So, these impressions are past the point of relevancy, but what the shit. I knocked the game out over the past day, taking about nine hours on medium. The game has a legitimately good story, and the raw shooting is some of the best around. Most of my post is coming from the perspective of someone who loves with a passion the first two games, on top of that I think that the majority of Rockstar games are garbage. So, I hated Max Payne 3. Don't get me wrong, it's one of the best games this year and on top of that it's the best game Rockstar have ever made. Where most Rockstar games are 40 hours of filler and 5 hours of cutscenes, Max manages to trim that down to 6 hours of fun, an hour of cutscenes, and 20 set pieces of bullshit.
I was never one to care about the "noire" of Max Payne 1 and 2. I liked those games because they were six hours of slow motion Italian murderin' story time. I think that the two Max Payne games are bested only by STALKER and Half Life as my favourite games of all time. I loved being a guy in a trench coat, shooting pistols (and only pistols), and sitting behind a corner waiting for two dudes to finish talking about eskimos before blasting their brains out. That's a pretty superficial thing to like about a game. I don't care. It's why I love The Darkness, and Mafia 1+2. It's why Godfather, Goodfellas and fucking Shoot Em Up are so great to me. I like Mafia stories. So, what can I do. I came into this game to hate it. Not in some half-assed, "oh I thought it'd be shit but it's actually really good" kind of way. In the best kind of anti-social internet superhero kind of way, where even if this game was by some foul magic the exact game I wanted it to be, I'd still hate it out of spite.
So, to reiterate, I hate Max Payne 3. At the bare minimum I'm self aware, though it doesn't make me sound any less idiotic. I'm some knuckledragging asshole who just wants to get angry at something existing. But, at least let me extrapolate why.
Multiple forced slow motion set pieces, multiple unlimited ammunition vehicle turret sequences, multiple moments requiring you to shoot a rocket / grenade / rocket-grenade out of the air, collectables, failure conditions for exploring, characters repeatedly verbally nagging you to progress, mash a button to do a thing QTE that only appears once, a QTE boss battle that only appears once and never again, identical minibosses with LMGs that are cloned level to level, forced cover sequences where you cannot exit cover, inexplicable failure conditions during boss battles, contextual verbalisation of every second painkiller item you find in the game which would be kind of cool if it didn't happen so frequently and the item reselection thing after every single cutscene in the game.
By "extrapolate why", I mean... whatever it is I just did.
So, I guess, I just hate modernisation. Not all of those problems are actually caused by it. Heck, most of them aren't. I just don't get why those elements are there in a game that has no reason for them to exist. If a game is going to contain shit like vehicle sequences, or QTEs, or cloned boss fights... why not just make it shorter? Oh, because the script calls for a boat chase or a car chase or for max to do something besides shoot the bad guy. So we need to replace the vocabulary we gave the player for a few minutes, so the movie we made can still work.
I can't say much more than that. Well, I can. I just don't want to because it will sound even more petty and banal. So, there you have it. Max Payne 3 has some design elements I don't like, therefore it's a shit game. Which isn't true. The game's fantastic. It just isn't the same as what I wanted. It was never going to be what I wanted, and even if it was I don't think it would be.
So, there's that.