My favourite five games of 2012. Why five? Don't know. In order? Not really. More questions? Probably not.
1) Sleeping Dogs. If you've dabbled in the wonders of Hong Kong for any length of time (or China in general) you'll have had a whale of a time with Sleeping Dogs. The acting was top rate, and though they didn't push the policeman / triad schism far enough it still did enough to be one of my entries here. Shame the DLC looks to be the all too common "cheap pricepoint and little content" so beloved of most games around these days. Fighting tournaments and "spooky" Halloween events? Bleh. You have a rock solid storyline to flesh out, guys. Don't waste it.
After a wonderful experience on console, this game almost soured me completely due to the infamous hkshop.exe error on PC (go Google it, then weep). In fact, this sounds more like a rant about things I hate than "my top games" so I'll shut up now.
2) FTL. A powerhouse of decision making and random luck blessing the brave. Best thing to come out of Kickstarter? It might well be. Anybody with the mildest Star Trek hankering needs to have this on their PC. Also here's a few tips (I'll also add to those that Drones are essential).
3) Hotline Miami. If you ever wanted to pretend to be Professor Pyg while powerdrilling the heads of those who truly deserve it, then this is the game for you. I keep seeing "Drive: The Game", but "Professor Pyg: The Tribute Album" would be more appropriate. Not so much what your character does, as the overall feel of what takes place keeps reminding me of him for some reason.
4) Binary Domain. I'm truly glad to see it popping up on a number of "best of" lists. EVERYBODY should play this.
5) Spec Ops: The Line. This shunted a fair few titles out of this spot quite late on, as I only recently played it. The campaign is around six hours on normal difficulty and probably closer to ten on hard. It's powerful, it's bold, it's dramatic, it doesn't shy away from the horrors of war and almost everything it does is very, very smart. In fact, something it starts to do later on with a common videogame "thing" will slowly but surely start to freak you out a bit. And that's before you get to the plot, and the multiple interpretations it bears the weight of. A phenomenal title, and something that everybody should play.
It also doesn't contain a single QTE, and that's quite remarkable in this day and age.
The rest of the best of the bunch
I haven't done much with Torchlight 2, but it seems like a lot of fun. XCOM probably got doinked off the above list by Spec Ops, but is a really rather sensational game. Legend of Grimrock would have booted FTL or Hotline Miami out of the top spots, but again - not enough playtime. Borderlands 2 is phenomenal, but somehow it doesn't quite squeeze into the list. I guess I might just be a sucker for the first game.
And, me being me, I couldn't let this blog post finish without a closing complaint so I'll just come right out with it: my biggest gaming disappointment was Far Cry 3 which - I've come to realise - isn't as good as Far Cry 2. Blog post incoming, release the hounds and happy new year.
Here are my FTL protips (buyer beware, I've died horribly on the seventh wave every single time so maybe I'm not the right guy for the Protip job). Having said that:
1) Comb as much of the first map as possible, because you won't be able to hang about on later sections of the game. At this point, the enemy ships chasing you are fairly weak and you can afford to get caught by them once or twice as you forage near the exit.
2) For the first few levels, passing through a red area isn't quite as bad as it seems. It's worth passing through them if taking the "safer" route means you'll end up in a bunch of nebula sections which almost always mean instadeath later on in the game.
3) When upgrading the ship, a lot of players start powering down the medbay because other bits of the ship need to be up and running (you know, like oxygen and guns or whatever). Don't neglect the medbay! It'll stop you getting dead (important) and you can also use it to fend off ship invasions. How? PULL UP A CHAIR, but first: the doors.
4) Upgrade the doors as soon as possible. On later stages your ship will be on fire pretty much all the time, and if you wander into bug / mantis territory you'll be dealing with ship invasions every couple of hops. Patching up your doors will allow you to deploy some tactics. Position your least favourite redshirt in the vicinity of the invaders (next room over should do it) and shuffle one or two extra guys in the medbay.
