Max Payne 3 (Gameplay #5) - Bullet Point of No Return
3By now I've finished Max Payne 3 and can summarize it as a well-presented, surprisingly hardcore shooter experience which managed to stay compelling throughout the fast-paced and cinematic 6-8 hour singleplayer campaign despite some questionable design decisions as well as a rather weak script. The actual gameplay included a fair amount of well-implemented features carried over from the old Max Payne games, but Max himself is not a particularly interesting character and his endless inner monologues eventually grew tiresome. More importantly, the narrative couldn't quite live up to its undeniably stylistic presentation since Rockstar's attempts at bringing this fragmented mess of a man into a fresh new environment and context came off as too arbitrary and forced to provide much in the way of relatable character motivation.
Gameplay-wise, the addition of cover-based mechanics did shoehorn Max Payne 3 into the conventional third-person shooter formula in ways which are to some extent regrettable, but to its credit the game was definitely challenging enough (even on Normal) that Bullet Time remained an absolutely crucial gameplay mechanic, and most firefights in MP3 would become very difficult indeed if the player tried to approach the game as a mere Gears of War clone. Occasionally clunky controls aside, there's something very precise and uncompromising about Max Payne 3's shooting which comes off as a deliberate throwback to the series' PC roots.
And, thankfully, at least in my experience this is by far the most respectable Rockstar release on the personal computer so far. While not on the graphical level of a Crysis 2 or Witcher 2, Max Payne 3 is a very nice-looking game and seems to be much more optimized and scalable than both LA Noire and the infamous GTA4 (a 3-year old game which looks and runs significantly worse on my high-end rig than MP3 does).