Max Payne first came to prominence in 2001; a product of Remedy Entertainment, creator of the equally angst-ridden Alan Wake. The game made an impact. Max’s moody, boozy descent through physical and emotional suffering, relayed both through gameplay and the at-the-time-revolutionary comic book pages, though hardly a candidate for the Palme d’Or or Man Booker, pushed things forward just enough for both gamers and developers to sit up and take note. It had influence.

Arriving two years post-Matrix, Max Payne was also the first prominent release to make use of bullet time, the replenishable time-slowing mechanic, powered by accurate shooting and the taking of damage, which allowed Max to run, jump and dive while executing pinpoint headshots, one after the next. Now, a decade since we thought we’d seen the last of him, Rockstar has revived and evolved both the character and the gameplay to create something that’s really rather surprising – a game that is, in our opinion, one of the finest third-person shooters ever created.

Primarily, this is because it comes closer than the vast majority to delivering on the promises of games rather than striving to compete with any other medium. Alan Wake’s biggest mistake was that it wanted to be a book, Kane & Lynch’s that it wanted to be a film. Narrative, action, interaction; Max Payne 3’s blend is perfect. Sharp storytelling that understands where it sits – within a videogame – and makes no pretensions at higher artistic status. Though it is told with great finesse and features characters as well-rounded as those found in any A-grade action flick, it serves primarily as a mechanism of pace – time to breathe between the action – as well as offering some good reasons to shoot the bejesus out of everything that moves. Like we need a reason.

Considering its fondness for set-pieces, you’ll be surprised to discover that Max Payne 3 romps in at around the 12-15 hour mark, provided you don’t set the game up with soft lock (auto-aim), a mode expressly included for people who don’t play shooters. Perhaps this is the game’s one weakness; that players need to take it upon themselves to set an adequate challenge in order to make the gameplay experience all it can be. Basically, set free-aim, as hard as you can take it, and brace yourself.

The vast majority of Max Payne 3’s playtime is not spent watching talking heads, but engaged in intense firefights set against a rising musical score every bit as rousing as the best Hollywood has to offer. It is played on the edge of your seat, each and every one of its elements tuned to a singular purpose: to tweak your central nervous system.

Max Payne 3’s influences arrive primarily from outside of Hollywood – the wave of cinema arriving from the favelas of São Paulo across the last decade; Fernando Meirelles’ City Of God, José Padilha’s Elite Squad, among others. This, we found, is much to its benefit, but in videogame terms, Max Payne 3 has only one influence: the series of which it is a part. Rockstar clearly feels that there wasn’t much broken and by extension not much to fix. And so Max Payne 3 manages somehow to feel both progressive and old school – more challenging than its contemporaries, but incorporating well-hidden mechanics that ensure it’s never punishing.

There is no regenerating health bar. As is traditional, Max’s health is moderated with painkillers found scattered about the game’s environments. Keeping an eye on your health is a primary concern; as long as you still have pills to spare, on four of Max Payne 3’s five difficulty settings, a fatal shot will result in the automatic activation of Last Man Standing. This addition slows time to offer Max one last chance to save himself from death, so long as he can kill the enemy who delivered the fatal shot before he hits the ground.

Bullet time can be activated whenever the gauge has the necessary juice. Quite often, though, you’ll find it lacking and must resort to Shootdodge. Hit the right bumper while pushing in a specific direction and, as in previous games, Max will dive in that direction while activating bullet time whether the gauge is full or not. For most players, Shootdodge will begin its life as a matter of last resort – when we play a shooter with cover available, we’re just programmed that way – but as things roll forward, it will become clear that it’s a necessity.

Though there are points of cover to be found dotted about the game’s environments, using them for more than a few seconds is suicide. Enemies use cover, but they seldom stay there long. Instead, they work together to find a way to sneak around you for a multi-pronged attack. Stealth, cover and run-and-gun will all get you killed when used in isolation, so a mastery of all three is essential, as is the ability to switch your approach on a dime. Think, move, shoot; three simple actions that in Max Payne 3 amount to considerable joy.

Enemy AI does not make the same decisions all of the time, which makes things difficult to predict through simple repetition. Though you may have played a part of a level numerous times, from Max’s point of view it’s all new, and so AI behaves in ways to surprise you so that, by extension, you’ll feel the way Max does – panicked and edgy.

We experience everything through his eyes. Max, for example, does not speak Brazilian Portuguese and so by extension neither do we. There are no subtitles, the only clues we receive as to what’s being said arriving when Max occasionally translates his assumptions through his ongoing internal monologue – a mechanic that’s also used to nudge the player in the direction of Max’s next goal. There are no maps, simply because they are not needed.