Can you see where I'm going with this?
The redshirt will lure the invaders to the medbay where they'll be greeted by three or more shipmates who can lay out a smackdown while being constantly regenerated. There is a downside to this tactic, in the form of the next tip...
5) The moment the invaders look like they're going to die, start filtering your guys out of the medbay asap. The reason for this is the same reason you don't do what I did and get into the habit of healing everybody at once - I lost my entire crew bar one guy when an attacking ship teleported a big explodey thing into the medbay.
Unless you're in a gambling mood (or need to smack up some invaders) then only heal your crew two at a time, max.
6) Always target the enemy weapons, then go for the engines so they can't run away. After that, it's a case of juggling those two and hammering the bridge. I've never really seen any benefit to blasting away at their oxygen supplies.
7) Luck plays a part in this, but when you're on the run and desperately trying to get your hands on supplies, a defence drone will work wonders in fending off attackers long enough to be able to jump to safety. Hands up anybody who ever bothered to use a drone. I'll wait...
8) There is no 8. That's everything, it's all I have. I'll probably remember a few others and update the post but feel free to drop some more in if you have them.
I finished Sleeping Dogs today, and I'm here to tell you that you should probably go out and buy it.
If you ever wondered how Shenmue 3 would pan out, this is pretty much it assuming Ryo turned into Jackie Chan: Supercop and started mashing heads into freezers. As someone who has spent a reasonable amount of time wandering around Hong Kong (and also wrote an altogether too long dissertation on the politics and symbolic imagery of 90s HK cinema back in Uni) I was dying to see how this would pan out.
After an hour or so of playtime, I was close to being overwhelmed at how damned Hong Kongy everything was. That first walk around the market? INCREDIBLE. I think the devs went for trips to HK to record the sound and capture general observations, and it shows - everything from the ding ding the shops make when you walk in / out to the perfectly replicated noise of the pedestrian crossings is all here. My opening game highpoint was jumping up onto some rooftops and suddenly hearing a class of kids singing a song from off inside one of the buildings, complete with instruments. I just stood around for ten minutes soaking it all in.
The scene setting here is phenomenal, and the moment a downpour hits with those neon signs on either side of you (and passers-by covering their heads with their newspapers), there can be no doubt you're in Hong Kong. I even heard ringtones on phones that were blazing away when I was over there last. Or how about the way your guy nods his head while walking around in a club. Or how clubs will be empty save for the odd floor sweeper at morning time. Or how secluded spots may have a hobo sleeping rough if you venture there at night. Or how I winged a pedestrian in my car only to find passers by had whipped out their phones and started filming me. Or the time I escaped a car chase by popping a wheelie and driving over the top of an oncoming car which smashed into my pursuer.
Or. Or. Or.
I could go on, but it's better to discover a lot of this stuff for yourself.
The Gameworld
It isn't huge, divided up into four chunks that try to give a flavour of various zones of Hong Kong - this isn't a replica, because that would be crazy. However, it's a little bit of a let down to find that parts I was dying to see in the game were pretty much AWOL.
There is no Kowloon. There is, amazingly, no Tsim Sha Tsui. You won't find the famous waterfront with the Star Ferry, the walk of fame or Chungking Mansions.
These are all 100% iconic chunks of Hong Kong cinema and it's jarring to find them absent. There was also no MTR. As an additional method of transportation and also a place to have some dubious antics happening, it's a shame this wasn't included.
I also need to mention the crushing blow that was Victoria Peak. When I saw it was on the map, I was practically salivating at going up on the tram, maybe walking around up there at the top and basking in the view.
What you get, is a series of ugly high gates made up of bars with a little gated door to walk through. You go through about two of these, and find the view, the money shot, the show stopper is a poorly drawn skybox (hidden behind more bars!) that doesn't even appear to be fully finished down on the bottom right hand side. You can read a bunch of people similarly crushed here, along with a video that shows the peak minus the hideous railings - so much better.
