William
Spy
- Joined
- Jan 12, 2010
- Messages
- 63
- Reaction score
- 11
I'll try to avoid any spoilers from this post, but if you are really sensitive to such things you should just stop reading now.
Last night I finished my first play-through of Max Payne 3. I played the game from two perspectives and I will try to cover both of them.
First perspective is as a Max Payne fan.
Overall the game was quite fun, compared to most AAA games the story was both moderately deep and interesting. I wouldn't say it was very engaging though. The game has way too many cut-scenes. It took me 15 hours to beat the game first run and I guarantee half of that was watching cut-scenes. At one point my wife turned to me and said "Do you actually get to play that game?". Driving narration through uncontrolled methods is never a good thing, as such, the levels and the environments feel very disconnected from each other.
The gun-play was pretty solid... it took some getting used to. I did my first play through on Hard for achievement purposes and found the learning curve to be quite steep; even as a past Max Payne enthusiast. As with the previous games there was a strong emphasis on pistols and every other weapon came secondary. There were sniper rifles and grenade launchers, but their novelty uses were kept to a minimum. No grenades. The game assumes you are going to over-use bullet-time... so after a while it becomes habit to turn it on before every shot -- which kinda defeats the purpose. Unlike other Max Payne games I found I had no use for the shoot dodge.
The overall theme of the game was unlike other Max Payne games, which was a bit of a disappointment. The narration stayed true to the 'film noir' genre, but the atmosphere did not, which created some really bad feelings of juxtaposition. The original Max Paynes had a dark, gritty, depressing atmosphere filled with self loathing, depressing, and sorrow. Everything from the dark cold streets of New York to the abandoned crack houses. Max Payne 3 has a vibrant atmosphere, once you look past the shooting gangsters. Even in the poorest of neighbourhoods it's hard to find an area without some sorta techno-upbeat-oversexualized-rave party. When you have house music blaring in the background while Max is delivering a deep inner monologue it sorta breaks the context and makes Max seem like an emo bitch.
Aside from the theme of the game being terribly off balance, I felt the actual set design was fantastic... you could tell a lot of work had gone into creating some of the more interesting and complex areas like the slums of San Palo.
Some other things that I enjoyed was the fact that Max was really labelled as a dumb American, even in the game play mechanics... i.e. Max, and the player, doesn't actually understand the language of the country. I thought this was a really neat decision -- the developers could have added English subtitles for the forign languages but they deliberately kept you and Max out of the loop. Almost immediately hinting that "Max didn't know the true story, and the truth was right out in front of him". I was hoping after my first play-through Max would have "learnt" the language and the subtitles would unlock for future play-throughs, but alas, no such luck.
Second perspective is as an achievement Hunter.
I played the game on Hard so I could get all the difficulty achievements right off the bat, I grinded every collectible (which were more or less right out in the open). And completed every chapter related achievement, which were "kill x amount of people during x pre-scripted shootdodge" (which got old real fast).
Playing on Hard right off the bat was very frustrating... the first two chapters of the game were extremely difficult. Looking back this was probably a really bad decision, but I got through it!
Most achievements are stat based... get x amount of headshots... get x amount of arm shots... etc. The majority of them you can get in your first play-through and the subsequent ones will likely unlock as I go through the next sets of difficulties that unlock.
I started the "Hardcore" run this morning and it seems way easier than the "Hard" run. Mostly because I'm not used to the gun-play.
The cutscenes are a big issue... the are practically unskippable if you are not running your game on a SSD -- and since the game is almost 40gigs most people won't really have that option. It's to the point where a new chapter will load and I will go fold laundry because the cut-scene is almost 5mins long and you can't skip it until the very end.
I completed the first two chapters in less than 30mins -- so my next set of play-throughs will be quite short.
As an achievement hunter I appreciate the addition of "chapter select", which exists in Max Payne 3, they even have "checkpoint select" where you can start from specific checkpoints... awesome for achievement hunting.
