The guy calls for a regenerative health system in order to tie in with Payne's self-imposed "rebirth". Fuck that and fuck him.
There are some valid points in there, but for the most part he's not making a whole lot of sense. Like:
- Max Payne 3 is full to the brim with cut-scenes = Max Payne 3 has a big emphasis on story which sadly doesn't deliver, so let me devote 10 minutes to talking about what's wrong with the character development.
Look, the story is paper thin because it isn't a story driven game and cut-scenes have absolutely nothing to do with that. They're there just to make it a more cinematic experience, tying it in with the game-play which is also cinematic at it's core, but there's no real attempt here to make any of it emotionally engaging, arguably in contrast to MP1/2, just visually appealing and stylistic. I mean, fuck, the story is bad enough to be disregarded; it's not even worth spoiler tags. When Max sides with the negroid savage that he's been chasing for half the game, the same machete wielding motherfucker who executed the trophy wife of his employer right in front of him, the trophy wife that Max has been beating himself up about in nearly every cut-scene and narrative since her kidnapping, sides with him at the drop of a hat because, err, the new bad guys are harvesting poor people's organs and, unless their uses are strictly culinary, potentially saving medium income people's lives around the world, lets the guy take a knife to some less-than-saintly md and allows him to murder him brutally -- you either have to give up on the story or stop playing.
The trophy wife's sister thinks Max did all that he could in saving her sisters ass, doesn't ever beat herself up her death nor blames Max, despite the fact that in the "rescue" he casually walks in on the hostage situation, lets himself get disarmed and quite obviously provokes the gang to execute her. What about the cop who's unable to do anything, other than provide a homicidal maniac with weapons, help him avoid police detention and drive Max to various locations with the intent that he slaughters whole populations of people? He even smuggles him into a police holding station where Max proceeds to viciously gun down what seems to be the city's entire police-force. Reading a synopsis of Max Payne 3 would need ridiculous suspension of disbelief in order to be at all coherent, but the scenarios presented in the story are nonetheless appealing from a visual standpoint as free-standing locales of over-the-top cinematic violence and style over substance presentation. Definitely in contrast with MP1/2, but I doubt that the designers of MP3 did not achieve exactly what they set out to achieve, which wasn't coherent plot and deep character development.
Now, let it be known, that I'm not a fan of slogging through hours of pointless cut-scenes and MP3 is just full of that shit and I wouldn't dream of defending it in that regard, but the review above hardly touches on what's wrong with the cut-scenes themselves and instead goes of on a pointless tangent about story; irrelevant when you have a shit story. The gun switching aspect that is mentioned is barely worth discussing; it isn't all that bad, especially when compared to other games that suffer from the same problem. Any big gun that you're carrying gets switched to your off-hand when you pull out a side-arm, which is just what happens in the cut-scene, and if you need that other hand for holding on to a chain as you're swinging down to shoot a bunch of guise you'll just have to assume that the AK didn't fit into any pocket that you had and that you had to drop it. In fact, it all looks quite natural and there's no real gun-teleportation going on like in some other games. There is however position switching in cut-scenes, and holy shit is this one bad.
The game really enjoys introducing opponents with cut-scenes, especially when we're talking about groups of people or particularly nasty, well armored, heavy-mg carrying bastards. In a game where you kill thousands this shit gets annoying really fast, but worse than that is that in these instances the game may decide that your position in the world is inappropriate for the upcoming battle and put you smack in the middle of gang-rape whereas previously you were safely behind cover some distance away. Not only does it break continuity, it can create a killzone where you're basically fighting the cut-scene teleporter over and over in an effort not to die. I got stuck on a rooftop fighting this heavy-mg dude over and over, where his cut-scene would always put me in his line of fire no matter where I started out, that shit just pissed me off.
- The last-chance mechanic is too unforgiving because of obstacles, limited magazines, screen distortions etc.
Too unforgiving? The last-chance mechanic is a fucking safety-net, i.e the game essentially being too forgiving by giving you any chance at all. So you end up in scenarios where it doesn't save your ass? That's too bad, but since you shouldn't need to use it in the first place, since it doesn't really need to be there other than to placate people with gamepads, who cares if it's less than a 100% reliable?
- No transition from prone to cover.
No, fuck the cover system in the first place in the most general sense. MP3, at least from my experience, did cover about as good as you can make it, and by that I mean badly. You can't stay in cover and expect not to take hits, you can't shoot from cover without taking hits, you can't blind fire without having your limbs get hit -- that's great. I was ecstatic about this feature, and played the entire game only getting into cover 4-5 times in total, and it actually worked really well. I mean, I took a lot more damage when trying to stay in cover.
Feels really nice to finally bring down the main baddies hard.