At one point I heard the ding ding of the tram and got my hopes up, only to find it went chugging past inbetween the two sets of fences. So that was crappy.
Other than that, this is the closest virtual reproduction of Hong Kong that you'll see for quite some time. Even accounting for the (required) differences, you'll be running through a slice of street or driving past an area and think holy crap, I know that bit! It's a lot of fun.
The Characters
Special mention to the voicework and script here - the lead character, Wei Shen, is brilliantly acted and the majority of the supporting cast are very well done. You can even go on a date with Emma Stone, and Lucy Liu puts in an appearance at one point. I can't recall anybody major flubbing their lines, or anbody else for that matter. Even the random people on the street are well done (with one "invisible" exception - more on that later), and most of the places you live in usually have a few characters hanging around who have their own little stories acted out as the game goes on. Another nice touch.
The Story
You're an undercover cop looking to rise in the ranks of the Triads and take them down from the inside. What this means in practice is a story that picks up a lot of the main beats from the best HK action films around and makes them its own. The Big Brother / Little Brother dynamic is quite important in this one, and any number of memorable scenes set in hospitals and docks to cemetaries and tea houses are all in here. It covered most of the things I'd want to do myself from my HK action movie checklist, so I'm entirely satisfied with that.
It's tight, it's focused and it gets to the point. I found myself blitzing the main missions just because I couldn't wait to see what was going to happen to Wei next. Well played.
The Gameplay
Everything is tied into your character's skillset, from dating to finding in-game objects to selecting clothing to wear (which gives bonuses, but can only be worn if your "face" level is high enough).
The fighting is great fun, slamming a dude's head in a car door or a spinning fan never gets old and the bullet time triggered by leaping over an object while shooting is THE BEST THING EVER (tm). They also develop the "find an item" gimmick from open worlds, making you return them to a Dojo where you can (again) select moves to learn. Makes things a bit more interesting. There's also car racing, gambling, debt collection and a heap of random "help me please" missions along with various in-world happenings.
Rounding that off is a set of multi-tiered undercover cop missions that loosely skirt around the main story. Drug busts don't end well - after beating the goons and hacking CCTV, you're supposed to mark the dealer and have him arrested. What this means in practice is you wait for a shield to appear over a guy's head and press the button. Bit of a waste, guys.
The Music
Oh man, the music. I already mentioned it here, but there's a definite 70s vibe to a lot of the OST. I've come across so many musicians I wasn't familiar with. To name a few, Burn Out by Cinematic Orchestra, Emika, System by Terry Lynn, Art of Xen by Jay Price....amazing, amazing stuff.
The Bad Things
There's always some. Here's my list of "could have done better":
1) Camera issues. This tends to be a problem in open world games, but there's somethng....not quite.....right about the viewing angle when driving. It seems rather low, and a common solution seems to be holding up on the thumbstick a little to gain a better view of your surroundings.
2) YMMV on this, but the first selectable option is "new game", with "continue" below it. I'm willing to bet cash money that someone, somewhere accidentally did this at least once. I've no idea if that would wipe your saves or not.
3) When leaving a clothing shop, the immersion is suddenly broken by a terrible disembodied voice that for all the world sounds like someone in the Wu Tang clan yelling "TAKES GUTS TO WEAR THAT".
What the Hell?
4) Characters in the game world will just straight up vanish if you turn your back and walk away a little bit. This seems to mostly affect "story" characters, ranging from main missions to smaller favour jobs but it's annoying all the same.
5) Police. I like that the game is built with the notion that you're an undercover cop in mind; no GTA style rampage here, if you go gun crazy (assuming you can find one) or just start running people over your ass will be grass in no time at all. The problem is that the cops teleport in right behind you (and in some cases in front of you!) and start letting rip with a volley of handgun and shotgun fire.