I'll probably post a bit more about achievement hunting once I finish a few more play-throughs.
Last night I finished my first play-through of Max Payne 3. I played the game from two perspectives and I will try to cover both of them.
First perspective is as a Max Payne fan.
Overall the game was quite fun, compared to most AAA games the story was both moderately deep and interesting. I wouldn't say it was very engaging though. The game has way too many cut-scenes. It took me 15 hours to beat the game first run and I guarantee half of that was watching cut-scenes. At one point my wife turned to me and said "Do you actually get to play that game?". Driving narration through uncontrolled methods is never a good thing, as such, the levels and the environments feel very disconnected from each other.
The gun-play was pretty solid... it took some getting used to. I did my first play through on Hard for achievement purposes and found the learning curve to be quite steep; even as a past Max Payne enthusiast. As with the previous games there was a strong emphasis on pistols and every other weapon came secondary. There were sniper rifles and grenade launchers, but their novelty uses were kept to a minimum. No grenades. The game assumes you are going to over-use bullet-time... so after a while it becomes habit to turn it on before every shot -- which kinda defeats the purpose. Unlike other Max Payne games I found I had no use for the shoot dodge.
The overall theme of the game was unlike other Max Payne games, which was a bit of a disappointment. The narration stayed true to the 'film noir' genre, but the atmosphere did not, which created some really bad feelings of juxtaposition. The original Max Paynes had a dark, gritty, depressing atmosphere filled with self loathing, depressing, and sorrow. Everything from the dark cold streets of New York to the abandoned crack houses. Max Payne 3 has a vibrant atmosphere, once you look past the shooting gangsters. Even in the poorest of neighbourhoods it's hard to find an area without some sorta techno-upbeat-oversexualized-rave party. When you have house music blaring in the background while Max is delivering a deep inner monologue it sorta breaks the context and makes Max seem like an emo bitch.
Aside from the theme of the game being terribly off balance, I felt the actual set design was fantastic... you could tell a lot of work had gone into creating some of the more interesting and complex areas like the slums of San Palo.
Some other things that I enjoyed was the fact that Max was really labelled as a dumb American, even in the game play mechanics... i.e. Max, and the player, doesn't actually understand the language of the country. I thought this was a really neat decision -- the developers could have added English subtitles for the forign languages but they deliberately kept you and Max out of the loop. Almost immediately hinting that "Max didn't know the true story, and the truth was right out in front of him". I was hoping after my first play-through Max would have "learnt" the language and the subtitles would unlock for future play-throughs, but alas, no such luck.
Second perspective is as an achievement Hunter.
I played the game on Hard so I could get all the difficulty achievements right off the bat, I grinded every collectible (which were more or less right out in the open). And completed every chapter related achievement, which were "kill x amount of people during x pre-scripted shootdodge" (which got old real fast).
Playing on Hard right off the bat was very frustrating... the first two chapters of the game were extremely difficult. Looking back this was probably a really bad decision, but I got through it!
Most achievements are stat based... get x amount of headshots... get x amount of arm shots... etc. The majority of them you can get in your first play-through and the subsequent ones will likely unlock as I go through the next sets of difficulties that unlock.
I started the "Hardcore" run this morning and it seems way easier than the "Hard" run. Mostly because I'm not used to the gun-play.
The cutscenes are a big issue... the are practically unskippable if you are not running your game on a SSD -- and since the game is almost 40gigs most people won't really have that option. It's to the point where a new chapter will load and I will go fold laundry because the cut-scene is almost 5mins long and you can't skip it until the very end.
I completed the first two chapters in less than 30mins -- so my next set of play-throughs will be quite short.
As an achievement hunter I appreciate the addition of "chapter select", which exists in Max Payne 3, they even have "checkpoint select" where you can start from specific checkpoints... awesome for achievement hunting.
I'll probably post a bit more about achievement hunting once I finish a few more play-throughs.
