In preparation to take my first-ever dive into the world of the Alan Wake games, I decided to first play through all three of the Max Payne games, since I understand there to be some kind of spiritual continuity between the franchises. Well, that, and Max Payne 2 is honestly one of my favorite games, and I'd never actually finished Max Payne 3. This seemed like a good opportunity to revisit it and see if my initial distaste was premature or well-founded. Turns out it was the latter!

The following bullet points are observations collected over the several play sessions it took me to beat Max Payne 3. I know there are a lot of them but frankly this game disappointed me in ways I truly was not even expecting to be disappointed.

• You have to install the fucking Rockstar Social Club Launcher and create a Rockstar Social Club account in order to even play it
• Brother I hope you enjoy Long Fucking Cutscenes because they're here and they're bookending literally every single gunfight
• You hated all that innovative run-and-gun John-Woo-inspired bullet time gameplay right? You wanted to play most of the game as a mediocre cover shooter, right?
• Hey speaking of those cutscenes - the voiced graphic novels from the first two games were obviously pretty lame so instead everything is in-engine, baby! It might increase the modeling, rigging, animating, motion capturing, and lighting workloads by several orders of magnitude, but at least it'll look like total dogshit
• Fuck overhearing funny conversations between enemies. We're in Brazil so it's all unsubtitled Portugese
• Oh yeah we're in Brazil in this one. No more darkly comic Y2K-noir Americana, instead it's time for Max Payne to slaughter hundreds of brown people (from cover)
• Speaking of cover, you might want to "cover" your eyes if you have any kind of motion or light sensitivity. Those awesome in-engine cutscenes that you get to watch one hundred thousand times feature the finest in 2010 shaky-cam technology and Max's frequent drinking and pill-popping is accentuated by eye-searing screen glitches and double vision that makes me want to puke
• I bet whoever came up with the "Last Man Standing" system where if you go down but have painkillers left you'll get a chance to shoot an enemy & recover health felt pretty clever! Unfortunately 75% of the time this happens Max spasms wildly & makes it impossible to actually train your gun on anyone in time so instead you're treated to roughly 10 seconds of slow-motion flailing while you wait to reload a checkpoint
• Did you enjoy the quicksave/quickload feature from the first two games? Fuck you. Fuck you. It's checkpoints now you stupid bitch
• Okay another thing about the Last Man Standing system: better hope you aren't near a wall or anything when it kicks in because if you are there's an EXCELLENT chance you'll be stuck with the camera trained on it when you get shot, making recovery impossible
• Maxes Payne 1 and 2, both games that are over 20 years old at this point, never crashed a single time during my playthroughs. Max Payne 3, half their age, has crashed half a dozen times at LEAST
• God the constant cuts and double-vision effects in the cutscenes are MISERABLE. It's literally done with the frequency of dramatic moments in Indian soap operas, except nowhere near as charming. There are times when they literally render incredibly simple scenes incomprehensible. I really hope I'm getting near to the end
• Max Payne (the character) has a really bad case of Cutscene Stupid Brain. It has now happened MULTIPLE TIMES that I'll have strolled through a level, vaporizing a billion bad guys, and then Cutscene Max Payne will take the wheel and stroll into a room with like three dudes in it and let them disarm him at gunpoint. It's just absurd at this point
• Another cool thing about the cutscenes: a lot of times, you'll exit a cutscene essentially mid-combat, except it takes a couple seconds for the game to hand you back control of Max so you get to just kind of watch enemies take up positions behind cover when you could be shooting at them. Cool!
• Oh and every time you exit a cutscene it switches you back to the weapon in your handgun slot, even if it would be very very nice to have your rifle equipped like it was before you entered the cutscene. Cool!
• Not that you'd want to try changing weapons anyways thanks to the World's Shittiest Gun Wheel that'll have Max throwing away his guns in the middle of a firefight for some reason
• Unless I'm missing something, this game has completely done away with the throwables from the previous games - grenades and Molotovs. Not for the enemies, they still get them, but I guess Max lost his grenade privileges
• Something that should give you an idea of how fucking dire the state of video game criticism was in the early 2010s: Arthur Gies, in his review of this game for Polygon dot com, gave it a 9/10. This was sadly not an outlier. Christ
• This is so much longer than it has to be. Like the cutscenes are the worst of it but these levels just go on and on and there's so many chapters and it's all just glurge
• The bullet wound decals are so funny man. It's obviously SUPPOSED to look like exploded-open flesh but it ACTUALLY just looks like people keep getting pegged with rotten tomatoes
• I can't BELIEVE that only took about 10 hours to play through the story mode. It felt SO much longer
• The credits scroll is SO long. Like, almost fifteen minutes long. Maybe this feels like a weird thing to complain about but whenever I finish a game I like to sit and watch the credits because, I don't know, I feel like if I spent years working on a game along with a bunch of other people I'd want people to see my name in the credits! It's a respect thing. But oh my god. Just the list of motion capture actors took almost two minutes all on its own.
• This dovetails into my next point, which is that this game just SCREAMS "waste" at every turn. It's clear that a lot of design work was done trying to cudgel the Max Payne formula into Rockstar's GTA engine. A truly staggering amount of voiceover clips had to be recorded to accommodate the insanely frequent cutscenes, to say nothing of the masses of enemy barks (which, again, are almost all in Portugese! There's nothing wrong with Portugese but this was being marketed to English-speaking audiences!) The cutscenes have SO many unique NPC character models, all of which would have needed motion capture and animation work done on them. All of those cutscenes would have needed to be planned, blocked, shot, edited... oh! And let's not forget all of the music, either original or licensed! Do you know how expensive that is? Do you know how EXPENSIVE that is? I wouldn't be harping on this if the first two Max Payne games hadn't accomplished so much more with so much less. Max Payne 2 had ONE (1) licensed song (Late Goodbye by Poets of the Fall), and it fucking slaps wicked hot goat pussy
• The "waste" aspect really puts into perspective the fact that Max Payne 1 and Max Payne 3 reportedly sold about the same number of copies (~4 million). I gotta wonder if Rockstar even wound up making a profit on this project after the absurd level of resources they poured into developing it. They certainly haven't shown much enthusiasm for the property since then (beyond paying Remedy to work on a Max Payne 2 HD remaster, which I'm extremely excited about because Max Payne 2 is a fucking incredible game that had the bad fortune to be coming out at an all-time-miserable period in PC gaming history and more people deserve to experience it

So, yeah, not a fan of the third entry in this trilogy! It probably won't get the same number of replays that its predecessors have gotten from me, I'll say that much. Nevertheless, I'm pleased to have finally gotten all the way through it, and I'm excited to finally find out what made Alan woke (after a brief detour to blast through a playthrough of Beyond Good and Evil, which was what I was promising myself as I was gritting my teeth to finish MP3).