If they're chasing you on foot, they'll never....ever....stop or grow tired or lose the scent. It doesn't seem to matter if you bust some parkour moves or not. The buggers are just...there, somehow. Car chases are much the same. Other open world games at least have the cops roll in around a corner or come in waves to give you the chance to escape; what's in the game here is silly, but it's another YMMV moment.
In Conclusion
I've put about 20 something hours into the game, and that's allowed me to complete the main storyline and a chunk of side content. I'm still only about 60 to 65% towards total game completion though, and it'd be interesting to play through again as an actual undercover cop instead of "oh well, nobody will miss the ten pedestrians I bundled into my car boot and drove off the pier when nobody was looking".
Despite being shunted from one publisher to another, this is absolutely a game you should play if you're even remotely interested in martial arts, Hong Kong and stabbing a dude with a fish while dressed up in the yellow Game of Death jumpsuit.
Seriously.
Sleeping Dogs is a very good game indeed. The music is phenomenal, and a curious mix of jazz, classical and straight up Bruce Lee 70s vibes. You haven't lived until you've staked out a drugs bust with that tune playing in your car while sizing up the best way to take down 18 or so heavily armed goons down the nearest alleyway.
I wasn't familiar with the artist linked above, and did a little Googling. Sure enough, the album containing that track (and a bunch of others from the game) is available to buy for 69p in the UK, and (from the looks of it) $9.99 everywhere else.
It is fantastic. You know what to do...
What's amazing about the latest videogame fiasco isn't so much the latest tipping point ("girlfriend mode", just in case she holds the controller upside-down HAHA) as fact that it keeps on happening over and over again in the first place.
Steps for success:
1) Say something anybody with ten seconds experience in talking publicly about stuff could tell you is a bad idea on the grounds of it being a) silly b) offensive to a decent slice of your paying audience and c) silly
2) Watch as it becomes the focal point of said article, exploding across the internet at a million screaming people an hour
3) Ensure the head guy says something that suggests he hadn't actually seen the article in question before weighing in
4) Dig that failtrain all the way down to Chinatown in a horrible, horrible example of "it's broke, so I did the exact opposite of fixing the shit out of it".
There is a time and a place to use the "...but, but..." defence, and this sure as Hell isn't it.
When you raise legitimate questions in the minds of people who potentially buy your stuff (or just wonder why person x said silly thing y), you don't repeatedly dismiss them as "sensationalists", especially when most of the objections I saw flying around were entirely reasonable. It's also probably a bad idea to retroactively throw in the term "boyfriend mode" after the lightning strikes, despite it never being called that and only focusing on females in the original context.
This is the president of the company, and everything he's tweeting in response to the fallout is only making things progressively worse, not better (no, it's not a good thing when you're the #1 trend on twitter if it's because lots of people think you did something silly). Add this to the original comments in the Eurogamer piece, and I'm once again reminded that - just like in the Mass Effect 3 pr meltdown extravaganza, this stuff wouldn't keep happening if game devs selected to be the mouthpieces of the industry were actually trained in the art of talking about things and stuff.
Like...where is the PR rep in the interview gently correcting the clearly soon to be disastrous direction the discussion has taken? Where is the formal prep talk before the interview takes place? If there had been one, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have been talking about girlfriend mode. Why do people in the games industry keep doing this? Even the "pro" industry talking heads like Cliffy B skirt dangerously close to the edge of the pit, and despite being mostly positive here it still comes across as somewhat.....hmmm.
Let's put it this way, when people are suggesting that a sane solution is for the supposed-to-be-impartial gaming press to advise the people they are interviewing that their words are poorly chosen, something has gone horribly wrong. The gaming press should do their level best to not be doing something like that at all times.
I mean...look at this. Here's the Eurogamer news editor having to ward off claims of "sensationalism" and all the rest of it, in admirable fashion I might add. On the other hand, I guess there's no danger of Eurogamer handing out free pr tips anytime soon.
So far, there's been a reasonably sensible post on Kotaku about this and not much else. However, given how these things tend to go down I'd almost be willing to bet cash money that this thing just gets worse when the inevitable "No, people are wrong because..." articles appear on gaming sites starting from tomorrow.
