Game rating: Max Payne 3

[Binnatics]

Game title
Max Payne 3

Category	Rating	Comments
Story line	10	Max.... Payne. Max.... Payne. Max.... Payne!!!   That in fact, says it all. This story is about Max Payne. Our Dumb-Move-Guy. Our Drunken American Has-Been in a Brazilian Never-Was. The story carries us away from our comfortable home and takes us to a place where things are simple. As long as you have enough booze, smokes and pills to take the pain away, and enough bullets to keep the bad-guys at a comfortable distance, Max will guide you through a movie-like gameplay where you are the excellent shooter. The one that never misses, has eyes in his back and knows what his enemies are up to. You get involved in one of the most messy criminal organizations where you meat the most cruel people on earth. My first impression was; "When will I ever get to control this Max Payne guy? I only see the game take care of all the w@&k??!!" But I learned to live with it, and in fact, those cutscenes are worth looking at more than once. They are bloody entertaining. Whether you like the story or not, it's damn good. It's complete, with care for detail, and perfectly built around a character we all can relate to. Well, men at least, and since we don't have any female members who gives a f***
Graphics	9	The graphics in the game are extremely good. So much care for detail and so much effort taken into emerging the game with reality of the local environment and habits of the people living there ( hope JRD that you agree with me, but the way I know Peru and it's ghettoes I do think the game gives a correct impression of the Favela and the rest of Sao Paolo). I was surprised to see the detail on the Panama mission where the local signs were suddenly in Spanish and English instead of Portuguese. The spoken language also changed correspondingly but that's another matter. For being a movie-like game where you 'may follow the footsteps of the principal' the only thing I'd wish for is to make things look even more real, in not showing the sharp lines of the character models but make them merge into the environment a bit more so that it's less recognizable as computer animations. Besides of that, it looks all marvellous. Especially the way water and fire are acting is very realistic. If you walk through a burning building you can almost smell the smoke around you, and when you walk through a jungle village with poring rain you almost get wet yourself.
Sound	10	I think Rockstar has put much w@&k into showing realistic local voice acting. I can only understand a poor but of the Portuguese spoken by the Brazilians, but you can feel the difference between the Favela accent and the rest of the people. It all seems pretty real to me. I was surprised when acting in Panama; suddenly you hear them talk Spanish. The way tyhe Brazilians are talking English is also something. :) Then the in-game music. That adds up the pressure!!!! I like the songs a LOT!!! The way they make the game emerge around your head (I use a headphones fore the audio) is marvellous. The sounds effects are very good. I think the sounds is the best part in the game. It makes me want to buy the soundtrack, if there is one available, something that only happened to me in GTA San Andreas before.
Game play	8	I have to be honest about the gameplay. It's good, but not perfect. Although I realised that it's getting better and better when you grow in skill. The bullet-time is worked out very well. The way you get hurt (or not) is damn realistic and demands certain skills to survive. That adds up the joy you experience when coming through a scene with almost no damage taken and a fast playthrough time. Where the game hangs a bit, is in situations where you get out of bullet-dodge, and want to go on with your next move. For example; you are in cover. You might use your bullet-time-bar and shoot from cover to oyer enemies, but you want to dive out of cover and shoot that ba$t@rd that's behind a small wall; so you jump-dodge, kill the guy plus another one or two guys in front of you. You prepare your dive in a way that you will land near something else that you can also use as cover. But when coming out of bullet-dodge slo-mo, pressing the button for getting into cover again, your character Max Payne first gets up a bit clumsy and then walks towards cover. He'll be a colander before reaching the cover. There are more situations like thatone where one action won't go smoothly into the next, which makes you stumble over chairs and tables like in the middle of a drunken bar-fight. Besides those small issues, the gameplay is perfect. Getting better all the time, when adding my own experience. For example, I found out you can grab a gun on the floor while running by performing a somersault without losing speed. The fact that you have to wait for all these cutscenes in-between, and the fact that the game is pretty linear, are simply justified by the challenges you face when actually shooting. The way the game offers you killcams and slomo action is so well emerged in the entire gaming experience that you get easily used to it and finally use it to your own benefits.
Replay value	9	This game won't stop after the first playthrough. Like any good movie you wan to experience the story again and again. I'm now starting my third playthrough, and still won't skip a single cutscene. They're so damn good. And in fact on the higher difficulty settings, they are a welcome rest and sort of a reward for fighting your way through just another tough situation. After doing regular playthroughs, there's all sorts of arcade games. One of which I have already tested; the New York Minute. The objective there is to rush through a mission the fastest possible. You can of course rank up in global rankings to see how fast you are compared to the rest of the world. A bit of a bummer is the fact the the top 1000 probably are cheaters ::) Anyway that's where you learn to make real good use of your Max Payne skills. It reminds me of the challenges in Batman, where you finally came to make real good use of your fighting abilities in tough situations with lots of bad guys. It's also nice for the ones that DID get bored of the cutscenes and want to play a game with a bit more action. Then there's multiplayer. I haven't yet tried it out, but from what I've heard about it so far it's promising and will add to the total hours I will spend in this game.

