It's that time for another sequel and this time it's Max Payne's turn, created by Rockstar (GTA and Red Dead Redemption) instead of Remedy, will this really be the fall of Max Payne? read on and find out
The story revolves around a kidnapping and turns into something more complex as you will find out, it also goes into Max Payne's life as he falls deeper into oblivion.
This is helped along with Max providing his thoughts and feelings throughout the game as in previous games.
Alot of things haven't changed, Bullet Time which slows down time while you shoot and/or dodge bullets, This will be familiar to fans of the prequels and also easy to understand for gamers new to the series, also familiar is a grey outline of Max which fills up with blood as he gets injured and pills are the remedy. The voice actor for Max hasn't changed which keeps it all believable and makes you care about him.
Changes include snapping to cover which is essential as enemies are plentiful in every location, they have also introduced shoot dodge scenarios throughout the game which slows down time to allow you to shoot several enemies before it goes back to normal speed. Comic strips to progress the story that were present in previous games have been replaced with in-game cut scenes so the action isn't interrupted.
A criticism of the game is that there's a lot of rinse and repeat gameplay, which doesn't change apart from on rails shooting sections which breakup the constant bullet time, shoot and cover which could bore a lot of people. Another bad point is the strange positioning of checkpoints, while on normal difficulty it wasn’t a game breaker it could be at a higher difficulty and on top of that I felt the difficulty spikes could frustrate a lot of gamers. One of the puzzling things is the fact while the enemies have grenades in their arsenal to throw at you, you don't get to use grenades nor can you throw them back at them which can be annoying at times and ends up with you having to remove yourself from cover which causes frustrating deaths.
Cut scene's were another issue, they were well presented although the annoying part was you couldn't skip the cut scene's which means along with the difficulty spikes you have to sit through them all over again which could cause some players to get frustrated.
The multiplayer side of things is a new feature of the series but unfortunately apart from Gang Wars mode there is nothing really new here with Capture The Flag, Deathmatch modes etc so it really is not the best reason to hold on to the game if online is your thing.
Max Payne delights as well as frustrates, but a lot of these flaws can be looked past if you're prepared to do that, if you were looking for something new then you've come to the wrong place but if you were a fan of the previous games and you love Max Payne then you will love it.
8/10