I have always maintained that Max Payne is one of the best video game characters ever to exist. From the events of the first game to his inevitable fall Max has seen and done a lot. Nothing ever seems to go right for thIS guy and he is always hitting the proverbial iceberg. Sure, you can say that his latest job in Max Payne 3 couldn’t have come at a better time. Getting out of New Jersey was probably one the better things to happen to him. Even though he found himself on another continent shooting at people at least he could understand just what was going on.

Ah, but things aren’t as they seem. What looked like a vacation and simple security job above water housed a far more devious plot below.

If there is one thing that Rockstar does better than anyone else on the planet, it’s crafting a virtual world. Just this generation they brought us a reinvented Liberty City as well as New Austin, West Elizabeth, and Nuevo Paraiso in Red Dead Redemption. Max Payne 3 is no different and São Paulo may be the most impressive yet. Even though it isn’t open ended like the others you see a world with multiple layers. From the high life on yachts and in corporate towers to the slums among the poor, Max sees everything that the largest city in Brazil has to offer. I constantly found myself gazing at stopping to look at the environment and checking out the details. Few games are able to make me stop dead in my tracks and heed my progress just to look at things and this is one of them.

As far as the story goes, Max meets up with a man named Raul Passos. These two went through their academy days together and Passos wants to help his friend and stop him from drinking himself into the grave. This is how Max gets out of New Jersey and involved in Brazil. There are 14 levels in the campaign and it will take roughly take 12 or so hours to complete. I am factoring in the fact that you will be repeating a lot of sequences because the game is brutally difficult. Max seems to be made of paper and the game refuses to hold your hand in any way. This is both good and bad, because it is nice to see a game that is challenging and refuses to back down. Even on the easier difficulties enemies are still quite formidable and if you aren’t smart you will get yourself killed. The AI loves to flank and always has the numbers advantage so it is imperative that you keep your back to a wall whenever possible.

I know that the cutscenes are a bit controversial. Many people find the motion comics to be grating. To be blunt, I have to side with those folks. The words being pulled out and displayed on screen for extra emphasis did nothing for me. The constant blurring gave me a headache and I kept wishing that I could skip them (though they’re just cleverly disguised loading screens). Even though Max’s schtick may wear thin after a few hours, I did find myself interested in what he had to say. James McCaffrey did an excellent job once again voicing the character and made listening to the internal monologuing not only bearable, but enjoyable. Thank goodness they didn’t drag Mark Wahlberg back into this.

Having said that, the game did frustrate me enough that I cranked down the difficulty just to get through the tougher parts. I constantly found myself getting one shot by enemies with perfect aim and reflexes greater than mine. Bullet time is a great equalizer to this but there were times which even that couldn’t get me past the eight to ten goons who were coming straight for me with shotguns and SMGs. Diving from cover to cover while shootdodging quickly becomes your best friend while also making you feel like a total badass. There are also special on rail sequences, which feature Max doing insane stuff straight out of an action flick. Being able to quickly access your weapon wheel (though enemies can still fire on you!) and swap to something with more ammo on the fly is another plus.

The thing is, though, that the single player seems to abandon this about halfway through. Instead of diving from cover to cover like a maniac you are forced to turtle behind specific pieces of cover. There are scenes where Max bumbles his way into something and sets off an entire group, forcing you to deal with his mess. Other times you see Max crouch behind cover only for things to pan out and for you to see that that is your only cover. I don’t understand why Rockstar chose to go away from the crazy, frenetic action and towards a cover based shooter but they did. Finishing up the campaign allows you to play New York Minute, one of the two arcade modes (Score Attack is the other one, it just focuses on racking up multipliers). New York Minute, in a way, almost operates sort of like a tutorial. You have one minute and each kill adds time to the clock with headshots adding a little bit more. This teaches you to get in the habit of timing your bullet time properly and to improve when and where you’re diving. It also irons out bad habits (such as my excellent strategy of “dive directly at all of the gunfire”).
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The reason I say that is because in multiplayer you need to always stay on the move. Camping won’t get you anywhere (unless you’re playing Last Man Standing in Gang Wars) and being able to find creative ways to take down your opponents is a necessity. Right now the state of the multiplayer is a bit grim. It’s highly populated, which is a good thing, but there are two drastically different communities. In Max Payne 3 you have the option of being in Free Aim or having Hard or Soft Locks. Soft Lock means that your reticle will “snap” towards an enemy and Hard Lock means it will “snap” directly on an enemy. This leads to a whole lot of groin shots, because the reticle tends to focus on the body since it’s the bigger target.

The reason the community is fragmented is because you can choose whether to have Soft Lock or Free Aim enabled. The Soft Lock modes currently have a 3:1 advantage in players which is alarming. Sure, it’s nice for those who rely heavily on Soft Lock, but I have had almost all of my most frustrating online experiences there. Most players who have pre-order bonuses also reside here and, as a new player, it would be best if you just got use to Free Aim. The pre-order bonuses may have seemed innocent at the time, but with leveling up at a snail’s pace, the items they have you won’t be able to get even after playing for a few hours. The Soft Lock plays also seem to be a far rowdier bunch and tend to be a cesspool of bitter teenagers.

