Max Payne 3

I don't want to talk about the gameplay in Max Payne 3.

It's not that I didn't like it, this is a game that made me mostly happy, and Rockstar's take on the third-person shooty shooty slowy slowy concept improved on the problems of Max Payne 2 in every way.  No, it's that every reviewer of this dumb game didn't just settle with "game fun many bullet bang bang" took the opportunity to pretend they were writing for fucking Pitchfork.  Every "serious" review of the game focused on the gameplay in some breathless superlative nonsense, something along the lines of "the bullets are percussion of heart and fury, physics shaking into a kaiju rock concert, the exit wounds never healing but understanding comes anyway."  Suffice to say that the most honest description of Max Payne 3's combat would be "Gears of War except everything has a quarter less health, also pills."

An aside: I've seen you assholes out there.  Yeah you, the ones that despite everything, still bitched about OH GOD NOT COVER MECHANICS MY PRECIOUS OLD SCHOOL ERODED BY THE CASUAL UNWASHED TIDES.  Just...stop.  Have you played the original Max Payne?  Do you remember how most fights eventually ended up in the early game?  That's right, just you and Mr. Pump Shotgun, hiding behind a doorway, your left hand mashing on the A and D button while the right occasionally clicked the left mouse button.  Granted, you could play the game like it was supposed to be played if you were some sort of autoaim mutant or were a savescummer willing to put up with the game's hilarious enemy aim RNG.  But unless you fit into those categories, we sure used that there cover, just without a button to help us out.  I don't even want to talk about Max Payne 2.  Okay, there's not really cover in that game.  That's because fights are either 1) hilarious slaughter fests thanks to the completely unbalanced nature of Max's bullet time, or 2) utterly frustrating pokefests when the enemy is a million floors above or below you and you can't hit them worth shit and godDAMN did that game not age well at all.  Max Payne 3's biggest gameplay sins are some big budget on rails sections that demonstrate that your reactions barely matter almost immediately, and a reallllly fucking obnoxious enemy type that takes a million bullets in the head to kill and also has a minigun and what the hell Rockstar.

I'm also not going to talk about multiplayer, because like every other shooter that isn't less than six months old, the whole experience these days is some sort of pseudo-intellectual indie game indictment of your average MOBA's laning phase.  Please consider funding my Kickstarter for 'You are a Creep," where your confused form lumbers across a field, occasionally trading shots with a slightly differently colored form until a cruel god (that has apparently been playing this game since it came out what the FUCK is wrong with you AssSlicer98) ambles by and puts you out of your misery.

No, what I want to talk about is something that apparently only I noticed: this incarnation of Max Payne is the most bummerdude I have ever seen in a video game.

I don't mean he's angsty, though he's naturally that too.  But there's plenty of video game characters that are mopey, staring sadly into the void and boo-hooing.  But I've never been thrust into the virtual self of a character that is so consistently DOWN on itself.  There is not a single five minute stretch in the game where Max is not saying something to the effect of "wow I'm such a shit dude I can't do anything bodyguard more like shoddyguard."

I get that Max Payne has had a rather hard knock life.  But this level of "NO ONE KNOWS WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE THE SAD MAN" was never suggested in the first two games.  Max's personality in the first game was a wildly angry murderdude that occasionally had hallucinations about trying to navigate blood bridges.  His personality in the second game was slightly more complex; now he's a slightly less angry murderdude that treated his love interest like a sack of shit.  Max the Second is a little more philosophical, and the game is a little more explicit that Max has some Problems, but nothing at the end of that game suggests that ten years later Max's new dominant personality trait will be talking like Batman in "The Dark Knight Returns."

The worst part about all this is that Max gets progressively whinier about all this as the game progresses.  At the start of game, Max is just sort of surly and bitchy about his shittiness as a bodyguard.  And while certain events do not go Max's way as the game progresses, his dialogue doesn't really reflect any concern about the problems surrounding his situation.  Instead, it's more "I'm so old I'm so shit lucky old man how did I not die."  Which is a problem, because if we've learned anything from these games, it's that Max is an unstoppable murder god.  It's a silly complaint, but it's sort of weird to be playing a game about a dude that goes into room after room full of bad guys while only a bottle of Oxycontin to keep going, and having said dude act like he's Lester the Unlikely.

As far as I can tell, this is mostly Rockstar's attempt to deconstruct that nature of the American action hero that makes everything right.  "I suck" is Max Payne's new motto, but the runner up is "I am a dumb American dumb dumb."  The game demonstrates this by having Max turn into a complete retard when he wanders into a favela and is mugged by streetwise brown people and having the bad guys in the game yell out "YOU ARE A DUMB AMERICAN ACTION HERO MAX BUT BRUCE WILLIS IS NOT REAL" every fucking time they see him.  Okay, there's actually a little more subtext than that, but you'll forgive me if I'm bitter because in order to bring all that subtext in Rockstar removed pretty much any trace of the series's humor, rip in peace lords and ladies.  I'd like to complain more about that but considering what I saw of Rockstar's humor in GTA 4, perhaps it was for the best they just dumped anything funny about the Max Payne series in favor of more grit.

Ultimately, Max Payne 3 is a really good game in my book, because god knows frenetic shooter games that aren't also slobbering blowjobs to outdated FPS concepts are an almost extinct thing.  Especially towards the end, when the game starts to replace its dumb on rails sections for its more elegant cousin, the bad ass semi-scripted gunfight, there's just a nonstop amount of glorious violence.  It's just a shame that the stay in the game world is within the mind of the world's Gloomiest Gus.

also fuck the final boss fight