I can’t help but wonder if I’m playing the same games as everyone else. I just put down the controller and looked up
Max Payne 3’s Metacritic
in a fit of irritation: “A technological tour de force,” sighs G4TV; GamesRadar rates the game at 100 out of 100 while looking away and muttering “It maintains the mechanics that made the previous games great while modernizing them to excellent effect,” the Guardian coos that its controls are “smart, seamless, and intuitive,” IGN praises the “strongly-authored narrative.” It’s a surfeit of back-of-the-box quotes, enough to make even the most withered PR executive toss away bins of marital aids.
Why, then, am I so underwhelmed by Max Payne’s latest outing? Rockstar’s built a reputation for interesting genre games; the recent Red Dead Redemption was a very fun recollection of moments from the Western Film Canon, and they’ve had an ongoing love affair with Tony Scott since GTAIV. LA Noire, its checkered production aside, was an unusual take on investigation that deserves props in spite of being a fairly unpleasant game. They should have had no problems with the embittered ex-vice cop from New York and his preternatural reflexes.
What I suspect, however, is that Rockstar’s attitude towards its genre pieces is basically incompatible with doing justice to Remedy’s vision of Max Payne. Remedy has shown itself over the past decade to be Rockstar’s light side, a developer which comments on genre’s reflection of reality even as it invokes it – a trick which Rockstar seems unable to pull.
The Trouble with Wish Fulfillment
The problem, of course, is that so many of Rockstar’s parodic moves -seem- to be saying something about American culture at large. Kill Screen’s Filipe Salgado waxes rhapsodic about Dan Houser, the VP of Rockstar and writer of Max Payne 3, and his prediliction for making snarky references to American culture. When you take a second look, though, so rarely are these games saying anything at all; how many of the radio ads in GTAIV are anything other than exaggerations of elements already present in pop culture? If someone in-game accuses Max of playing out action hero fantasies, and then the player proceeds to control him so that he or she can do just that, how much of a statement is that making? Salgado ends his piece by saying that despite trying to make a statement, Houser and co end up blithely reinforcing the tropes they seek to comment on – but I don’t see them even trying to do that, no matter how hard I look.
Noir is a genre fundamentally concerned with being critical of our modern existence. The detective is a modern knight errant – he’s sleazy, he has a checkered past, but he sticks to his morals and principles. He always falters, perhaps isn’t the poster boy for the morals he claims to protect, but life is dirty and mean and requires compromise and he always stands up when it counts, no matter the cost. In Max Payne 1 and 2, Max is tempted by money, revenge fantasies, seductive femme fatales, dreamlike acknowledgements of his genre and medium as excuses for his behaviour, is corrupted by the drug that killed his family, and faces scores of other potential downfalls. That’s the whole point of noir fiction – to highlight the temptations of the modern city, of modern life, and showcase how hard it is to live decently when you’re surrounded by compromise and corruption. They’re essentially moralist tales, about how humanity isn’t something you take for granted, and that’s why they have such a strong effect on us. Despite Remedy’s literally comic-book treatment of the genre and injections of bizarre humour and self-reflexivity, they understood the implicit statement of the noir genre, and the reasons for the detective’s appeal. I’ve heard plenty of comments akin to “the writing isn’t good, but neither were the originals'” – while Sami Lake isn’t the most technically elegant writer in existence, he’s certainly a craftsman who understands the emotional fulcrum behind the genres he uses. I have no doubt that the capable evocation of the noir genre is one of the huge reasons for the franchise’s initial success.
So when Houser starts Max in a terrible place and has him sink lower and lower over the course of the game, we’re playing a knight who has already fallen, doesn’t much care about it, and hates the idea of trying to reclaim his past glory, which he sees as futile and wrongheaded. The constant comparison of MP3 to films such as Man on Fire and Heat rather than the actual noir pieces which the first two games took as their inspiration is telling – the Sao Paulo in which Max exists is a place of bare capitalism and utter, unthinking hedonism, perhaps the most mercenary and cold a fictionalized city could be. But the tired cynicism with which Max reacts is far more off-putting than any presentation of modern-day crime could be; when our avatar is pessimistic and mocks the world he lives in, why would we want to identify with him in the first place?
