After nine very long and prosperous years, Rockstar finally released a third instalment to their Max Payne series.
Max Payne in June 2001. A marvel of its time, scoring near-perfect scores with the critics. Winning tons of awards. A great plot, great graphical detail of its time and never before seen gameplay features.
Max Payne 2 in October 2003. A practical story add-on to the first, only scoring lower than the first because of its short length. More countless awards, and the same marvellous plot-telling device; the Comic Strip.
Finally earlier this year, Max Payne 3. A completely redefined game. The same basic mechanics, but is completely different from the first two. Amazing graphical detail. Excellent story. Even more bad-ass shoot-dodge moments. "Grind" challenges which don't feel like "grinds" at all, because the game is just so replayable.
Out of 20 big-name critic companies, only THREE were silly enough to score below 80% (or 8/10, or 4/5...). Personally the game scores a 9.9 out of 10 with me. The only reason why it wasn't 10, was because of the graphics options on PC. No matter how good your graphics card is, you can't choose all options to maximum, unless you have a high amount of VRAM (2 Gigabytes or more).
For example. My Radeon 4890 could easily run the game on maximum settings (with AA and AF activated from the CCC rather than in-game). I still had to sacrifice some settings to bypass the "memory limit" that is in place. Why Rockstar?
Now onto gameplay elements.
Enemies are challenging, even on easy. Health bottles are scarce. Shoot-dodge time only seems to recharge with kills. Friendly AI is useless (aren't they all?). Golden gun upgrades are cool, but you should have an option to turn them on or off. This makes for a challenging game which might sound a little teeny bit flawed in theory, but plays amazingly well. To get the full story, I suggest you play through the first two games first. You can download them as Xbox Classics on Xbox LIVE for 800msp each (estimated).
Recommendations for improvement.
More health pills on easy difficulty for new players (my first playthrough was on easy, second on hard, for the record...), more shoot-dodge time for all difficulties, 10% more enemies, less cinematics.
Now you may notice there is no multiplayer segment. The reason for that is; all multiplayers are the same for shooter games. You run around, shoot sh*t up. I will never review multiplayer.
Thank you for reading guys. Here is a gameplay trailer to finish it off.
Max Payne in June 2001. A marvel of its time, scoring near-perfect scores with the critics. Winning tons of awards. A great plot, great graphical detail of its time and never before seen gameplay features.
Max Payne 2 in October 2003. A practical story add-on to the first, only scoring lower than the first because of its short length. More countless awards, and the same marvellous plot-telling device; the Comic Strip.
Finally earlier this year, Max Payne 3. A completely redefined game. The same basic mechanics, but is completely different from the first two. Amazing graphical detail. Excellent story. Even more bad-ass shoot-dodge moments. "Grind" challenges which don't feel like "grinds" at all, because the game is just so replayable.
Out of 20 big-name critic companies, only THREE were silly enough to score below 80% (or 8/10, or 4/5...). Personally the game scores a 9.9 out of 10 with me. The only reason why it wasn't 10, was because of the graphics options on PC. No matter how good your graphics card is, you can't choose all options to maximum, unless you have a high amount of VRAM (2 Gigabytes or more).
For example. My Radeon 4890 could easily run the game on maximum settings (with AA and AF activated from the CCC rather than in-game). I still had to sacrifice some settings to bypass the "memory limit" that is in place. Why Rockstar?
Now onto gameplay elements.
Enemies are challenging, even on easy. Health bottles are scarce. Shoot-dodge time only seems to recharge with kills. Friendly AI is useless (aren't they all?). Golden gun upgrades are cool, but you should have an option to turn them on or off. This makes for a challenging game which might sound a little teeny bit flawed in theory, but plays amazingly well. To get the full story, I suggest you play through the first two games first. You can download them as Xbox Classics on Xbox LIVE for 800msp each (estimated).
Recommendations for improvement.
More health pills on easy difficulty for new players (my first playthrough was on easy, second on hard, for the record...), more shoot-dodge time for all difficulties, 10% more enemies, less cinematics.
Now you may notice there is no multiplayer segment. The reason for that is; all multiplayers are the same for shooter games. You run around, shoot sh*t up. I will never review multiplayer.
Thank you for reading guys. Here is a gameplay trailer to finish it off.
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