real bright spots here and there. Unfortunately, those bright spots serve more to show the player what could've been than to truly improve the game. Rockstar took one of PC gaming's most respected modern franchises, and I honestly believe they tried their best with it. Unfortunately, their best seems to have required a "go with what you know" approach that makes Max Payne 3 feel more like a linear, third person shooter Brazilian GTA side story than a true Max Payne sequel. Max Payne purists, those who loved the game for the narrative and portrayal, and Max Payne as a character, should probably keep your distance.
16 of 19 people found the following review helpful
By Bragabondio
Platform for Display:PC Download|Edition:Standard
I bought this game out of nostalgia (good memories from max 1 and 2) but while the visuals in the new game are stunning Rockstar Games have bundled the game with "social network" meaning ANOTHER DRM that you have to install in order to play. And this is where the fun starts to disappear. First my login was not remembered and I had to enter it every time I tried to play the the game . I said tried as many times the login did not work (although my password was correct). Second, none of the DLC codes I got from Steam worked! I entered them many times to no effect. Finally, as mentioned by others you can not save when you want (the game has check points like a console port that it may well be) that brings even more frustration as you have to watch unsinkable trailers over and over again. If I wanted a console I would have bought a console. I have no time, sorry for this crap anymore.
If this is the future of gaming (DRM on top of DRM - Steeam already has its own DRM) thank you but no thank you there are better ways to waste my money.
If this is the future of gaming (DRM on top of DRM - Steeam already has its own DRM) thank you but no thank you there are better ways to waste my money.
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Platform for Display:PC|Edition:Standard
Fun:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Max Payne 3 sees the return of the titular hero after a break of nine years. Remedy Entertainment, who made the first two games in the series, have moved on with their Alan Wake series of games, leaving Rockstar (best-known for the Grand Theft Auto series) to carry on their work. Whilst fans of the earlier games were dubious of this move, it was actually reasonably logical. Rockstar games often feature damaged protagonists trying to live better lives but being drawn back into a life of violence by circumstances, which is a perfect fit for Payne.
The game acts as a reboot of the series. References to the events of the first two games are minimal and, aside from a couple of flashback missions set in New York, the game is set in a different city in a different country with a very different culture (not to mention a different and un-translated language). The only constants are Max himself and, of course, his ability to slow down time to engage in combat.
Max Payne 3 is overwhelmingly impressive from a production values standpoint. The graphics are fantastic, with the game employing a vivid visual style. Keywords from conversations flash onto the screen and sometimes the action dissolves into line breaks and the colour desaturates, almost like you're watching the action on an old 1980s TV that is about to expire. The game's colour palette tends towards the bright and colourful, but there is a dark hue to everything. Sections set in crumbling warehouses or an abandoned hotel contrast the light and dark elements of the game's style. Animation is astonishing, with Max storing his weapons on his person and moving them around naturally to swap guns or take painkillers. The game feels like it's had a million dollars spent on every single minute of it (in sharp contrast to the low-budget feel of the first game, with its amateur cut scene actors).
The game's centerpiece is action and gunfights, and the title impresses in these areas. Combat is hard, fast and furious, with effective use of bullet time necessary to proceed. The game also employs a cover system, one of the more tiresome elements of modern action gaming, but the use of bullet time and headshots makes it mostly an optional feature with only a few moments where its use is necessary to proceed. More satisfyingly, the ludicrous modern gaming concept of 'regenerating health' has been thrown out of the window and replaced by Max's more familiar use of painkillers, adding a great deal of tension to the action sequences and requiring the player to plan attacks more intelligently than just charging in, knowing you can hide behind a box to get your health back. Unfortunately, bullet time has been gimped since the second game. There's only one level of bullet time (you don't get additional slowdowns when you shoot more people) and, ridiculously, it doesn't regenerate when you make kills. Given it is fairly slow to regenerate, a fair amount of combat has to take place without the use of the game's central mechanic and main selling-point, which seems strange.
The writing is okay, though Dan Houser's script is notably less funny, knowing or introspective than Sam Lake's work on the first two games. But it's reasonable and House deserves some props for moving Max on in his life, continuing his character arc and trajectory from the first two games. The other characters in the game are somewhat less successful, with no memorable equivalent to say Vladimir Lem or Mona Sax, but they do their job well enough. The change of setting is far more successful, with Săo Paulo (or, rather, the criminal underworld that is the main setting) presented as a dark, threatening city which is a perfect match for the semi-noir stylings of the series. This is backed up by the soundtrack (by American band Health), which is excellent.
