Tuesday, October 9

Max Payne 3

It's good. It's also the second strongest case of cognitive dissonance I've dealt with in videogames this year.

Essentially, Max Payne says: Do you like noir? Drunks? Gallows humor? Dead women? THEN HAVE WE GOT SOMETHING FOR YOU!

The whole game is played through this visual patina of alcohol haze and I like that but it's not reflected anywhere else. You still shoot grenades out of the air, shootdodge (bullet time) through environments killing 4+ dudes at a time, etc. The superhero elements are not really diminished.

It's weird, having every other scene with Max essentially tell you what a fuckup he is but by god he can kill every last motherfucker in the room. Despite being hammered.

The only real complaint I have about MP3 is the complaint I have with any game of this type: Let's build an incredibly tense shooter on rails! Then, let's force players to get off the rails to find clues and special weapon drops, breaking the tension and any sort of immersion, because they need to find these other cool things.

Why do that? There must be a better way, mechanically, to integrate the elements of uncovering the conspiracy and getting better weapons than having the player stop everything they were doing that was fun, in order to run around and look for shiny gold pieces or scraps of paper. 

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