Backlog Beatdown: Diving through the air and going NOOOO!!! with Max Payne 3

I bought Max Payne 3 new last year. I’d played the first two games and liked them for the most part, and although the plot was consistently bleak and hard to enjoy, it fitted its theme well enough. I’ve been enjoying ‘kick back with a podcast, switch your brain off’ games lately so I didn’t want to pay too much attention to the plot, which is why it took me so long to play it. But with an unexpected day off work, I thought I’d give it a go, and was astonished to discover I’d played through the entire game in a weekend…

It never gets old. Never.

The series is a third-person shooter, with a gritty setting and a thoroughly depressing leading man in Max Payne. Its main gimmick is the “Bullet Time,” where you slow time down and give yourself more time to aim. You can also use this feature to shoot-dive, where you launch yourself in a direction and go into bullet time to shoot the enemies on the way down. And this never gets old. All those cinematic moments where this happens was available to play in a game for the first time with Max Payne, often imitated but never duplicated. Part of the charm is that the game is not afraid to let you fail; as it’s perfectly possible to go flying into a desk or a wall and de-rail the move entirely. You would think that this would make the move far too risky to be fun, but consider the alternative – Quick-time events that either couldn’t fail or won’t progress the game until it’s passed.

Max Payne 3 brought some new functionality to show for the eight years since the previous instalment: Typically for the seventh generation third-person action games, it included a cover system where you press a button to hide behind a wall. It meant I was using dive-shoot a lot less, but it works for the game. It also has one aforementioned quick-time event, which for once is properly utilised – to showcase the player character doing something not covered by the game mechanics. One addition for this game was the Last Man Standing function: If you take enough damage to die but you still have some healing items left, instead of dying the game goes into bullet-time mode and you have about six seconds to kill the enemy that mortally wounded you. If you manage it, the healing item is used and you carry on, but if you fail, you die. It’s less frustrating than dying when you’ve got painkillers left, but it’s not good to rely on it as sometimes the enemy who shot you will be blocked by cover or otherwise out of reach.

These takedowns are pretty cool too.

I found myself thinking that Max Payne 3 was the story Die Hard might have been if it had removed all the camp humour and was more grounded in reality. At this point, Rockstar were presenting their games very well, and Max Payne 3 is beautifully constructed with a staggering amount of attention to detail put into the environments. It dispenses with the graphic-novel style intermissions for fully-rendered cut scenes. The plot, while standard and with lot holes, nonetheless has a sense of desperate urgency that compels you to keep going. The soundtrack is incredible; atmospheric and complimentary to the scenes, and I’m far from the only person to have found Tears by Health an utterly mesmerising piece of music. The only slight mis-step is Max himself, who in an effort to convey what the past couple of decades have meant for him, refuses to see any light in any situation. Even the few positive remarks he makes are laced with self-deprecation. I understand the man had been through a lot, and hadn’t looked after himself in between times, but lifting his sense of humour a little would have made all the difference.

After one play-through, I’ve barely touched on the game’s content; there are collectables, achievement points and even a multiplayer mode. But as a story told, Max Payne 3 was a very intense experience that I won’t be returning to any time soon. Give it a go if you’re up for it. Just don’t expect a happy day!