Max payne 3 ps4 series#

What cannot be ignored is Max’s narration. While the bits of text are used to great effect throughout, the blur wears out its welcome over time and feels a bit tedious eventually, but it appears so often that it eventually becomes easy to ignore through repetition. During cutscenes, bits of phrases in Max’s narration will pop up on the screen to provide emphasis, and Max Payne 3 makes heavy use of a blurring effect aimed at giving the game a modern, cinematic tone and connecting the player with the sense of disorientation Max feels. There’s a lot of visual style imparted on these sequences. Nevertheless, they are entertaining and effectively maintain immersion by never disconnecting the player from the narrative. One has to wonder if some of the rather lengthy story sequences are of the length they are simply to cover up the fact that the player is playing a game, particularly upon discovering that many of the longer scenes cannot be skipped until they’re almost completed. The non-interactive sequences give the impression that they fold in and out organically, but serve another function as cover for the game’s lengthy loading sequences. Max Payne 3 transitions almost seamlessly from cutscenes to gameplay sequences and back, rarely giving the player an opportunity to have the time to think about doing anything but playing further and driving the story forward. The tale may be dark, but the presentation is flashy as hell. While it may make him a less sympathetic character, the story is considerably better for the change as it provides an opportunity for Max to be more than just the man standing between evil and its goals and experience genuine character growth. Throughout the story, it becomes clear that most of the situation could have been avoided had Max chosen a better way to deal with his problems than becoming a drunk. Unlike prior games, though, Max has to bear far more responsibility for his role in the course of events.

Yes, there are secrets to be learned and villains to be punished, and Max is still the guy who gets stuck in the middle of a bad situation. In some ways, you can make the same argument about Max Payne 3, but it doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny. He’s the guy who’s in the wrong place at the wrong time, either through no real fault of his own or due to the concerted efforts of others surrounding him. Throughout the series, Max has always been the unfortunate victim of circumstance.

Max payne 3 ps4 series#

But the job doesn’t turn out to be the cakewalk it was supposed to be, and a drunk Max fails to protect the family when a local street gang targets them, leading to a series of events which will leave hundreds dead in the wake of his efforts to redeem himself. That pursuit doesn’t stop just because he’s hired by a wealthy Brazilian family to work as a bodyguard, with the promise of good pay for babysitting socialites. Beyond that, events are frequently presented out of their chronological order so that the settings constantly shift and blur together, keeping the player constantly guessing where they’ll wind up next.īy this point in his life, Max has effectively hit rock bottom and has been spending all of his time searching for meaning in a bottle. Keeping with tradition, the entire plot is experienced in flashback, narrated throughout by Max as he reflects upon the recent state of his life. The story mode takes Max from the mean streets of New Jersey to the equally mean streets of São Paulo, Brazil. Packed with fast action, brutal violence, and a striking cinematic style, all of the stops have been pulled out to make this the most exciting entry in the series to date. Max Payne 3 is a game which is instantly recognizable by its gameplay tropes yet manages to achieve a fresh take on the character and his world without betraying his origins. And Max has changed with it, under the new direction of Rockstar Vancouver who are contributing the first game in the series not created by originating studio Remedy.

Nearly a decade has passed since Max Payne last brought his brand of violent street justice to a dark and unjust world, and videogames have changed dramatically in this time.