“I knew that if I was going to get the girl back, I was going to have to go after them like a Man on Fire. And if I had to die doing it, well, I'd Die Hard...” That all has to be said in the graveliest possible voice, of course. Rockstar can have that one for the Max Payne 3 DLC, if it wants. It'll be a perfect fit.
So, Max Payne is back in all his gun-toting, Bruce Willis-esque glory. Nine whole years after the last game in the series and with developer Remedy having shifted over so Rockstar could develop this one. This time out the dingy streets of New York have been largely left behind in favour of the more colourful terror on offer in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
It's been a while since Max buried his wife and child and he's spent much of the time living out of a bottle. You know, 'trying to forget', being 'too weak to face this life, too strong to end it'. I'm not quoting directly here, but I think I'm tapping into the seam Rockstar's mining. While the opening scene featuring Max wallowing in his own fag ash could have been ripped straight from an old Chandler novel, however, many of the aesthetic noir trappings of the previous games have been left behind. Sao Paulo is not, after all, New York or LA. Instead of deep shadows and venetian blinds, we get a Sao Paulo reminiscent of over-ripe, slightly rotten fruit, all bright colours and decay.
But while the look of the game may depart from the established tropes of noir, there's much that's recognisable here. A wealthy family under siege, a beautiful, kidnapped woman(/broad/dame), a deadbeat hardman/detective trying to save her and redeem himself, 'gritty' metaphor-laden narration. It's all in there.
It's a welcome shift, if extremely reminiscent of
Man on Fire.
The good news for
Max Payne fans, basically, is that you get exactly what you expect. Third-person gun-fights, bullet time, a heavy focus on hard-boiled narrative. Ask for a unique selling point and you won't get a very good answer. Bullet time was pretty innovative back in 2001. Not so much these days. That's not to say there's nothing to recommend it, though. It does what it does pretty well.
The bullet time in question is front and centre in any given firefight. I'm one of those guys who tends to hoard special abilities, but I learned early on that hoarding the bullet-time allowance you've built up won't get you very far. The shoot-outs are fast and furious. Try to take people on without using bullet time and you
will get shot up. As your health bar doesn't automatically refill, getting shot up is undesirable. Use your capacity for bullet time freely and you might just navigate the storm of bullets around you safely. Bullet time might be a fairly bog-standard, old-hat feature of shooters these days, but there's still something thrilling about taking out enemies in slow motion as bullets whizz past your ears.
