Max Payne 3 PC evaluation & FXAA vs. MSAA shootout

Max Payne is not the typical gringo cop turned private security in Brazil.  Max Payne 3’s story picks up eight years after the events of Max Payne and Max Payne 2 where an older and fatter Max is reduced to near-poverty and living on alcohol and painkillers.  Max is recruited by Raul Passos at a bar who tells him that they went to the police academy together.  Well Max is convinced after a mob boss in New Jersey puts a contract out on his life, to leave for São Paulo for a fresh start in private security.

The original 2001 game, Max Payne, was ground-breaking in many ways and it became known as the gaming equivalent of the “film noir” genre. Like its two predecessors, Max Payne 3 is so intense, that this player when nearing its conclusion with nerves jangling, had to actually leave the house for awhile just to get away from the game’s intensity.

There is an addictive quality to this game that makes the player want to know what is just ahead; to want to know how the story will unfold as you blast the thugs in your way, even if it takes multiple tries to get through an action sequence.  Basically, Max Payne 3 is an interactive movie consisting of seamless cutscenes followed by intense nonstop arcade-like shooting action.

Max is suicidal and he takes almost no stealth measures, and even quips about his lack of planning and how he dares the bad guys to kill him if they can.  One of the loading screens calls this adventure, “the longest suicide attempt in the world”.  If Max stays in cover, he will be flanked on the right or driven into the open with gasoline grenades.

Fortunately, Max is again voiced by the same actor, James McCaffrey, who also performed some of the live action for the game.  And the same dark comments on life continue all through the series as Max narrates the game.  Max gets a real look at the awful living conditions of the poorest people of São Paulo where police corruption is rampant, and as he observes, many times the police are just another gang of thugs with badges and guns.

This editor has lived in South Brazil and the atmosphere of the game is dead on.  The NPCs’ gutter slang is Brazilian Portuguese and it is very descriptive and coarse – even when they are talking rudely about Max right in front of him; unless you know Portuguese, you will miss what they say as the locals are often apt to do there, especially if you only speak English.

A typical dark quote from the game after Max shoots up a slum leaving hundreds of drug dealers, gang members and dirty police dead is, “As charming as this neighborhood was, my sightseeing is over”.

The first two games were written by series creator, Sam Lake and developed by the Finnish developer Remedy.  This time, Rockstar developed the game and the writer is Dan Houser who wrote most of the Grand Theft Auto games.  The graphics for the original 2001-2003 games were very good for their day, and today’s 2012 game is not a disappointment in any way as it uses the Euphoria dynamic animation engine very well.

All of the Max Payne games are called “third-person shooters” which feature an over-the-shoulder camera as the player “becomes” Max Payne and controls his actions. All of the Max Payne series can be described as “run and cover” and  Max Payne 3 introduces a new cover move for our hero called Shootdodge. Max Payne 3 also uses ‘bullet-time’ – originally introduced in Max Payne (2001) – in shooting sequences where you can see each bullet hit the enemy NPCs in slow motion.  As Max dives in any direction, time slows or his reflexes speed up to super-human and he can shoot in any direction while he is in the air.

There is also a new grace period when after after losing all of his health, Max must kill the enemy NPC who mortally wounded him in order to continue playing. To use it requires that the player have a new strategy of always having one or more bottles of painkillers on hand.  Players are able to stay grounded after landing a dive, which still enables them to shoot 360 degrees.  The game is also ultra-violent and very graphic.  Here is one of the milder cutscenes.  Playing in 3D Vision 2, the blood-spatter is far more realistic.

This is the first major game where when a player dives to shoot, it actually looks natural and and fits in with the context.  Instead of the skippable comic book style of story telling used in the first two games, there are interactive high-quality cutscenes which transition seamlessly into continuing gameplay. The developers were very clever to hide the game’s loading while the cutscenes are playing.  You cannot skip the cutscene while the game is loading although you can skip them once the scene is loaded after the first playthrough.

The player will never notice loading screens across gameplay and through cutscenes.  In this way, Max Payne 3 is more like an interactive action movie than any game preceeding it.  And there is no loss of immersion.  One note.  If you are playing the game in super-widescreen – as we did for awhile at 5760×1080 across 3 screens – the cutscenes only play on the center screen and it is a bit more jarring than playing on one large screen (as we preferred – either at 2560×1600 on a 30″ display, or with 3D Vision 2 on a 27″ 1920×1080 120Hz display).

Multiplayer

Max Payne 3 willl allow players to form online private crews or to join public crews.  A player’s Rockstar Social Club account allows joining up to five crews at the same time. Completing tasks together will gain XP.  The Social Club integration promises to connect play across Max Payne 3 and the upcoming Grand Theft Auto V.

The issues with cheats are promised to be addressed in an upcoming patch by Rockstar.  However, this review just covers the single player experience – one that is quite short – perhaps up to a dozen hours long if you really take your time to explore or have to restart from checkpoints, over and over if you pick too hard of a difficulty.  Yet it is a very intense ten or so hours on Normal or Easy.

DRM

There are four DVDs to install for a total hard drive space of 35GB needed for its large textures.  DRM requires that you connect to the Internet to activate your installed game.  You do not have to connect ever again which means you will not be able to patch it.  A major patch has already been issued by Rockstar which addresses some issues that this player did not have, and the game was completed with only two or three crashes to desktop in ten hours of action using the game as installed on the first day of its release, last Friday.

If you are connected to the Internet when you launch the game and a patch is available, you must download it to be able to play  There are issues with many Anti-Virus programs and they usually must be disabled in order to play Max Payne 3. Please remember to renable your anti-virus when you are done playing or you may have your own real-life issues with malware attacks.

Unfortunately, Rockstar does not currently allow third-party tools like Fraps to measure framerates or to even take screenshots with the retail (DVD) version.  If friends want to share video, it is impossible now with the retail version; the Steam version has no such issues.

Unfortunately, we were only able to take screenshots by using our Print Screen command and alt+tab’bing out of the game to paste and then save using Paint.  Since we can not give you framerates, we will give you an IQ comparison of MSAA to FXAA, noting that in this particular game, FXAA on Very High actually looks better and uses far less resources than 8xMSAA !