Wield those weapons
AI has dramatically improved as well, and while enemies still run out in droves to attack, they don't do so in the same mindless fashion as before. Instead, they now take better cover behind walls themselves and throw grenades more strategically as they flush you out at every opportunity.
Diving with wails
A new feature, 'Last Man Standing', sees a face-off with an enemy close to taking Max's remaining life capacity. If you shoot down the guy before he kills you first, you take a painkiller and continue. This can happen quite a lot if you're not careful, especially in a room brimming with gunfire. Wipe out all your enemies and you're rewarded with a prolonged, follow-the-bullet shot of your final kill.
Gamers can even slow this down further, watching ammo pierce enemies at snail speed. It soon loses its novelty, but for the sadistic Payne killer players (possibly all of them) they'll be sure get their money's worth of gore.
Banging stuff
As with the previous Max Payne epic, when the campaign mode ends, you're desperate for more – yearning to engage in fresh levels without another decade of waiting.
Fortunately, multiplayer is a whole new game in itself. Usually on-line modes are thrown into games like this as a means of necessity, but with Max Payne 3, the on-line multiplayer is ridiculously addictive and stands on its own. It incorporates the bullet time feature ingeniously and offers the ability to build your own gang of mates to play Payne, as well as future Rockstar games together, through the publisher's Social Club feature.
Payne in the gang
Verdict
The single player campaign doesn't quite match up to the more varied experience of Uncharted 3, but as interactive movie-like shooters go, Max Payne still takes some beating. The man himself may have aged but his bullet-time antics feel as newfangled as ever. Max Payne 3 is a seriously awesome game that you'll keep playing until both your favourite drinking arms ache. ®
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Max Payne 3
COMMENTS
That's not Max Payne!
Max Payne looks more (or less) exactly like Sam Lake.
Max Payne was your average looking guy with a lean, even skinny, physique. That was part of the charm of the character, he wasn't the typical muscle bound, square jawed meat head of your typical action hero. The guy pictured in those screenshots looks nothing like Max. That's just lame.
Looking forward to the PC version
I pre-ordered the PC version on Steam last weekend, since they're throwing in MP1 and 2 as well, all for £29.99. I haven't played the first two in ages, so I think that will make a nice appetizer while we wait for 3. Hopefully the PC version will be even better than the console version.
No PC version at release? Did you forget which market gave this game its success? Or are you making sure we don't get another day-1 patch for the game as we did with Max Payne 1? (Which couldn't save games at release - no, really!)
Re: That's not Max Payne!
Exactly. Max's permanent "turtling" facial expression was all part of the first game's charm.
On the plus side, he doesn't look like Mark Wahlberg, either.
Yet another game made for console and badly ported to a much better platform - the PC
Almost every single game made for console and ported to PC has kept all the lame parts of console UI and taken none of the good parts of PC performance.
The exceptions to that rule can be counted on the fingers of one hand, so don't go thinking that your favorite is one of them - it probably isn't.
Oh, the AI is better at flushing you out now ? Gosh, they've almost reached the performance of Half-Life circa 2004. Congratulations !
No, sorry. Doesn't wash with me. I don't care about the pretty effects or the bullet-time, if a game cannot code its AI as good as something made close to a decade ago, I feel like I'm wasting my time.