My advice? Take the lumps, apologise, give up and move on. Anything else will result in generous helpings of failure and pretty sweet jokes.
If you're still with me, then here comes a rather long, somewhat spoilerish ramble. I also spoil the ending to Splinter Cell Conviction, but I don't think anybody will care about that. I should also add that the soundtrack for this game is fantastic, and well worth buying.
Where is Max and what have you done to his bullet time?
Anyone familiar with the early games knows Max is not a guy to screw around with - a quick tap of the button and he dips into bullet time which is typically the most efficient way to take out a room full of goons waving uzis. Max Payne 2 deepened and enhanced bullet time by making Max plunge into a more bullet timey state of mind the longer you blasted bad guys, culminating in that sweet 360 degree spinaround cam when reloading.
All in all, bullet time lasted quite a while. Yet I can't help but think Rockstar seemed to view bullet time, the key mechanic of a Max Payne game, as a hideous instant win button and nerfed it completely. As a result, Max is in bullet time very, very briefly compared to the other two games (to say nothing of how long he takes to go into his shootdodge jump, being shot to pieces while VERY SLOWLY PREPPING HIS LEAP). Worse, the meter seems to refill quickly if you go into cover (!) or if you kill a dude. What this means in practice is lots of hiding behind walls while AI flank into positions you can't recover from but more on that later.
Let's put it this way, something has gone very wrong when Max Payne, MAX PAYNE, king of bullet time spends less time in that mode of action than random characters in other games that aren't Max Payne. And yet...bullet time, even the copious amounts of it in MP2, doesn't come close to an instant win. Skillful use of the more open, non-linear environments (no need to jump in this game, because you're mostly running around on a flat surface unlike the heady heights scaled throughout MP2) combined with a wonderful reload ability are the way you get through a level. Simply running around in bullet time will get you whacked.
Even the slo-mo reload animation is functional and not simply a graphical gimmick, because it gives you the breathing room to keep track of where all the goons are while the camera spins. Yes, a spinning camera becomes a tactical gameplay mechanic. How cool is that?
I was extremely excited to see how bullet time developed from 2 to 3. The answer is, "it got downgraded and if you press a button you run around slowly for a bit".
Of course, you have all the bullet time you can eat but only when the script demands it - see the plunge through the window of the nightclub or the ride on the trolley in the police station for proof of that. Otherwise, Max is spectacularly unspectacular.
This is not a good thing, especially as the ever present targeting dot from the first two games only appears when you aim, leading to precious seconds of bullet time wasted as you continually correct yourself.
I hope you like three hours of unskippable cutscenes
Oh God, the cutscenes. If you want to play through this game on the higher difficulties and maybe try some of the other modes out, think about this - no fewer than nine hours of your life have sailed by while a fairly mediocre (and occasionally nonsensical) story play out on the screen with no way to get rid of it. The old games let you whizz through the comic panels, and let you stay in control of Max while the rest of the story progressed. Here, you'll come to dread that most terrifying of enemies - your walk slowing to a grind as you wander up to a door, triggering Max doing something like going through the door, looking at the door, rambling to himself by a door, walking to somewhere, hiding behind something, so on and so forth.
The art director must have had a thing for Kane & Lynch too, because the shaky cam and streaky effects presumably there to indicate drunkeness and withdrawl symptoms are MIND BOGGLINGLY ANNOYING and do not help when bolted onto three hours of waffle.
Why can't I shootdodge through the door? Why can't I open it myself? Why can't I get into cover myself? Why couldn't half of this stuff left me in control of Max? Why is it frequently used as a crutch to manoeuvre Max into stupid situations the player wouldn't have put him in?
