Let's state the bleeding obvious shall we? The shooting that you do in the opening section is exactly the same shooting that you'll be doing in the final moments of the game. The same shooting that you did in Max Payne and Max Payne 2. The same moves. The same bullet time.
There's one new trick where the camera slows down as you kill the last enemy and you press A to slow time down further as each bullet explodes into your victims face with each blisteringly bloody impact. Faces explode. Faces implode. You can make a real mess of your enemies.
It's nothing really, just some side show gore fest that needn't be there.
But can the shooting sustain the length campaign? I reckon it depends how you approach it. If you thrash through the game in solid sessions I reckon you'll be pretty bored of it all by the end. The same tricks are used again and again as you enter a room and are immediately swarmed by shit loads of enemies. You hunker down behind cover and methodically wipe them out barely moving from your position behind hard cover because even on the normal difficulty it's brutally unforgiving. You can't come out of cover for a second without being pasted by bullets even if you've only got one or two folks left to go. You're health bar rapidly filling with red as bullets hit you. So for the most part you'll stay locked down to one piece of cover popping up to let off a few shots in bullet time before ducking back down and repeating the process again. And again. And again. And, yes, again. You'll occassionally find time to move about but it won't be very often. This isn't Gears of War, but it is a cover shooter which is probably what the prequels definately weren't.
I played an hour took some time off, came back and ploughed on for an hour before taking another break, and it was more manageable.
In fact, I couldn't help but keep turning it on, because for all the tired pew pew action there's something about it that's compelling. Max is ace. The voice is ace. Even when he shaves off his hair and goes all gringo on yo' ass, he's still Max Payne. He's dry, he's witty, he's sombre, he's depressed, he's a fucking maniac and you'll love him because Rockstar have done what only they can manage to do these days: make a fucking character you give a shit about and a story that you want to know what happens next. It's incredible really, when shooting was becoming boring I was eager to know what Max was doing to do next.
The story itself really isn't anything to write home about but with Rockstar's finesse driving the ship it's a joy and here's why:
It's the spiritual successor to Manhunt.
I sharn't ruin it for anyone, but anyone who loved Manhunt will instantly recognise all the same key notes in the last third of the game.
To be fair it's a mixed bag of a game with the start being quite promising, the middle being actually quite flat but then building up to a fabulous last third. So the shootings repetitive, the characters bring you along but there's three final things that make the game what it is and the reason why I think it's a pretty fantastic game all in all.
Firstly the animation is incredible. The bad dancers, the sexy ladies, Max dashing to cover, the police arresting folk, those kids playing football, etc. Marvellous.
The music is absolutely fricking sublime. It must be the greatest soundtrack to a game in recent times. The music compliments the action, the downtime, the emotion, the fear, just, well, everything. If it doesn't win some kind of award I'll be properly pissed off.
And the last thing are the visuals and specifically the environments. I doubt a single person who plays this will not come away thinking that these are some of the best environments that have ever existed inside a game. The level of detail on display is fucking ridiculous. The offices, the boat, the stadium, the night club, the streets, the pub, the slums, the police station etc jesus christ, everything is just fantastic. There's a section in an abandoned hotel (probably the best level actually) where the walls are crumbling, there's graffiti on every wall, there's shit up the walls... etc, and not a single texture is repeated (as far as I could see anyway). Everything just looks as though they made one of them. The problem is that I can see loads of gamers rushing through it and not stopping to look at what has been created for them. It's too easy to keep walking when you can look over the edge of a building and see the world around you.
Rockstar don't just create characters, they create worlds.
An absolutely fucking solid 8/10.
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