Final thoughts
Rockstar created a fine product. Although it's not open-world like GTA or Red Dead Redemption, it's a complete product. The main gameplay is shooting. And the way they fit this into a movie-like game is worth a high ranking.
Shooting is simple; aim, fire, BANG! dead. But they added a new dimension to it, without moving from the main theme; shooting. No steering vehicles, no climbing, running or trying to hide; 90% of what you do has directly to do with putting bullets into another man's bodies.
Rockstar puts you into a huge shooting gallery while even following a great story worth living through!!

Bravo! :bow

[Art Blade]

Excellent review. :) +1  :-X

I was a bit disappointed by the graphics at first but it got better and better in the game so indeed, like you said, details are convincing. And indeed, the more experience you get due to playing for some time, the better the gameplay gets.

[PZ]

Nicely done, Binn; +1 from me too!  :-X

[fragger]

Excellent review Binn, thanks for that +1 :-X

[Binnatics]

I re-read some game reviews of my own because I'm facing a problem that is bugging me for more than half a year; I'm afraid I will only give tens to GTA V. I thought waiting would be the option; I would discover flaws in the game, get disappointed, bored, you name it.

Anyway, this was one of the reviews that I read again and I still fully agree with it. When I wrote this review I hadn't played much MP yet. And I hadn't completed New York Minute Hardcore. That last bit is probably the most difficult achievement I've ever come across. It basically demands you to do the entire playthrough on hard difficulty without dying once. And no, there's no option saving your game and rechange. You have to do it in one single go. Talking about replay value.

The multiplayer is a bit buggy. Somehow R* designs its MP games in a way that there's always one or two players having a short advantage on the rest. Whether it is the amount of damage they do to enemies, or a simple half a second of time advantage. That makes the MP fail as a real good MP game. Besides that, it's got everything. The LVL design is good, the lobby system is good, the different game modes are challenging and good. They also designed a cool feature to make your own crew. You can recruit other players and together you can compete against other crews as an extra in MP gameplay. Besides the normal Team Deathmatch you can also fight a war between two opponing crews in the same match. And it works; there's a group of hardcore players that keep on playing the game and fight for their crew against others.
Sadly so, there are cheaters. You will come across some guys who use godmode or more hidden cheat benefits. The core community is against it though, and that makes up a lot. You can become part of one of the pure crews if you are a good player. I've played many hours in MP and will probably return to it in the future.

Having said that, I still face the problem I am up to.... will I really rank GTA V (and its Online parallel universe) the highest rank ever? I probably will. I got to start with it already.... keep you posted ^-^

[PZ]

Nice, BinnZ!

[fragger]

It's hard to find fault with something that has nothing wrong with it :)

Maybe that should be your main criticism of the game: "Can't find anything to gripe about" :-()

[Art Blade]

 :-D