Frustration Galore
I've killed my fair share of dudes in games. Specifically, I've killed my fair share of goons in Max Payne games. This one doesn't know whether it wants to be a cover shooter, or Max Payne. It sends out mixed messages and the gamer is punished for it. People will tell you you're playing it wrong; "Oh, you're not supposed to play it while hiding in cover", even though the mechanic is all-pervasive and comes with an endless stream of waist high cover. More often than not, playing as Max Payne and attempting to use bullet time will get you killed in seconds.
Poor scripting, baffling design choices and cutscene incompetence all compound this and leave you reeling. Here's some of my low points. I'm not sure if they're in order, but you'll get the idea. A couple of these, I could have handled. But the below isn't even the full laundry list of issues and there's only so much you can take before suspecting the game dev is going out of their way to punish you for not playing the game their way. I'm just not sure who would want to play it like this:
* Alarm bells start ringing once the stadium level begins and you're swarmed by goons in overtly CoD military gear. And they start throwing grenades. And you can't throw anything back (Max must have lost the use of his throwing arm since MP2). I hope the game doesn't take me into a jungle setting fighting paramilitary CoD-lite goons with gunboats and rocket laun.....crap.
* Ammo collection is erratic and makes little sense. Often I'll be low on ammo but instead of picking up the bullets on the ground in the form of "matching gun x", I have to drop the gun I have with the 3 bullets in favour of the new one. This doesn't happen all the time, why does it happen at all?
* After every cutscene, the game auto defaults back to a single handgun - even if I have no ammo in it. Oh look, I'm now dead. Thanks for that. This also happens in multiplayer, even if I'm carrying dual handguns handing an instant advantage to anyone with a two handed machine gun.
* Gun pickups are also illogical. If I'm running around with a uzi and a handgun and the handgun only has (say) 6 bullets but the uzi is full, trying to pick up a replacement weapon often results in Max DROPPING THE FULLY LOADED GUN IN FAVOUR OF ANOTHER HANDGUN WITH LESS AMMO. Now I have less bullets than when I started out and I'm still packing the nearly empty pistol. Oh look, I'm dead again. Thanks for that.
* You quickly realise that Passos is perhaps the worst AI companion of all time. I think in the entire game, he's scripted to kill maybe 3 guys and you can take those guys out yourself if you're quick enough. Otherwise, his game plan is to shoot like a stormtrooper while whining at you endlessly. Who thought that was a good idea? Worse, the game rewards you at being awesome by punishing you with instadeath. The level where you have to storm a sort of military museum and you're pinned down by about ten dudes shooting right at you?
If you manage to get to the entrance before everyone up top is dead, running inside to creep up and kill the goons won't work because you're treated to a cutscene of Passos running out and dying horribly. Remember when Mona Sax killed a bunch of dudes in the MP2 funhouse? Yeah, that worked fine guys.
* Some cutscenes lead to total stupidity, in the form of the game handing you back control as Max runs towards a group of enemies WITH NO COVER. The inside of the boat on the Panama level is a perfect example of this presumed attempt at "excitingly cinematic". Similarly, the level on the roof of the collapsing hotel - you fight your way through an incredibly annoying set of goons as the building crumbles around you, reach the end and can only trigger a cutscene by running out of cover.
Surprise, you get a cutscene of a fully body armoured bad guy waving a chaingun from a roof above you, and control is handed back with Max standing IN FRONT OF THE COVER, and defaulted to a handgun. Which, in my case, had no bullets in it.
* Your guns are endlessly taken away from you, often with no reason behind it. When you first emerge onto the upper portion of the hotel, you've planted a bunch of C4, killed everybody and stocked up your guns and ammo in an armoury. You clamber up a ladder, and...the next section starts and you're back with the silenced pistol from the start of the level and a machine gun nearby with about 8 bullets in it. Words cannot express how infuriating this is.
* The last stand mechanic is broken when combined with a slow, ungraceful Max. Going down on the floor often means you kill the dude who shot you, get up incredibly slowly (while taking damage), fall over again, kill the dude who shot you, get up incredibly slowly (while taking damage), fall over again and die. This renders the feature all but meaningless on hard or above.