So the game is well-made, with amazing production values, a decent story, some good characterisation and great action (if not quite as well-executed as the first two games). But there is a major problem. You see, the game doesn't actually like you playing it very much. For every minute you spend actually playing the game, it demands that you spend at least another watching it play itself, through intrusive use of lengthy, unskippable (as they hide loading sequences) and non-interactive cut scenes. Cut scenes are not just present at the start and end of each level with maybe a few reserved for major moments mid-level (the sort of structure the first two games employed), but they take place near-continuously. Frequently, opening a door will trigger a cut scene showing Max going through the door and taking cover before letting you resume control. This even happens if you've already flown through the door in shootdodge mode, resulting in frustrating (and continuity-breaking) moments where you could have wiped out a dozen bad guys in five seconds in bullet time but the game demands that you hide behind a counter instead and fire from cover. Cut scenes often kick in after you've dispatched the last bad guy in an area, taking you to a new area with no opportunity to loot the enemies for ammo (which is in fairly short supply throughout most of the game). There are also too many moments when the game has Max doing some really cool things (like diving between moving trains or jumping from an exploding rooftop onto a helicopter) when you don't have control.
Max Payne 3 is, of course, a linear action game and railroading is to be expected. Certainly the first two games had a lot of cut scenes and moments where player choice was taken away, but generally it was in areas where it made sense. They were also infrequent compared to the amount of time the player had control. Max Payne 3 actually seems to resent you doing anything other than what it wants you to, and punishes you if you try. During a shoot-out near a plane taking off, any attempt to jump onto the plane will result in a cut scene where a bad guy kills Max with a grenade, with Max standing there and unable to do anything. During a battle on a river dock, falling in the water will result in Max's instantaneous death, despite him being able to swim in a cut scene a minute later. Despite Max's ability to slow down time in gameplay, in a cut scene he runs into a room where a friend is being held hostage and is powerless to stop them being executed, despite the fact that if you had control you could wipe out everyone there in moments. The game also employs a checkpoint system rather than allowing quicksaves, resulting in the player sometimes having to repeat 10-15-minute long sequences if they are killed, which is simply unacceptable.
When it actually lets you play it, Max Payne 3 (***) features some intense and engrossing action sequences. However, the game makes the classic mistake of placing itself and its story (which is decent but nothing special) ahead of the enjoyment of the player. As a visual experience, Max Payne 3 is impressive and intermittently even brilliant, but as a game it's a frustrating let-down compared to the first two titles in the series.
The game acts as a reboot of the series. References to the events of the first two games are minimal and, aside from a couple of flashback missions set in New York, the game is set in a different city in a different country with a very different culture (not to mention a different and un-translated language). The only constants are Max himself and, of course, his ability to slow down time to engage in combat.
Max Payne 3 is overwhelmingly impressive from a production values standpoint. The graphics are fantastic, with the game employing a vivid visual style. Keywords from conversations flash onto the screen and sometimes the action dissolves into line breaks and the colour desaturates, almost like you're watching the action on an old 1980s TV that is about to expire. The game's colour palette tends towards the bright and colourful, but there is a dark hue to everything. Sections set in crumbling warehouses or an abandoned hotel contrast the light and dark elements of the game's style. Animation is astonishing, with Max storing his weapons on his person and moving them around naturally to swap guns or take painkillers. The game feels like it's had a million dollars spent on every single minute of it (in sharp contrast to the low-budget feel of the first game, with its amateur cut scene actors).
The game's centerpiece is action and gunfights, and the title impresses in these areas. Combat is hard, fast and furious, with effective use of bullet time necessary to proceed. The game also employs a cover system, one of the more tiresome elements of modern action gaming, but the use of bullet time and headshots makes it mostly an optional feature with only a few moments where its use is necessary to proceed. More satisfyingly, the ludicrous modern gaming concept of 'regenerating health' has been thrown out of the window and replaced by Max's more familiar use of painkillers, adding a great deal of tension to the action sequences and requiring the player to plan attacks more intelligently than just charging in, knowing you can hide behind a box to get your health back. Unfortunately, bullet time has been gimped since the second game. There's only one level of bullet time (you don't get additional slowdowns when you shoot more people) and, ridiculously, it doesn't regenerate when you make kills. Given it is fairly slow to regenerate, a fair amount of combat has to take place without the use of the game's central mechanic and main selling-point, which seems strange.
The writing is okay, though Dan Houser's script is notably less funny, knowing or introspective than Sam Lake's work on the first two games. But it's reasonable and House deserves some props for moving Max on in his life, continuing his character arc and trajectory from the first two games. The other characters in the game are somewhat less successful, with no memorable equivalent to say Vladimir Lem or Mona Sax, but they do their job well enough. The change of setting is far more successful, with Săo Paulo (or, rather, the criminal underworld that is the main setting) presented as a dark, threatening city which is a perfect match for the semi-noir stylings of the series. This is backed up by the soundtrack (by American band Health), which is excellent.
