Game keeps crashing every two minutes.

Worst of the series. This game sucks!

As a fan of the franchise, for me Max Payne 3 was looking a bit sketchy at the get-go. Visually It seemed too colourful and too much of a departure from the noir tones of the first two games.
However once you have played a few levels you can really begin to appreciate the amount of care with which Rockstar have handled this franchise. The character of Max is still totally intact, and believable if even worse for wear, and the high octane spirit of the preceding games is taken to the next level, with some spectacular set pieces.
Overall a thoroughly enjoyable and extremley worthy addition to the series, and hopefully not the last from Rockstar's capable hands.

I have never so desperately wanted to throttle a game developer for taking a beloved IP and rendering the dross which is MP3. Jack Thompson was right, but for the wrong reasons: MP3 inspires incredible violence. Not for its depiction of gunplay, or the fact that its titular character spends the game maiming and ventilating half the population of Sao Paulo, not because Payne is a drunkard with morbid fixations and a history of violence, but because the game had so much potential and Rockstar squandered every ounce of it.

Where to begin? Well, where I wish Rockstar's Vancouver studio had begun, by waking up every single morning with a single thought rolling around their collective brains: bullet time is your thing. Your thing is bullet time. Not cover shooting, not godawful setpiece battles, not QTEs, and certainly not cutscenes wresting control from the player every fifteen paces. Bullet time is Max Payne's thing, and you, Rockstar developers, are developing a Max Payne title, ergo bullet time is your thing. Focus on that. Perfect it. Everything else is clutter. I actually found myself pining for the dated cardboard graphics of the original, because the frequent ragdoll screwups rendered in perfect 3D were so immersion-breaking I'd have laughed out loud if I weren't raging at the fact that leaping into bullet time from cover totally ruins the novelty of it. Who cares that Max has just plowed into a doorframe, as perpendicular to the floor as the day he came into the world and just as useful when he crumples into a pile of flailing limbs after coming to a complete stop, maroon splotches blossoming all over his body courtesy of a couple of the thousand or so locals whose ire he earns in the week or so he spends there as Brazil's Worst Tourist. More than a few times I startled my pug while shouting impotently at the screen: GET UP YOU GORMLESS ♥♥♥♥! GET THE F*CK UP!

Which brings me to my second complaint, one which I attempted to address in the setting screen before despairingly going digging for some sort of hack to remove it entirely: the near-death kill cam. That feature was more of a menace than all the forces Sao Paulo could marshal against our gormless hero. I would happily have disabled the feature if given the option. Not only useless, it actively, and I can only assume deliberately, hampers firefights: many, many times I would be lining up a shot only to have my reticule dragged away to address some guy whose bullets seem to be slightly more insistent. Many times, as I'm preparing to leap into bullet time, I'm pre-empted by the NDKC and, having dispatched the VIP baddie, am unceremoniously dumped back into realtime where I'm riddled full of bullets. Which is what I wanted to avoid by engaging bullet time in the first place. Handy! Thanks! Why, yes, I'll press enter to start over. Thanks again! By the end of the game when I realized it auto-pops painkillers to engage the awful thing, I started munching pills preemptively to avoid it. It's enraging, immersion-breaking BS like this that prevents MP3 from being even a passable generic shooter, let alone the greatness it should have been.

The story is, I suppose, the highlight, if by highlight you mean the only thing dragging my attention over the finish line. It certainly wasn't the gameplay, which had gotten so repetitive by the second act that I wondered whether I might finish the thing on Youtube instead. And remember, this is a Max Payne franchise title: gameplay is supposed to be its stopping power. And yet for much of the second half I found myself loading (and reloading, and reloading) battles simply to see where this damp rag of a plot winds up. And the plot simply does not go anywhere. Max has no discernible interests here, other than vaguely atoning for past sins which, let's be honest, is thoroughly played out as a plot prop. It's a plot plop. How does this motivate your players? Because we watch you mourning over their grave? Who killed your wife and child, buddy? Because I'm pretty sure it wasn't you, and it's been a few years but I seem to remember you shot up whole boroughs of NYC tracking down the people who did, so just how much atonement are you still squeezing out of this clod of a story? Max reminds me of the Hound: a curmudgeon and a bit of a sociopath, there's a kernal of goodness to him, though not that much. But Sandor had another facet about his character that Max desperately needed: a cynical bent that kept him pragmatic. The arc of Max bends toward pragmatism, to paraphrase Barack Obama, but it never quite gets there. So accustomed is he to ♥♥♥♥ing up and berating himself for it endlessly that it's impossible to avoid concluding that Max takes a twisted pleasure in it, like killing small pets and then mourning them afterward. It's perversely indulgent, and at no point did I get the impression that he takes his arc any more seriously than he does his divisive little quips about wealth, poverty, capitalism, and his clients. It's just screen filler till the end credits. I started rooting against Max after he gets one of his clients killed by storming into the hovel where they're being held captive. Yes, Max! This is one of those ♥♥♥♥ups you drone on about! And what have we learned? Not a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thing!

Oh, well. Was it fun? Occasionally. At times I was able to execute a perfectly timed and positioned mid-air flight and take out several badduns, then watched smugly as Max dusted himself off like he was polishing an apple. But too often the game feels like it's punishing me for the indiscretion of daring to enjoy it. I just wanted bullet time combat and a noir setting and a sense of brutal detachment. What I got instead was a game that plays itself half the time, a developer that wanted to make a movie and resents its players for the gall of wanting a game, and narration from a feckless, permanently aloof ♥♥♥♥♥♥ who lost his sympathy card somewhere after his first romp through the Bronx rolled its end-credits.

Max Payne 2 : Fall of Max Payne - best Max Payne. Only graphics are good in this game. Miss those old games which made my childhood.

Good game 4 racists. Max Payne 3 or "Kill all Latinos","Brazilian Superman Simulator 2012"

Fat bald dude with a bad temper simulator 2012.

Did not shoot a single white person for the entirety of the game.

10/10

The best!

I haven't even been able to play the game once. Rockstar's piece of garbage "social club" is required to play the game, and no matter how many times I reset my password and re-enter it, it always gives me an error.

Why do you NEED to sign into this utterly worthless piece excrement before you can play a game you paid for? Good question! Only Rockstar knows!

The game is literally unplayable, I haven't spent one second outside of the "social club" login screen.

Screw Rockstar. Nonsense like this is singlehandidly keeping piracy alive, and it couldn't have happened to a better developer.