Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Just plain fun"

Pros: Exciting firefights; Enjoyable narration and dry humor; Great production values all-around; Smart implementation of bullet time online

Cons: Otherwise routine online modes; Story and gameplay are not terribly deep in the long run; Obnoxious film effects

Narration is a really under-utilized effect in video games. For being so common technique in other media, you don't hear narrators in games very often. It's a shame too, because a well-done narration can positively impact the story in many ways.

Take Max Payne 3, for instance. On its own, you have a fairly standard cover-based shooter: people fire a gun at Max, and Max fires back. If you don't take cover, then you go down. Fast. Most fights boil down to nothing more than that. There is very little flanking, or strategy so to speak. Surprisingly, this doesn't matter as much as you think. Sure, I just called the game a bit shallow-and I stand by that remark-but it does things with so much style that the fights are still fun. Max has the ability to go into bullet-time (read: slow motion) at any time, and fights get so much more dramatic as a result. It also helps that Max is super-weak, and thus susceptible to dying at any given point. When the difference between life and death is a matter of seconds extended gratuitously by a stylish slow-mo effect, things get intense-strategy or not.

Coming back to narration, it impacts the game in a similar war. Sure, the story is a little bit predictable and straightforward: you know the moment Max takes a bodyguard job in Brazil that he's in over his head, and that there's something larger going on-but the way it's told makes it so much more entertaining.

Max has a very dry, sarcastic sense of humor and a tendency to speak in metaphors. At times he may say something like "He was as slick as an oil spill on an iceburg, and about as toxic" or justify picking up pain pills he's addicted to (which function like medkits do in most games), and usually it's pure gold. Even if he's not saying anything significant most of the time, Max delivers each line perfectly and the dry humor is just hilarious at times. Perhaps it's unsurprising that Rockstar is able to make a funny homage to noir tropes, but the writing is no less funny for it.

Sure, by the time you finish the roughly 10 hour experience, it's not deep enough that you'll probably feel inclined to replay it again. And sure, the game doesn't really break enough new ground to have anything new to say in a review of it-but the entertainment value is definitely there. After the campaign, you CAN head into multiplayer, although it's largely uninspired and won't keep you occupied any longer than an average shooter. I will give it this though: the implementation of bullet-time (a must for a Max Payne game) is pretty brilliant (anyone witnessed by, or capable of witnessing someone in bullet-time is brought into the fold). But everything else is as routine as what you'd find in a post Modern Warfare world.

But Max Payne has never relied on its multiplayer as a selling point anyway (it never even had one previously), and the campaign is strong. I can't recommend Max Payne 3 for doing something radically new or different. I can't recommend it for offering a deep experience. I can't recommend it for being highly replayable or expansive. However, I can easily recommend it as one of the most pure and simply entertaining action games of this year.