So the game is well-made, with amazing production values, a decent story, some good characterisation and great action (if not quite as well-executed as the first two games). But there is a major problem. You see, the game doesn't actually like you playing it very much. For every minute you spend actually playing the game, it demands that you spend at least another watching it play itself, through intrusive use of lengthy, unskippable (as they hide loading sequences) and non-interactive cut scenes. Cut scenes are not just present at the start and end of each level with maybe a few reserved for major moments mid-level (the sort of structure the first two games employed), but they take place near-continuously. Frequently, opening a door will trigger a cut scene showing Max going through the door and taking cover before letting you resume control. This even happens if you've already flown through the door in shootdodge mode, resulting in frustrating (and continuity-breaking) moments where you could have wiped out a dozen bad guys in five seconds in bullet time but the game demands that you hide behind a counter instead and fire from cover. Cut scenes often kick in after you've dispatched the last bad guy in an area, taking you to a new area with no opportunity to loot the enemies for ammo (which is in fairly short supply throughout most of the game). There are also too many moments when the game has Max doing some really cool things (like diving between moving trains or jumping from an exploding rooftop onto a helicopter) when you don't have control.
Max Payne 3 is, of course, a linear action game and railroading is to be expected. Certainly the first two games had a lot of cut scenes and moments where player choice was taken away, but generally it was in areas where it made sense. They were also infrequent compared to the amount of time the player had control. Max Payne 3 actually seems to resent you doing anything other than what it wants you to, and punishes you if you try. During a shoot-out near a plane taking off, any attempt to jump onto the plane will result in a cut scene where a bad guy kills Max with a grenade, with Max standing there and unable to do anything. During a battle on a river dock, falling in the water will result in Max's instantaneous death, despite him being able to swim in a cut scene a minute later. Despite Max's ability to slow down time in gameplay, in a cut scene he runs into a room where a friend is being held hostage and is powerless to stop them being executed, despite the fact that if you had control you could wipe out everyone there in moments. The game also employs a checkpoint system rather than allowing quicksaves, resulting in the player sometimes having to repeat 10-15-minute long sequences if they are killed, which is simply unacceptable.
When it actually lets you play it, Max Payne 3 (***) features some intense and engrossing action sequences. However, the game makes the classic mistake of placing itself and its story (which is decent but nothing special) ahead of the enjoyment of the player. As a visual experience, Max Payne 3 is impressive and intermittently even brilliant, but as a game it's a frustrating let-down compared to the first two titles in the series.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Big fan of this game since Version 1 ;L)
Love this game, and finished it in 4 days lol. Nice graphics, but the price was a little too much to pay for a game, and the updates are annoying very time you play!
Published 14 hours ago by linuxcult
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Game
I was just OK with the first two Max Payne games, but i really loved this one, particularly for the story telling. It was like playing through a crime novel. Read more
Published 11 days ago by C-T
2.0 out of 5 stars
What Happened?
After the first two games and a very long wait you'd expect a super game but all you get is a middle class game.
What a disappointment :(
What a disappointment :(
Published 13 days ago by AAR
2.0 out of 5 stars
IT'S MAX PAYNE MEETS MIAMI VICE!
Sadly, most of the game's detractors are correct. I really liked the original Max Payne and loved Max Payne 2. I've played both many times over. Read more
Published 17 days ago by PJ
5.0 out of 5 stars
Everything I Expected
Great game and was totally satisfied with the seller on Amazon. Would purchase again. Max Payne 3 on PC is definitely the best version of the game in my honest opinion because I... Read more
Published 1 month ago by sb
5.0 out of 5 stars
WOW
I played the original Max Payne video games, and this one is amazing. Max is older, but no less deadly. The slow mo sequences are still there and just as good. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Gary R. Smith
4.0 out of 5 stars
one of the better games of 2012
sandbox environment, good looking graphics, however sensitive on overclocked GPU. make sure if you run this game in an overclocked GPU, you feed it with enough juice.
Published 1 month ago by howie
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excelente juego!! Muy bien hecho!!!
Excelente juego!! Muy bien hecho!! El motor fisico es muuuy bueno, tremenda historia, interludios y cinematicas muy originales, los movimientos de los personajes son increibles y... Read more
Published 1 month ago by Dandarcia
2.0 out of 5 stars
Ugh!!
Spent 30 bucks on this direct download and found out right away that there were WAY too many cut-scenes in this game! Read more
Published 1 month ago by Wolfshead
1.0 out of 5 stars
Doesn't work - and no help from Rockstar
I have not yet successfully launched this application. Rockstar has been NO help. I signed up for their 'gaming environment / user interface / share site because I had NO valid... Read more
Published 1 month ago by Bill Brinkley
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Platform: PC Download | Edition: Standard
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