It's been 9 years since we last saw Max, and he's a lot worse for the wear. He's taken a job with his pal Raul Passos to guard a rich Brazilian family, the Brancos, but the whole thing soon goes to s*** like you'd expect with anything Max touches. Then things go terribly wrong for Max and the Brancos. The story takes you from the luxury penthouses and yachts to the filthy favelas-the Sao Paulo slums, but if you've read the other reviews, you know the story, so we'll go on from there.
There have been some pretty scathing reviews from the Amazon users, but I beg to differ. So I'll give you the good and the bad from my perspective.
First it's a huge game, it comes on 4 DVD's. I bought the disks because I knew it would take forever to download.
What do you get on all of those disks? You're getting an interactive movie for good or ill. That brings us to the "cut scenes". This really plays like a movie. The acting and dialogue are top notch. The buddy movie type banter between Max and Passos, while you've seen it before in most buddy cop movies, they've done a good job here, there are some solid laughs. James McCaffrey does the voice for Max and Julian Dean does Passos and both are excellent, I especially like the interaction when Max and Passos are dealing with the mafia baddies in New Jersey. It almost makes you forget you're playing a video game. Many reviewers complain the cut scenes are too long, but they are important to the story, and the action weaves seamlessly between the cut scenes and where Max goes to work. If you want to just go blast stuff, you can do that in the "Arcade Mode", but if you want to work through the story, the game really pays off.
The graphics and the look of the game are great, almost cinematic in quality and the sound quality is also great. The background neighborhoods and buildings and are well done and the characters move well and have a great look. There's an excellent feel to the whole game.
What about the gameplay? It's a tough game. I died many, many times at Medium difficulty. As the game goes on, you have to aim better to get a kill. This means you basically have to get a headshot to drop the bad guys towards the end. SInce this is a third person shooter, the controls can be a little awkward and clunky, but the motion capture they've done works extremely well. There are some nice little touches, like the routine when Max tries to get through a locked door, it's not the rattling of a door knob like on most games, he thumps it with his body; they've done the little things to get it right.
The down side of the third person shooter is the aiming and moving around the environment. You can't jump over things, or climb on things. You're pretty much stuck on the ground. I also found it hard to locate the aiming dot when coming out of a cut scene or coming out from behind a barrier when you're surrounded and getting shot up. It takes a lot of finger dexterity to keep Max from standing up from behind a safe spot and to get him to fire at the bad guys without exposing himself to some withering gunfire. Until you get this down, you will die. A lot.
In order to protect yourself from getting shot to pieces, they've added a cover mechanic, so you can hide protected behind a wall or a column and then peek out to fire from the position. They've also brought back bullet-time and you can dive forward, to the side or backwards and fire at the bad guys in slow motion. There are many, many times that this is the only way to get through the level without getting killed.
So this brings us to the parental advisory. This is a game for mature gamers. The language is very course, they don't hold backon the cursing, and it is pretty gory. You will see, close up, what the damage that guns and machetes do to the human body. There is one particularly gruesome scene where Max tracts down a machete wielding slum gangster who has just done a whole body necklace on a poor retch (burning someone in a stack of tires), and then Max goes hand to hand with the thug. If you miss the blocking maneuver you get the full effect of a machete to Max's neck. It's not pretty. There's lots of blood and gore, but that's what you sign up for when you get involved with Max.
Once you've gotten through the story, there's a multiplayer feature for online play. I've only done this a little, but the maps are very good, the action is well done, and the gameplay (for the short amount of time I did it) was very fair. Even as a new player I was able to get in some very decent game play without massacred every time I spawned. This should be very playable for a long time to come, and makes the game a very good value.
What are the downsides? Having to install and go through Rockstar's Social Club is kind of a pain. You have to log on to your account through the Social Club to play the game. It's not as bad as EA's Origin, but I'd like to play a game I paid $50 for without having to log on through your anti-piracy game control to play my game.
Also as I said before the controls are a little awkward and the camera is in a few spots hard to manage, but this is easily dealt with. One small personal gripe, I'd like to be able to explore a bit without being told exactly what to do. Like put the explosives here, push this button or pull this lever, or use this keyboard combination to fight the bad guy, or do through this particular door. But this is happening with all games, so I suppose that players expect this from the game makers.
As far as the mechanics of the game, I had no problems with loading from the DVD's or getting the game authorized through Rockstar. I played a 1024x768 with all of the graphics set on High using a middle of the road graphics card, and the game looked and played great. I suppose those with a high powered gaming rig would have even a better experience.
In summary:
Don't believe the bad reviews here on Amazon. The gaming sites and magazines all gave this game excellent reviews and I agree with them. It's not perfect but it's pretty damn good. This is definitely a worthy successor to the first two Max Payne games.
**Great Game Play
**Excellent acting and story line, I liked the dialogue between Max and Passos.
**Don't mind the cut scenes, they really make for a solid story
**If you want to shoot things up and avoid the story and some (but not all) cut scenes, go to Arcade mode
**Outstanding graphics and sound
**Lots of nice little touches
**Multiplayer looks very promising for long term play
**How can you go wrong with an depressed alcoholic ex-cop with a death wish who doesn't take s*** from anyone?
If you're sitting on the fence on whether to buy it or not, I'd say go for it if you liked the first two Max Payne games and if you like third person shooters.
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