Max Payne 3 isn’t one of these games. You’re left with the
feeling they had an idea, downed some jelly beans and then ran with it. It is boldly
violent, unapologetically vulgar and narrated in language that adds flesh to
its character’s bones.
Nine years have gone by since Max Payne 2 and the titular
character remains defined by the memories of his butchered family. To ease the
pain he pops painkillers as if they're TicTacs and washes them down with scotch
neat.
When the game starts, Max is hired muscle working a security
detail for the wealthy Branco family in São Paulo, Brazil. In a town burdened
by poverty, flooded with drugs and perverted by prostitution, Max watches the
Branco family attend night clubs in helicopters and party on lavish yachts.
When the time comes for his services to be rendered, the clichéd trophy wife
gets kidnapped and things slowly spiral out of control.
As Max wreaks havoc in search of the missing wife—and
ensuing red herrings—the game elegantly flashes back to his days in Hoboken,
New Jersey, explaining how the gun-yielding, bullet-dodging anti-hero ended up
in God’s forsaken city, stuck between the past and the present:
The way I see it,
there’s two types of people. Those who spend their lives trying to build their
future, and those who spend their lives trying to rebuild the past. For too
long I’ve been stuck in between, hidden in the dark, locked on a course of destruction.
At times, Max’s story seems stretched for the sake of
facilitating gameplay. There are always more goons around every corner, more
guns to pick up, more pills to pop. But it evades complacent repetition through
gritty language:
“When you’re stuck in
a foreign country and don’t know the words for “reverse charges” and you’re in
some lonely skin joint in the middle of some poor slum and just had every last
cent robbed from you and you call yourself a bodyguard, then you know you’re a
loser."
The latest Max Payne shifts the role of storytelling from
the traditional graphic novel to cinematic cut scenes. Just like a Tony Scott
film, images are distorted and the action is contextualised by keywords that
flash on the screen, as if you’re looking at the world through Max’s drunken
eyes.
This world couldn’t feel as authentic if it wasn’t for the graphics.
Each venue is unique, characterised by its own garbage, street scum, colouring
and layout. When people walk, run and shoot they appear natural, as does the
blood that sprouts from their wounds. Max himself appears life-like, to the
extent you believe his chiselled wrinkles were born from tragedy and raised by
alcohol.
Players get a unique chance to look at this world during
bullet time sequences, where, in the midst of heavy gun fire, Max leaps from
cover and discharges bullets in slow motion. There are countless situations
where bullet time livens gameplay; in fact, most gamers will be scanning the
room, hoping someone else is witnessing the awesome spectacle every time they
give it a whirl.
When gamers finish the long story mode, they can reap more
value from multiplayer modes. Although no Call of Duty, it is a cut above the
norm for Rockstar, and handles the addition of bullet time with ease. If one
player engages in bullet time, both characters slow down. How much gameplay
slows down is based upon the distance between two players, where the closer
they are, the slower time elapses, and vice versa.
Between the colourful language, unapologetic plot, smooth-as
graphics and the fleshed out characters, the successor to the Max Payne series
faithfully recreates the hard-boiled attitude gamers around the world fell in
love with. It brings a level of engagement familiar to profound cinema, and will
leave an impression that resonates longer than usual. This, then, is a worthy
addition, carrying the beloved legacy forward and not just cashing in on the
name.
By Tony Ibrahim
By Tony Ibrahim
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