Beautiful natural feeling graphics. Fairly well detailed and smooth running. It has a unique style that is very entertaining. There is a very nicely woven storyline that really holds your interest throughout. Bullet time is very well crafted. 360 shooting while on the ground is a nice touch. Shooting from cover is also well achieved.
Cons
Multiplayer is not as great as I was hoping. It is a bit clunky and only mildly entertaining. Sort of reminds me of the Alan Wake controls and the aiming system reminds me of Red Dead Redemption. Bullet time can sometimes actually hinder your game play. There a few weird clipping issues. Sometimes when you shoot an enemy they will just stand there frozen, and eventually fall.
Review
I must say I am impressed and a little surprised with what they have done with Max Payne. I have been building this game up in my head for the past few years since I first caught wind of it and I must say it has met and beat my expectations. The game is very well put together. There is intense action, a lot of violence, and a carefully woven story that is peppered with flashbacks and poetic cut scenes. The single player campaign is roughly 10 hours long and the trophies are split up between single player and multiplayer, though there are a few more single player trophies. Fans of the original games will enjoy this very much. I have a feeling that newcomers may gravitate more toward the multiplayer side of the game, while us old timers play Max Payne for the gripping story and the depressed main characters drunken inner monologue.
One little pet peeve of mine in games is when they take the control away from the player, well due to all the loading cut scenes they do take the control away quite often and have varying length cut scenes. It does get annoying after a while and for the most part you cannot skip the cut scenes as it is loading the next section. However I rather sit through a cut scene than a empty loading screen.
As a huge Max Payne series fan, I was a little insulted by them adding multiplayer, though it is mildly fun and entertaining and like any multiplayer game it greatly depends on who you are playing with. Other reviews are saying this third installment in the Max Payne series has drifted from its roots. I agree and disagree. It has been almost 10 years since Max Payne 2 came out and the game needed a facelift. It is still Max Payne, however they have gone above and beyond to make this a new gaming experience yet still hold on to the classic aspects we look for. Max is old, I felt as bad for him as I did for Bruce Willis in Die Hard 4. He still has it though! Max's sad poetic dialogue, painkillers, and bullet time are all here. The game is very violent and intense, mostly seen in bullet time slow-mo kills showing the bullets flying through your enemies like a grapefruit.
The game is very smooth and stable and I have had no issues with glitching or lagging. At one point a multiplayer game did freeze up (the game, not the system) on me and it restarted within 30 seconds and took me back to the multiplayer menu.
Over-all I am very happy with Max Payne 3. It has lived up to my expectations and the hype. However keep in mind it is a single player game, with a less than perfect multiplayer game latched onto the single player for survival. The style is great; it is like a Heavy Rain and L.A. Noire and a Tony Scott (especially Man on Fire) film all in one. It is highly entertaining and the dialogue is fun and holds your interest throughout the game play. The loading times are hidden in the cut scenes, so there are many long cut scenes and they do seem to interrupt often, so if you are looking for a shoot um' up style game you'll get it with MP3, however you'll have to sit through the cut scenes first.
I really enjoyed this game, the story was good, the controls were easy, the game looks great, and its a lot of fun. My only knock on the game was Max's voice overs in between chapters and him always whining. It got old and I was wishing I could skip through them because they didn't offer much to the game. But very fun game.
No
