What Went Wrong with: Max Payne 3

Antiheroes are damned entertaining.

They lack the morality, the kindness, and the generosity that plagues many characters with objective blandness. Videogames of generations past were riddled with such principal characters that were completely devoid of personality. The videogame industry was in need of an interesting character; one that was relatable, had no super powers, and wasn't entirely sure of what he was doing.

Max Payne, with his snarky pessimism, took the gaming world by storm, and made him an instant fan favorite.

Max Payne and its sequel both received hefty critical acclaim, but only the first installment was welcomed with financial success. In fact, the financial failure of Max Payne 2 was so extreme that it forced Rockstar Games to heavily reconsider its next investments. It seemed that the franchise had come to a decisive end.

It came to the gaming world's shock, then, that Max Payne 3 was ever announced. Fans rejoiced, skeptics were intrigued, and the world started dreaming about shooting up bad guys in bullet time.

You will never feel as cool as this in Max Payne 3.

In the end, Max Payne 3 was not what the audience expected. Devoid of cheesy comic book cutscenes, New York City, and a head of hair, the videogame took a decisively cinematic turn away from its predecessors. Although it received identical critical acclaim to that of Max Payne 2, this new installment left a bitter taste in the mouths of fans (including myself). Of course, many considered this a welcome change of pace for the franchise, but no one could deny that this game has problems. Simply put, Max Payne 3 was unbearably close to true greatness, but it was boggled down by confusing conceptual design choices. This game has fundamental flaws in three aspects of its being: its mechanics, story, and multiplayer.

Mechanics

Max Payne is synonymous with slow-mo, matrix shooting. We saw it first in Max Payne where he could mow down foes with style. Max Payne 2 further developed this intense experience by actively rewarding players for running headfirst into a crowd of gun-wielding goons. So, what's the best way of wasting bad guys in the newest installment? No, it's not by running through their ranks, using bullet time to narrowly dodge bullets so that you can fill them with a couple of your own; this isn't Max Payne 2. One of the biggest crimes of Max Payne 3 is that it ignores the perfect bullet time of its immediate predecessor, which rewarded the player for taking risks by increasing the power of Max's bullet time as he killed enemies while using it. Instead, Max's bullet time has a fixed potency. Max also gains an insignificant amount of bullet time for each kill that he acquires, and his maximum capacity is stifling.

In general, the bullet time's decreased power discourages the player from taking the same ultimate risks that made the combat in Max Payne 2 so satisfying. Encouraging Max to take advantage of the newly-implemented cover system isn't itself a problem. Taking away means to reward the player for taking risks is indeed an issue, because mitigating the risks a player can take, or mitigating the reasons for which a player would want to take a risk, makes for gameplay that can quickly become unsatisfying. By making Max more realistic, Rockstar Games made Max Payne 3 a more linear, repetitive game.

Other abilities provided to the player also add to this repetitiveness. While Max is underpowered in terms of basic damage-trading, he has a few incredibly powerful abilities that certainly don't exist for the better. One of them is Max's "last stand" mode, where, upon taking lethal damage, Max has the opportunity to take an instant-kill shot at the inflictor, or die. If he kills his target, he restores the same amount of health as a painkiller normally would. The catch is that he requires one bottle of painkillers to do it. Understandably, this feature is meant deal with constant death in the first two games, and it almost works. However, the gimmick gets boring fast, it stops the pace of combat, and it negates the use of painkillers since saving them for "last stand" ensures that Max can never instantly die. It doesn't add to Max's ability to dive into combat, since if he takes lethal damage and kills the inflictor, he becomes prone; if he gets caught in a crowd of enemies, he might as well be dead. Let's not forget the fact that a bottle of painkillers cannot save someone from a lethal bullet; the realism that MP3 boasts vanishes instantly. The result of this "solution to death" slows down combat, and once again encourages Max to stay behind cover.

Bullet dodge, unfortunately, has been changed for the worse. Bullet Dodge is Max's literal leap of faith.

Perhaps the most badass move ever. It's bound to break a few ribs though.

This incarnation is a mixture of those seen in the previous two games. During bullet time, Max is invincible (seen in MP1), and he can shoot while prone (MP2). However, the former perk of this move is what cheapens the whole ordeal. In a game that boasts cinematic realism, the main character is able to take a face-load of bullets while in mid-air without taking an inkling of damage. This is literally what happened in one of my playthroughs: while using bullet dodge, someone stuffed my head with enough bullets to kill a village. Although humorous, the fact that I was laughing at such a silly thing meant I was taken out of the experience. In MP2, one of my favorite videogames of all time, Max was vulnerable even during bullet time. With the power that he was given in his bullet time, his bullet dodge became less of a viable option to survive, and more of a "look at me, I'm a badass!" ticket. The opposite is true in MP3, where the bullet dodge is so powerful that bullet time is downgraded in order to compensate. Bullet dodge shouldn't have to be spammed or gimmicky, as is encouraged by MP3, it should be savored for the perfect moment.

