Okay this game would have been a 4 star but I removed 1 star for a glaring bug. There were several points in the game where if I was in cover Max would get stuck and remain in cover unable to move at all until the bad guys shot him,. I had to restart the checkpoint many times. The fact this kept happening after cut scenes make me think this could have easily been picked up. I am sick of games getting away with glitches like this, it's inexcusable to spend millions or in some cases hundreds of millions of dollars on game development/marketing and not spare some money for testers play the game several times and find these glitches. It's even more inexcusable in this case as I'm playing it 6 months after release and a patch hasn't been released. This isn't a PC version with many configurations it's a console version, the hardware's the same and has been the same for 6 years since release. Rockstar are repeat offenders, I usually let it slide because it's an open world game (RDR, GTA) so hard to test for all the in game circumstances but this game is linear and it's bang out of order to let this game out the door with the same easy to find glitch occuring so often.
Okay rant side over to the review, this is a very enjoyable game. For the internet's (and my own) fears after seeing bald Max in the sun - HERESY! - Rockstar have done brilliantly in capturing the essence of Max Payne in a whole new setting. Kudos to Max's voice actor he's brilliant. I listened to I think it was the Tested podcast recently and there was a comment about subtitles in games, someone made the comment that they have the subtitles on during a game to force them to concentrate on the story and how some voice actors are hard to listen to. That's me, I usually have subtitles on everything but with this game I turned them off. They were distracting me from the great voice
Visually the game is gorgeous, it's not Uncharted standards but it's really good. The problem I have though is the flares and words across the screen. At first I though "oh sound a bit of 'man on fire' inspiration, I like that film", now pretty much most games take inspiration from films COD being the most notable. The thing is there's taking inspiration and just plain out and out copying. The flares and words on the screen got ridiculous, we already knew the story was 'man on fire-ish' but there were plot points clear stolen. There's a fine line and this game crosses it both visually and in story. But take that away and it's great.
Gameplay wise, I do love the Max Payne bullet time and 3rd person view style. What I loved about the original max payne was going into bullet time having that hyper mouse sensitivity to shoot one guy at one side of the room then spin round and shoot the guy coming out of the bathroom all while diving through the doorway. Not having a mouse really worried me that I wouldn't get that feeling but it's still there, it translates well onto the console. The cover system is good but it doesn't feel thought out, it feel put in simply to keep it current. Some of the levels/rooms are planned out almost like a shooting gallery at funfair, pop up-bang bang-pop down-reload-repeat. There was some inspired originality during this game but sometimes there was just laziness and felt like the same room as the last but with different lighting and walls. This was a long game, in a good way, I felt I got a lot of enjoyment and value from this game. A hard thing to find these days, but if there had been originality in every level then it would have really propelled this game higher.
I've give a lot of grief in this review really, I'm sure you might be thinking why did he say he'd rate it 4 stars? Well it's got that thing a lot of games really forget to add....Fun! It's really enjoyable, I could go back and play this a lot of times. I haven't even touched the other modes which I've heard are equally good. Me I'm here for the single player and when it wasn't glitching I loved it.