Story:
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Max Payne is no longer a cop. The game starts off in apartment where you soon see he is addicted to pain killers and alcohol. He takes a job protecting a wealthy family, but things get out of control and he has to fight to protect the family and survive.
Gameplay:
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The main menu gives the options of story, arcade and multiplayer. I decided to play the story mode first. This took me to another menu to choose the difficulty.
You can select easy, medium or hard and hardcode and old school can be unlocked once you've completed the game. I choose medium which then led me to a third menu where you can choose whether you want shooting to be hard lock, soft lock, free aim.
Story:
After going through the menus the game starts with a long video. The first of many. The game then instructs you on how the controls work. The game soon jumps into the action with people shooting at you. You make your way around the building, trying to rescue the wealthy people and kill everyone shooting at you.
Moving around is easy as you use the left analog stick to move and the right analog stick to move the camera. Shooting feels a bit awkward to start with as you use R3 to aim and R2 to shoot. I kept wanting to use L3 to aim and R1 to shoot and with such long cut scenes I often found myself being shot a lot when the scene was over as I'd forgotten it was R2 to shoot and had automatically pressed R1. As you press X to sprint it's not easy to press that and use the right analog stick to move the camera around. You can also use L2 to target which works pretty well for keeping track of people once you have targeted them. Killing people is pretty easy at the start, but it gets harder later on, especially when shooting people at a distance.
You can see killings in slow motion if you press X although some are shown in slow motion anyway. While in some ways it's cool to see the bullet flying through the air in slow motion it's really just another video clip and as you have the option of pressing X to see it in slow motion it doesn't really make sense for some to automatically be in slow motion.
The manual states for controls that x is climb, vault, sprint and roll and yet most of that stuff is done during the videos. For example, at the start Max jumps over a wall and slides down a roof during a video and later on he slides across a ledge of a building and jumps over to a platform. Even running for the helicopter was a video clip, not part of the gameplay which is a shame as these few simple things would have made the game much more interesting.
On the plus side they do combine video elements and gameplay as there is talking while you are moving, which is realistic and adds to the story and gameplay. However, sadly this does not mean less cutscenes. I felt more like I was watching a film. If I wanted to watch a film I would have done. It is probably better if you like films like this but personally I don't. What's happening isn't interesting enough to make me want to keep playing the game, or watching it. I don't need to see 5 minutes of Max getting drunk, then 5 minutes of people sitting in a helicopter laughing and drinking. It doesn't really add to the story. I guess it shows you more about what the characters are like but it could be far shorter clips.
You can find numerous guns that are dropped by the enemy when you kill them. However, finding a gun doesn't mean you'll keep it. After the cutscenes I was back to my previous gun.
It does seem that you can have unlimited deaths. When you die it goes back to the last checkpoint and you are almost healed. This is useful, especially when you are about to fight a large number of enemies. If you do find yourself being shot at a lot you can partly heal yourself using painkillers. Using them just requires the tap of the Up button, although finding the painkillers in the first place sadly isn't so simple and I could never find them when I needed them. They are a nice feature to the game (however unrealistic for healing gun wounds). They seemed to randomly appear as I never actually saw any before picking them up, only once they were in the health meter.
Despite just basically being walking around and killing people the game didn't feel repetitive.
Arcade:
Arcade mode has three options. The first is Score attack which is just replaying the chapters except you score for kills. Then there is New York Minute and New York Minute Hardcore. New York minute is unlocked when you complete the game and the hardcore option is unlocked when you complete New York Minute. As I have not completed the game I have no idea what these are.
Multiplayer:
Multiplayer is the online mode. This loads quite fast, which is surprising because loading time in the game wasn't always that fast.
Multiplayer gives you a number of options.
* Rookie team deathwatch
* Rookie deathmatch
* Deathmatch
* Team deathmatch
* Payne killed (needs to be unlocked)
* Gang wars (needs to be unlocked)
* Large team deathmatch (needs to be unlocked)
* Large deathmatch (needs to be unlocked)
While this may look, at a glance, a good amount of options half are locked and the other half are just deathmatches which is quite disappointing. I have to admit that the deathmatch game was better than I thought it would be though.
You do respawn instantly (assuming you press X to do so), although after being killed a couple of times without killing anyone it took a few seconds longer before I was able to respawn. After killing two people I could then respawn again instantly so it seems that as long as you can keep killing you'll be able to keep respawning quickly, not that it takes long anyway.
Audio:
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The voice of Max really suited him and the other characters sounded fine too. The music suited the game. It was almost sad music at the start to fit in with his new life and moving into new place. The music does get quite repetitive. I can't say I really noticed any other music during the game except when they were places like the Nightclub and music was playing there.
Graphics:
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The graphics are amazing and detailed. The characters and settings all look realistic. The characters move like real people, although they did seem to walk with their legs a bit too bent. Sadly the graphics were often ruined with a horrible coloured camera effect, which made everything blurry and jumpy during videos and sometimes during the gameplay.
I don't mind when a video goes to the characters point of view for a few moments and shows their vision is blurry if, for example, they've taken drugs or are drunk, but to constantly keep showing them effects and worse is just annoying. Maybe they had a reason for it, perhaps to show how the character sees things, but you can imagine how he sees things from what he's doing and what is happening around him without the effects. They just made me feel sick and gave me a headache.
The cutscenes and death scenes are made more interesting with a comic strip style effect but even on this they sometimes add the strange colours.
Price:
As this is a new release it currently costs about £35 to buy this new and about £30 used from Amazon. It is also available on the xbox 360 for about the same price and for slightly less on the PC.
Overall:
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I didn't complete the game and really have no interest in doing so. By the half way through the first chapter I already knew that this would be the case as the effects were getting annoying and showed no signs of going away, but I kept playing in the hope that it would change or there would be more gameplay and less video. There might be a good story hidden somewhere and perhaps there is more gameplay later on, but it's just not enough to motivate me to continue and suffer through the effects.
However, for the gameplay that there was, it was well done. It was easy to move around, aim and shoot and the graphics are amazing without the effects.
If you like this type of game it's worth playing it, but personally I think Max Payne could have been so much better.
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