* More of a storytelling thing, but in the brothel we see various couples having sex in a rapid-fire cutscene. All of the women are naked; the men are of course either fully clothed or wearing boxer shorts, because heaven forbid we see a penis, an actual penis, in a videogame. Right bro?
* Laser sighted guns. Late in the game, you're given a reduced selection of weaponry and the bulk of it ends up being these laser sighted guns. These weapons may have the worst wobbly useless aim in the history of gaming. The moment you aim, the sight vanishes and when it's actually onscreen, it jerks all over the place. This isn't what you need when taking on those police station rooms full of SWAT officers. Protip: switch the sight off with the back button on the xbox controller, I'm assuming you can do this on other platforms.
* Almost everything Max does is stupid. Even after he decides to "confront his demons" by, uh, shaving his hair off and wandering into the favela the very first thing he does is listen to a small child and walk down a SUSPICIOUS LOOKING ALLEYWAY. Cue ambush. I know Max is supposed to be at a low ebb here, but I was practically screaming at the TFT by this point. Similarly, the build up to the favela rescue of the sisters was built up heavily, and when the inevitable cutscene kicked in I was ready to see Max burst in through the window and slow-mo shoot those assholes in the face.
What actually happened, was that Max walks through the door, yells a bit then hands over his guns and someone dies. Let's not even get started on his "those poor, poverty stricken people" observations on sighting the favela before walking in and turning it into an orphan holocaust. Or the insanity of Max blaming himself for not being able to stop an entire military outfit from burning his employer's building to the ground when everyone else in Brazil seemingly had the smarts to hire an entire military outfit. Max is at fault because is boss is too stupid to realise that two guys aren't enough? Okay.
Random questions: what happened to the handcuffs Max was wearing in the police station? Why does the cop appear in the sex club Max walks into, making sure he vanishes via the magic of cutscene before the shooting starts? Why does Max call himself fat when he looks like a big guy with muscles? I have lots more of these. I'm going to stop now.
* You get an achievement for not shooting [a guy] at the end. Why? I have no idea. Is this some sort of redemption for Max? Probably not, because he then goes on to kill a ton of other dudes. Plus [this guy] was a massive asshole, why wouldn't you kill him? All the while, a rambling dialogue plays in the background while Max talks about him becoming the thing they wanted him to be. It's all very serious until you realise the next section is firing infinite rockets at jeeps and an aeroplane.
* When it wants to, the game straight up cheats and breaks the established rules of the game to further the direction of the story. I have issues with games that resort to breaking your skillset because that's all they have left to throw at you. Splinter Cell: Conviction, pushing you into a final level where narrow corridors and indestructible light sources take away any of the stealth powers you thought you had while turning it into a straight up gun battle, is particularly guilty of this (and don't get me started on the final cutscene, where - spoiler alert - Fisher decides to rescue his friend by exploding what sounds like half the building and shooting everyone in sight with non silenced weapons).
Wait, where was I? Oh yeah, rule breaking. In the church shoot out, Passos tells you a guy on the balcony above needs to be killed. Try as you might, the game wants you to go upstairs to kill him so a bunch of goons can appear downstairs where you were originally. Dip into bullet time - doesn't matter, his asshole whack-a-mole head will slide down faster than you can pop him. The moment the reticule goes near, down he goes into hiding.
After this, you're left wondering how many other times the game will arbitrarily decide to break your bullet time and Max seems even weaker than before, because now he's not only dealing with strange controls and gun mechanics (hey, why don't you do an awkward roll which puts you out of cover when picking up a gun, instead of just picking it up), he's also dealing with the heavy hand of scriptwriters who decide when your powers work and when they don't.
* The game constantly feels like it's making shout outs to levels from earlier Max Payne games, yet the newer versions aren't as good or as interesting. The sniper mission in MP2? Navigating Mona across the construction site, while getting into different positions, taking down the goons and sniping the waves of bad guys chasing Max. Here? You're in a fixed position, don't do anything other than shoot 2 or 3 slowly moving guys at a time and Passos even tells you the exact location of each gunman.
