Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Disappointing"

Original Max Payne was very unique game: it not only introduced bullet time feature but also managed to create great atmosphere. From Max Payne 3 I simply expected solid third person shooter with the same elements that made the series so fun to play. Unfortunately, some bad design choices managed to spoil my experience.

To start with, I could hardly get into any kind of flow because the game was constantly interrupted with cut scenes. Way too many of them and most of them were too long. I can understand watching a cut scene to advance the plot, but I'd expect those after long corpse-filled levels of shooting fun. Here you feel like you barely had chance to fire few rounds and it's story time again. There's probably a half an hour of footage of Max Payne drinking there. Same thing for slow motion kill shots: it's great to see one now and then, right after you scored kill with amazingly placed shot. But when it happens too often it really harms the flow of the game.

What's even worse, after each cut scene the game for some reason would switch my weapon to pistol. Here I was enjoying myself with AK-47 and now the cut scene leaves me right in front of few thugs with good old pistol. Very frustrating. Another problem was weapons selection; I'd really prefer that I could use all previously found weapons instead having to chose between carrying Uzi and shot gun, for example.

Bottom line is this: if I'm into action movies with bad acting and cheesy plot, for 60$ I could get ten of those from bargain section of any movie store. When I spend 60$ on third person shooter- I expect a game, not interactive movie.