Having never played the first Max Payne or its sequel, anticipation for the third entry in this series fell flat on me.  Only the gist of the storyline was ever made clear to me: grizzled veteran cop loses wife and kids, seeks revenge.  Certainly we've never seen a premise like that played out before, especially not in the 80s and 90s.  But after delving into part 3, I was at least surprised to see a shift in the setting and the circumstances of plot -- if underwhelmed by the gameplay.  Max Payne 3 is a heavily stylized and cinematic experience set in a gritty, Man on Fire-esque universe that is fun for all of 3 hours until its simplistic and repeitive gameplay grow old and leave you wishing for something that was a little more than an modern Charles Bronson simulator. 

Max Payne has gotten old and bitter.  It has been years since he lost his wife, and after neutralizing the bellicose son of a local New Jersey mob figure in a bar fight, the titular hero decides to leave the country and take up a job in the private security industry in Brazil.  After narrowly escaping the vengeance of an entire mob family and finding his way south of the equator, Max meets employer Rodrigo Blanco, for whose wife and party animal son he is to serve as bodyguard.  Of course, there wouldn't be much to this game if things didn't go horribly awry.  While guarding the wife and son at an upscale club, the entourage is beset by an army of well-equipped kidnappers.  Let the slow-motion rampaging begin...

Before I say anything about the gameplay, let me emphasize how visually stunning MP3 truly is.  The world is colorful, unbelievably rich in detail and virtually free of graphical bugs.  Character models are near-lifelike, especially facial animation and the motion-captured character movements (a pleasant dose of reality after dealing with the jittery animations in Deus Ex 3.)  Cutscenes blend in seamlessly with the gameplay which really gives it the feel of an immersive cinematic experience.  Fields of grass and plants respond individually to wind and the lighting and water effects are basically perfect.  If there is one flaw with the visuals, it might be that some of the near-lifelike environments of MP3 (take for instance the slums of Sao Paulo) are so complex that it becomes tricky to locate some distant enemy in dark clothing who's firing at you.  For me, this has led to more than a few repeats of some of the more chaotic scenarios.  But this is a trifling complaint.

What isn't so trivial is the repetitiveness of the gameplay.  MP3 is basically just a third-person shoot-em-up with almost no depth beyond that.  Success in any scenario (each mission or chapter is made up of a number of scenarios intercut with cinematics) does not solely depend on pure firepower (ammunition is rather scarce) and you do need to make use of your environment to dodge the endless stream of gangsters with automatic weapons.  But for most of the 6 to 8 hour Story mode, all you're doing is ducking and shooting, ducking and shooting... maybe sometimes you'll leap into the air and trigger Bullet Time, where the game slows down slightly to let you take out a few enemies in mid-air.  But there isn't a lot of diversity to how you can take out enemies.  Despite the enormous level of detail in its environments, MP3 seldom or never allows you to say, utilize a crane to drop a beam on some unsuspecting enemies, or sneak under a well-armed facility and set it ablaze from the ground floor.  With the amount of detail herein, it would be nice if you got to interact with it a little bit more than just examining the odd photo or collecting what few hidden items there are.  You can't even utilize grenades or vehicles, and don't expect to ever use stealth as the AI is programmed to instantly see you even if you're sneaking. 

The controls are manageable but not without their faults.  Sneaking (L3) is virtually useless and it almost always makes more sense to just duck behind an object instead.  While there are no aiming issues with a little bit of practice, it would be nice if the crosshairs were more than a barely visible white dot.  Of course, you could go the easy route and enable the Lock mode which auto-targets your enemies, but where is the fun or the challenge in that?

All in all, I was disappointed with Max Payne 3.  It's not a bad game, and its storyline and graphics are both superb, but the lack of any experience system or gameplay variety makes it grow old rather quickly.  There is a multiplayer mode here that offers some incentive to keep playing outside of the Story quests, and a mildly entertaining Arcade mode where each completed Story chapter can be replayed to maximize head shots and try to achieve the highest points possible.  But as someone for whom multiplayer has limited appeal, the mediocrity of Max Payne 3's single player experience makes it barely deserving of a 3/5 rating.

Recommended: No