Max should be given tools to achieve ultimate awesomeness. Unfortunately, what is provided is a bunch of limiting mechanics that don't make much cohesive sense. They exist as a means to take full advantage of the cover system, thus limiting what the player can or wants to do. There's less inherent risk in the system that made its predecessor so intense, and thus the game feels more restricting. It feels like all of the game's encounters were more calculated, less organic. "Get behind this cover to kill these guys," the game dictates. By being more cinematic, MP3 ends up being less engaging, and more repetitive.

Story

POSSIBLE SPOILERS FOLLOW

After everyone he loves dies, and after he eliminates New York City's crime moguls, Max becomes an alcoholic. After angering NYC's kingpin of crime, Max is forced to flee his home with an old friend, Passos. He and Passos, a boring character, then find work as personal guards. Despite having nothing, Max lives on. Essentially, the only thing keeping him alive at this point is his tolerance to the various drugs that he consumes. He says that he is alive in order to see the man that kills him, but that's an utter cop out.

Eventually, the family he has been contracted to protect finds itself in danger, and it's up to Max to save the day! The first half of the game can be summarized as "people get kidnapped, Max tries to negotiate/take them back." If you know this guy's luck by now, you know that things go wrong preposterously quickly.

The second half of the game sees a bald Max (a decision I still find appalling) undergoing extremes to save this family, and taking revenge on its aggressors (who are exceedingly dull). Max goes on a rampage, killing an amount of people tantamount to the Nagasaki Bombing. The story ends our hero on a beach, looking like he's in retirement.

Why Max why?!

As you might have guessed, nothing is particularly grabbing about the story in MP3. The whole thing seems like it should be completely out of one human's hands. (I cannot express enough how many people Max kills. He kills everyone. Seriously, everyone dies.) Where in the first two games, Max Payne has a personal, understandable involvement in what's going on, MP3 provides no way for the audience to connect to Max. He is, for all intents and purposes, just an outlet for genocide.

He eventually overcomes his alcoholism through the game's run. In the context of this being Max Payne, the man who has lost everyone he loves, this should prove some sort of significant feat. However, the player has no way to -- case in point -- connect with Max overcoming this burden; there is no direct change in the way MP3 plays that would suggest that he is currently experiencing overbearing stress. In fact, if the game were to contain no cutscenes, there would be absolutely no way for the audience to tell that Max was ever an alcoholic. His withdrawal could have been enough excuse to get a dream sequence in the game, famous in the Max Payne series. That right there is missed potential.

It must be pointed out, by the way, that close to half of the campaign's run time consists of cutscenes. For that much time, the player should be given something interesting.

In summary, MP3 takes far too much time in telling a story that doesn't matter, while providing no way to connect to the game's titular character.

Who is this guy, you ask? It doesn't matter, he's boring.

Multiplayer

For me, this is the greatest disappointment of the game. Not because it's bad, but because it's too good. Shooting up real people in bullet time, making nemeses, and taking advantage of the intricate customization system proved an absolute blast. Yet, regardless of how shockingly well-thought the system was, the online community dissolved almost instantly.

What on earth happened? I believe I have the answer: Call of Duty.

MP3's multiplayer features loadouts, extremely low health, and killstreaks. It's easy to point out these similarities to CoD, but why did Rockstar Games even attempt reusing such popular material? Now, I'm not a fan of the hate that borders on barbaric on the massively successful CoD series. Yet there is one truth, whether one hates the games or not, that can't be denied: everyone wants the kind of success that envelopes this franchise. And so, Rockstar Games tried its hand at creating an equally popular game to no avail. The very existence of half a dozen active CoD games and communities doomed the multiplayer of MP3. This is synonymous with the unfortunate demise of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Despite a triple A budget, it simply couldn't stand up to the guns of the already massive World of Warcraft. Add to the fact that low health almost completely closes the gates to unskilled players, and that leveling up is punishingly slow, and we can see just why the promising MP3 multiplayer was left with no community in a matter of months. MP3's multiplayer becomes less a matter of skill as the first person to shoot tends to win.

You'd hope that you could get out of an encounter like this alive. Unfortunately, all you need to die is a half dozen bullets, so that's unlikely to happen.

Commendably, MP3, through eight years of development, has diminutive issues. These problems, however, begin to stack upon each other until they produce a glaring vision of what is fundamentally amiss with the game. Despite vicious polish and the masterful attention to detail that this game boasts, there really is no way to dress up fundamental conceptual mistakes. An unfulfilling combat system, an uninteresting story, and a multiplayer that lacks its own staple of originality all add up to a sense that something went wrong with Max Payne 3

To finally conclude, why am I talking today about a year old game that is currently being talked about by approximately nobody? This game is, unfortunately, seen as a failure by Rockstar Games on a financial level. The game turned out to be an unfit use of resources, and we may never see a game of its like for another console generation. Max Payne 3 is the perfect example of a perfectly capable game, forgotten because of a thousand tiny conceptual faults that could have been diverted through a little more focus on the part of the developers.