There are many different modes with multiplayer and all of them are worth a playthrough. Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch speak for themselves and you can even get into larger versions. I tend to avoid large games because these tend to crash more often (more on that in a moment). Payne Killer is a unique mode which is styled to be a bit like King-of-the-Hill. Players start out in a free-for-all and the first killer becomes Max while the first victim becomes Passos. Max and Passos have special weapons and stronger abilities (Max has level three bullet time, for example) and the objective is for the other players to take them down. Everyone else is a regular soldier and they have to work together to take these guys down. Even though this may require some teamwork, you also want to be the one to put the final bullet because whoever kills one of the heroes has a good chance of becoming them. The new Max and Passos are chosen on a combination of who did the most damage, who got the killing shot, and who is still alive. Max and Passos can also work together to try and keep one another upright adding another level of cooperative play.

Gang Wars is the other unique mode in the game and it works a bit like Killzone 3. Each round changes things up a bit and as a team you have to conquer objectives. Some may require you to be the last man standing or kill a specific target, others may require capturing points or planting explosives. Winning a round gives your team +5 to your kill count for the final round which is a big team deathmatch. This means you can have a 20 kill head start at the end and easily coast to victory. The mode is a blast, especially with a group of cooperating friends, but also the buggiest of all. The netcode doesn’t seem to handle the larger modes well and constantly drops and disconnects games. It also is prone to freezing, especially in the scenes before a match. Some of these are hardlocks and require resetting your PS3 and others just seem to sit in limbo, leaving you to talk to your friends for twenty minutes (I actually did this) without ever getting past the victory/defeat screen.
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Not only are there connectivity issues, but there are also an assortment of strange glitches. Some bursts turn out weird, such as the one that gives you a grenade launcher giving you absolutely no ammo. There is also a very odd glitch that is caused when people quickly leave a game after it ends. The countdown to the next match can skyrocket from two minutes to 436 after just four or so people have dropped. This also happens sometimes during a match and games can last 500+ minutes. Yes, you read that right, some games can go on and on for over eight hours. I actually sat in one of these glitched games for two hours, seeing the kill count in a small team deathmatch get to be 250-220 or so with no end ever coming in sight. Leaving a game costs you some bonuses and it’s disheartening to have a great round ruined by a wonky clock.

Crafting your character to your strengths should be the first thing you do after unlocking a customizable loadout. Getting the right burst (particularly one that you have a third level of) and the right guns can make you into a killing machine. You can even add attachments and make your guns gold (if you collected all of the parts in single player). Finding that balance between firepower and loadout with is important. While carrying two SMGs and an assault rifle along with body armor may seem nice, it means your health will regenerate far slower than just about anyone else. Some of the smaller details, such as the thick rimmed glasses, seem to be glitched online. There was one instance after surviving a last stand that made my character’s shades float above his head. Apparently this was also a target because a friend of mine was able to gun me down just from shooting at them while I hid behind cover. There are also some issues when you try to join a party after getting dropped. I kept getting a message telling me I was “Blacklisted” and my “Data was not compatible” but this turned out to just be standard error messages (not cool, Rockstar) and were easily fixed by resetting my console.

While playing you will also see that players may have vendettas against you. After killing a player twice in a row they can basically put a bet against you. If you kill them a third time you get bonus experience and if they are successful in their revenge plot, they get it. In Gang Wars you can also place bets before each section on one of three players. This could be anything from the first to die to the highest kill count at the end of the round. Succeeding gives you a bonus and losing costs you cash.

When you get killed you are forced to endure a Kill Panel, which works the same way as the single player. It shows your character keeling over and any wound that may be inflicted (such as a headshot blasting blood everywhere). After killing an opponent you should take the time to rush over and loot their corpse. This not only grants experience, but it also can give you items or extra adrenaline for your bursts. The way bullet time is handled in multiplayer is that you have to be within person’s “zone.” If you are on the other side of the map you’ll get a notification on the side of your screen but you won’t be slowed down. If someone directly in front of you activates it, you have to deal with them. Nothing is more satisfying than pulling off a slow-mo headshot on someone but more often than not they’ll take their pound of flesh.

The multiplayer is frantic and will keep you coming back for more. It make take a few hours and a handful of asskickings for you to get on even footing with the rest of the player base. With some patches we could be looking at one of the best multiplayer experiences of the year. Combine that with a campaign that can (and should) be replayed a couple of times, as well as a quick and fun pair of arcade modes, and you have an impressive amount of content. I won’t condone the fact that the game will have a boatload of DLC but at least Rockstar is nice enough to offer a cost friendly season pass. Max Payne 3 is a successful resurrection of an amazing franchise and nothing will ever replace jumping out of a window and gunning down guys in slow motion.

Don’t stay a stranger, Max, let’s not wait another nine years until our next get together.