Favela of Leaves
In many ways, Max spends the game in search of a higher principle to defend; having lost his family, job, and femme fatale, he is reduced to acting based on personal safety and economic need. He doesn’t find much in Brazil, and waits until late in the game to find the point beyond which he will not go. On a replay, the machinations of the political scheme that runs the mystery are clear – but given that the game provides a literal Powerpoint presentation to sum up the plot before the third act, it’s mostly nonsensical on a first playthrough.
The game actively distances itself from the player at every opportunity: most of the whack-a-mole cast speaks only Portuguese, and Max’s allies often take the lead in a depressingly Homefront-esque way, relegating the former hero cop to a support role where he cleans up the dregs or reinforcements. The level design is often shoddy, missing the elegance of the first two games in favour of a compulsive versimiltude; where the Remedy productions lacked in realism, they made up for in attention to gameplay flow and multiple angles of attack. Too often Rockstar neglects this last point, requiring players to step through levels while attempting to guess the designer’s intentions as to what to do and where to go.
This is particularly apparent in the combat: far from being “modernized to excellent effect,” the gunplay misses or ignores many of the improvements made in the second game, such as on-the-fly reloading, dynamic restoration of bullet-time reserves, and other mechanics which encouraged Gareth Evans-like moments of firefight-as-ballet. One final segment of the game required use of the new cover mechanics to proceed – some will say I’m just bad at the game, but when one approach lets you through unscathed and the other results in death due to environment or enemy 9 times out of 10, I suspect more than just player skill is to blame.
Another objection which came up again and again was the visual design of the game: random snippets of dialogue are superimposed on the screen as the (mostly unskippable) cutscenes play. I think these were intended to reference the comic-format segments of the first two games, but it just comes across as laughable. When Max’s supposed partner in personal security voices yet another cynical observation that “politics are everywhere” and the screen flashes “POLITICS EVERYWHERE,” it implicitly paints the player as an idiot, incapable of even the basest level of attention and comprehension. This only contributes to the ludonarrative dissonance which Tom Bissell noted in his piece for Grantland – when the game as a whole seems to be hitting me over the head with the existence of politics, corruption, and unsavoury characters in everyday life, I can’t help but think that someone forgot that pointing at something does not equate to scathing commentary.
The controls were equally unfocused on the 360; although the PC’s mouse is more precise, the dual joysticks compare unfavourably to the previous games’ emphasis on elegantly executed combat. This was exacerbated by the difficulty I had reading the battlefield: often enemies’ silhouettes were compromised by scenery or lighting, making aiming and prioritizing a chore at the best of times. The snap-to control was needed for anything approaching good gameplay. On the PC this was much less of a problem – with a mouse, it plays much more like the originals. On either platform, the emphasis on grit and realism translates unexpectedly to gameplay – while the earlier games treated each dodge as its own floating shield, allowing you to glide down walls if it meant a few more seconds of slow motion, Rockstar’s version has Max awkwardly bump into walls and fall to the floor. Sure, it’s more realistic, but it’s also frustrating as hell in the often tight confines of the game’s environments.
I wish I could put my dissatisfaction down to being a fanboy of detective fiction and as the first two games in the series. I like Remedy’s sometimes-whimsical approach to genre, and I admit that I prefer their outsider’s perspective on American habits to Rockstar’s introspection. But even if Rockstar had managed to salvage the noir aesthetic from the mire of development – something LA Noire almost did – the gameplay would remain as shallow and frustrating as it stands today. In the end, Max’s quest for meaning made me question why I was playing in a way that Spec Ops: The Line tried, failed, and would kill to do.
Further Reading
Knowing is Half The Battle: Max Payne 3 And The Fourth Wall by Adam Maresca
Hired Guns: The Real Price of Game Violence by Adam Maresca
This entry was posted in Criticism and tagged detective fiction , film noir , Grand Theft Auto IV , Max Payne , Max Payne 3 , noir , nwarrrrr , Remedy , Rockstar , Sami Lake , Sao Paulo , That Face , Why Are Favelas So "Cool" Lately? . Bookmark the permalink .