The escape from the apartments in MP2? Multi tiered building, some simple puzzles, a little bit of platforming, collapsing fire escapes, that AMAZING cavalcade of goons on the rotating staircase which becomes a flying body frenzy in bullet time. Here? You creep past windows of goons with laser snipers, the building explodes a bit and you run off to the rooftops. It's better than the Brazil levels, but it isn't a patch on the original incarnation which had more meat to it.
The police station in MP2? It's great, you can walk around and listen to calls, annoy the guys watching the TV, observe a line-up, wander down to the cells, flesh out the story. Here? Your cuffs magically vanish after being taken in so you can shoot the place up. And that's pretty much it.
Did you ever hear a guy in the toilet? You can jump up and see him reading a paper. It's that attention to detail that generates new discoveries, even now.
Finally, for sheer inventiveness nothing on offer here tops the escape from the hospital mission in MP2 where Max has to arm himself before the lone gunman, formerly less than nothing on the "severe threat index" becomes the single biggest problem he's ever faced due to not having any weapons. What use is bullet time when you have no bullets?
"I'm coming for you!" and that single crack of thunder. Brilliant, panic inducing terror. Compare to the panic on offer here which usually comes from the game auto selecting a handgun with no bullets while standing out in the open. This level also wisely rewards the player with a stairwell escape packed with an endless supply of mooks to mow down. You haven't lived until dipping into bullet time, slow-mo blasting your way through and coming out of it right at the bottom.
Or how about chasing Gognitti in MP1? Come to think of it, where are the goons with actual personality talking about things before you crash their numerous parties? The bad guys here are just pincushions to be filled with lead, non-speaking, non-interesting, non-anything bad guys that will pipe up in a cutscene if you're lucky.
* Where is the weirdness of the storytelling? The same game that used to reference Norse mythology is just a straight shooter with Max swearing all the time. The storytelling device using the televisions has gone straight too, replacing the handful of shows that not only told their own story but reflected aspects of Max and his journey with "blah blah here's a news broadcast".
It's like playing Alan Wake feels more like playing Max Payne than Max Payne 3. This is a strange sensation to have.
MAXIMUM REDEMPTION
Well, sort of. Did you roll your eyes in amazement when you saw that the increased difficulty levels reduce your bullet time? Because the thing we really want in a hard Max Payne game is reduced bullet time and more bad cover shooting!
Roll no further, because should you manage to complete the game on Hard - and I did, while mashing my face into a desk - a glorious sunrise will appear, in the form of Old School Mode. I'm not sure why this wasn't the default mode or at least available from the start, but it's a mode that keeps difficulty high while removing the broken last man standing mode, upping the pills (as far as I can tell) and increasing the bullet time / meter refill.
You know, so you're actually playing the game like Pax Payne.
Ultimately, it's the developer's biggest mistake that this wasn't the default setting, because the extra boost in bullet time just about cancels out the majority of the design flaws that cause so many BUT THAT'S NOT EVEN FAIR BECAUSE moments.
It's still a challenge, but the game suddenly feels like it's playing fair and Max is on an equal footing with the dozen or so heavily armed and heavily armoured goons flooding into each location.
Max Payne 3's greatest tragedy is that a good chunk of people who played it will never actually unlock this mode. I reckon the reviews and general feedback would have been much better. Instead of setting out a million words above raging about the design decisions that broke my brain, this entire review would (for the most part) say "Yeah, that Max Payne 3 was a blast and you should pick it up".
Instead, I'm saying "If you can deal with the crazy difficulty spikes, frustrating design and endless blah blah cutscenes twice over in an effort to unlock Old School then you'll probably want to buy it".
I was hoping I'd have a ringing endorsement; instead, it's a cautious thumbs off that occasionally gets torn off in a doorframe to make myself feel better.
