Max Payne 3

Honest and Unpopular Reviews No. 59 Max Payne 3 (Xbox 360) Ask most people for Rockstar’s best game and it’s GTA V or Red Dead Redemption 2. I just played Max Payne 3 and I’m picking this one over anything Rockstar has ever made. There’s no slowdown when you’re playing. Once this game begins, it’s just wave after wave of enemies. The story keeps bringing it. Red Dead Redemption 2 is the exact opposite: you have to go out and find the action in that one. The story in this game is fantastic. Max is a washed up drunk working private security for a rich family in São Paulo, at least until his boss’s wife gets kidnapped on his watch. The game keeps jumping back to how he got to Brazil in the first place, all the way back to New Jersey. The soundtrack is one of the best I’ve ever heard in a game. It was done by a band called HEALTH. The airport scene is one of the best scenes I’ve ever played in any video game ever made. The amount of enemies that come at you with that music playing, it’s its own vibe. Bullet time is back from the first two games. So is the shootdodge. Drop the last guy in a fight and the camera follows the bullet all the way in, every time. Your health doesn’t come back on its own either. That’s what the painkillers are for (go down with one left and you get one last shot at whoever got you). One thing I really liked in this game is it wants you to keep progressing. A few parts of it are legitimately tough. There were a few times I kept dying in the same spot, and the game would give me extra painkillers and ammo. The only knock on this game is the cutscenes. Well, not the cutscenes themselves, more how often they show up. You get 20 seconds of action and then a 3 minute cutscene you can’t skip that’s really just the game loading the next scene. Despite being 14 years old, it holds up better than most of what’s coming out now. I rate Max Payne 3 a 4.5 out of 5.