The X-ray death vision of Sniper Elite V2 was just the latest in a wide-ranging set of expansions on Max Payne’s cinematic shootout sequences. Slow-mo falling bodies had already been comprehensively outdone by 2007’s John Woo Presents Stranglehold and its spectacular blend of style and mechanics. Max Payne 3, now in the hands of Rockstar, plays catch-up with one innovation. When you finish off a fight against a group of enemies and kill the final one, he will fall in the same slow motion close-up. Now, though, you get a measure of control too, pressing A to toggle super-slow-mo, the better to admire the splashes of blood.
This is not a particularly compelling addition to the formula, even as Rockstar strive to make it so with expensively detailed environments and characters. The gameplay pleasures are mostly in the familiar being executed well and at length. The settings offer cover just sparingly enough to force you into making use of time manipulation powers, but you can’t rely on them alone as a strategy. Health packs are cutely old-school, but sneakily giving you additional ones after you fail a few times is a rather clever dynamic difficulty measure. In the world of shooters, all and sundry had taken up slow motion shootouts, but few with anything like the panache of Max Payne 3’s set-pieces as you are forced to blast your way from collapsing water towers, roof slides and nightclub dives.
In 2012, some good shooting was no longer enough to make for a blockbuster game. That was something that Rockstar were more than clear on. Look at the back of the box for Max Payne 3, and there is no mention of any of those game mechanics. Outside of the standard smallprint, in fact, the only evidence that it is a video game comes in the words “single player and multiplayer” at the top. Instead it is styled like the back of a DVD, with an outline of the plot, and some screenshots free of any kind of user interface.
An increased focus on serious cinematic storytelling was a direction Rockstar had been moving in for quite a while, and it was no coincidence that this was the series they decided to take it further with. The original Max Payne was a pioneer of emphasising story above all else. Readers may remember that it did so in a way which made me absolutely hate it and its leaden prose. Some familiar elements remain from it in Max Payne 3. Max still talks a lot, and moodily says things which sometimes land with a clang (“I wouldn’t know right from wrong if one of them was helping the poor and the other was banging my sister”). It is still the kind of game where when he steps into someone’s apartment and switches on the TV, it’s to a cartoon which reflects the game’s themes in the least subtle way possible. A decade on from the first game, though, games were slowly moving past the time where “it has story!” was appealing, and Max Payne 3 reflects that.
Some change was inevitable with the change of developers, with writing now headed up by Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser. His confident way with blending humour and weightier topics is familiar from Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption. Indeed, the plot has strong parallels with both, given that it’s about a migrant trying to escape his violent past before being drawn back into trouble. There are several things Houser and Rockstar do to make the best of this beyond just providing better writing at the sentence level.
Max Payne is a much more defined character than Grand Theft Auto IV’s Nico Bellic or even Red Dead Redemption’s John Marston, and this is a more focused game than those huge open worlds, so it can take much more of an interest in Max Payne as a character. His hard-boiled world-weariness comes off a lot better with added time, and so the game goes all in on his age and how washed up he is – “a sweaty, grey-haired mess”. He doesn’t have much direction in being in São Paulo beyond finding a way to keep living, keep drinking and keep taking painkillers.
The game reflects this with a stylishness a world away from Max Payne’s half-arsed graphic novel interludes. The cutscenes really sell his lack of hope, as well as coming up with interesting angles and combinations of angles to present places and events. Isolated parts of speech get highlighted on screen like he’s only taking in half of what’s happening, turning it into strange poetry in real time. Even outside of the most cinematic bits, Max’s paranoid, altered view of reality keeps intruding in the visuals. Colours separate, images double, scanlines add a distancing filter to the world. The soundtrack from rock group Health is a constant source of twitchy, doomy droning, pushing the tension levels even higher.
It makes use of its Brazilian setting to further the same ends, with Max out of place and unable to understand much of what is being said around him, a step behind every time things go wrong. It does a fair bit of presenting Brazil as a corrupt and often brutal place, though never really in contrast to any superior America. Max gets a local companion who is presented in a mostly positive and equal light, too. When Max talks about himself as a representative of American capitalism, it is not in a positive light. If anything, the comfort and resources of the rich family he is bodyguard to are more alienating than the corruption or crime. The game returns frequently to “the rich looking down on the poor, literally as well as metaphorically”.
The setting makes for an obvious point of comparison to another early 2010s third-person shooter which put its American heroes in a fight for survival in a city elsewhere in the world, Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days. That game also made a lot of use of queasily distorted visuals, too. It’s an instructive comparison for where the differences fall. Dog Days was utterly committed to coherent ugliness in every aspect. Kane and Lynch were bad people, doing bad things, in bad ways which went badly for them. Max Payne 3 goes even harder in some ways, particularly its main character’s self-loathing, but doesn’t follow through as completely and leaves a gap.
The common dissonance in games including mechanics like Max Payne 3’s is in morality, or at least its perception. Cole Phelps of L.A. Noire is presented as a generally good and reasonable man, but he kills hundreds of people without pause. Max Payne 3 does not have this problem. Max describes himself as “some rent-a-clown with a gun who puts holes in other bad guys”. He kills with weary inevitability in plot and mechanics alike. “I kept moving towards the signs of life, rubbing them out as I went along”. In one standout moment of convergence, he is in a bar brawl in a New Jersey when suddenly the game’s red dot targeting reticule appears on the chest of the mobster he’s fighting. Killing is the only thing he knows.
Instead, Max Payne 3 brings a new kind of dissonance. Max is hungover, strung out, blurry, bleeding, but shoots his way through entire armies of men with guns who are after him. As the people he is charged with protecting get captured or killed, one-by-one, he presents it all as his own personal failure, no matter the strength of the forces against them. After his people are the victims of one particularly well-executed assassination and building-burning, he says that his survival would be “a victory for gross incompetence”. All of the playable bits of Max Payne 3, though, are built on Max Payne as a supernaturally competent killing force. It’s one-on-ten fights never feel like fair odds, stacked too far against the ten. He shoots rockets out of the sky; the slow-mo kills revel in his coolness. The contradiction nags at the edges of its story as it propels forward.
It wasn’t the only game by this time to be using mechanics of violence to tell a story about the detrimental effects of violence. It’s a particularly striking example, though, thanks both to how well made it is, and how obvious a strain it still shows in attempting to be Stranglehold and Dog Days at the same time. Bridging that wide a tonal gap with the force of one man’s self-loathing alone is a hell of an ask.
Top of the charts for week ending 19 May 2012:
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