With GTA IV and Red Dead Redemption, that meant breaking up open world driving, riding and shooting (and, sigh, bowling) with extensive dialogue scenes that demonstrated voice work and cinematography a cut above the industry standard. Since Grand Theft Auto III, the company has steadily been working towards creating 40-hour films in video game form. Max Payne 3 represents Rockstar’s most blatantly Hollywood game yet. And every single battle is a showpiece for the game’s impressive visuals. For the most part, combat feels tough but fair-Max dies fast, but so do enemies, and the Last Man Standing mode provides an automatic bullet time shot at redemption as long as you have pain pills to spare. Only a few punishing checkpoints mar the game’s dozens of shootouts and set-piece moments. And Max can’t shoot anywhere at any time-he has to shuffle his feet and twist his body to fire off to the side, and recovering from a shoot-dodge makes Max vulnerable for a few seconds as he lies on the ground. To dual wield, he simply tosses it aside. To reload his pistols, he cradles it under his shoulder. The little touches Rockstar executes perfectly drive home the detail in Max Payne 3’s animation: Max has no sling or backpack to hold weapons, so he’ll carry a two-handed gun like a rifle in one hand as he trots through a level. Entering bullet time, unloading on half a dozen enemies, and then watching them all topple over is the best use of the Euphoria physics engine yet. Hand cannons blast enemies off their feet, while machine pistols will riddle them with bullets until they collapse. Shots to knees and groins will down thugs, while hits to the torso will send them staggering. Bullets rip apart flesh with a meaty so-good-it’s-almost-gross sound. Thanks to Rockstar’s motion capture work Max moves realistically even as he ridiculously shoots, dodges and dives through windows, over railings and around corners. And while Max is still crazy enough to stroll into a room filled with armed thugs, he’s doing it as private security in sunny São Paulo, with no sign of the delightfully cheesy and overwrought noir narrative that so heavily coated his first two stories.įully intact, however, is Max Payne’s bullet-time gunplay. Nine years after developer Remedy gave Max’s tormented soul some closure in The Fall of Max Payne, Rockstar has dragged him back into a world of sex, drugs, and gruesome murders for another round of punishment. He still mourns his dead wife and daughter, still pops pain pills to forget, still finds himself staring at the world through the bottom of a glass. May Payne is still playing it Bogart, but these days he wouldn’t phrase it that way.
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