The story of Max Payne 3 is a straightforward affair, populated with engaging characters and complex relationships, and incorporating the classic touchstones of character motivation – love, revenge, betrayal. It would be fair to say that in any other place beyond the dafter end of the action movie genre, Max Payne 3’s story would indeed stand up. But videogames are different.

In videogame stories, especially those found in shooters, the biggest problem is keeping the player motivated. Only the best of the best do this well – make us feel as if each shot is fired not merely to stay alive or to make it to the next checkpoint, but because these horrible bastards deserve some payback. In that sense, Max Payne 3’s compelling story shows an understanding of the medium in comparison to which most other games pale.

Cut-scenes are frequent and yet never irritate. They move with the flow of the action either to provide a breather or to crank things up another notch. A cross between the comic book frames of the original games and the fast-cut crosstalk of directors such as Tony Scott and Michael Mann, visual accents are provided with the on-screen appearance of certain words and phrases from the spoken dialogue. We were sceptical of this approach at first, worried it may turn out to be a limp gimmick. In reality, they serve to beautifully accent the game’s sharp dialogue.

One particularly pleasing aspect of Max Payne 3’s narrative is the way it relays its backstory through gameplay. Raul Passos is the man who talked Max out of New York, out of drinking his life away in the seedy Hoboken dive bars where he used alcohol to torture himself over the death of his family. The story of their meeting brings with it a setting that will be eerily familiar to those with previous Max Payne experience. Snow, alleyways, rooftops. It’s classic Payne, recreated with all the luxuries of 2012.

Arguably, the entire game is one back-to-back set-piece, so it would seem futile to point out the diamonds within it. The problem is, Max Payne 3 is full of them. Rockstar is not content simply to paint by numbers. While it may seem to follow familiar patterns – firefight, cut-scene, firefight, cut-scene, on-rails section – in every part of this pattern Rockstar offers us some new twist. A boat chase, for example, doesn’t presume to be doing enough by throwing multiple enemies across our reticle, and the resulting insanity is a ten-minute action scene that uses expert pacing, story, and a crescendo of action that resolves itself in a climax as ludicrous as it is brilliant.

For us, Max Payne 3 joins a group of maybe three games this generation in which the end credits were swiftly followed by a stab of the start button and a declaration of ‘Again!’ It has tremendous replay value. Primarily in moments you’ll want to experience once more, but also in challenges and achievements, hidden clues and golden weapon pieces to collect, and two additional difficulty settings above ‘hard’: Hardcore and Old School, both of which are locked until the game is completed once.

Then there is Arcade Mode, which is split into two sub-modes. Score Attack pits you against your friends on the leaderboards, the score to beat pasted onto the screen to act as reminder, and New York Minute; a mode in which kills add time to the initial minute provided. Add to this the comprehensive multiplayer modes and there is a lot of game here.

Games can and do make you feel cool. When you clear that ravine or claim that pixel-perfect headshot, or when you talk an alien species out of declaring all-out war. But with a non-gamer in the room, the pride is somehow bled out. Perhaps because you can’t help but see things through their eyes and, all of a sudden, you’re haunted by the notion that, well, that it’s all a bit broken.

Which highlights our generally lenient attitude towards videogames. We forgive a six-inch-high wall we cannot pass or a situation in which there’s no conversation option for the thing we want to say. We forgive third-rate acting, hammy dialogue, awkward control schemes and more. We’ve grown attuned to these inadequacies, grown up with them and watched them improve over time. Sure, they may not have fixed everything, but they’re getting better, right? Right.

It’s precisely these specific, time-honoured videogame problems, the ones invisible by their prevalence, that Max Payne 3 fixes. There are no invisible walls. No doors that are doors in appearance only. Each enemy has a different appearance. There is no visible loading.

But Max Payne 3 is seamless in more ways than one. Take a look at Rockstar’s last triple-A game, L.A. Noire: scarily realistic faces that did their job in increasing the drama, but also inadvertently bestowed a kind of unreality on everything else. Each detail in Max Payne 3 is realised in such a way that it disappears as it would in a movie. We don’t, after all, watch a film to marvel at how realistic the beard hair is on the lead actor’s face. Rockstar’s anal attention to detail is so prevalent across every facet of the game that such minutiae disappear amid a collective beauty that advances both the capabilities of the Xbox 360 and the medium of videogames as a whole.

The only real problem here is not in the game itself, but in the games of others. After playing for sufficient time, some of Max Payne 3’s perfectionism leaks out all over our experiences of other games. When it does, some of the forgiveness we’ve cultivated over the years is lost and we start to wonder: if Rockstar can make a game with so few of the problems we’ve all been slow-boiled into believing are limitations of technology, what the hell is everybody else doing? Max Payne 3 is a labour of love, and screams it from every pixel.

Score: 9/10

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Addressing the many inspirations behind Medal Of Honor: Warfighter’s set-pieces, he began by discussing the real-world ‘vent’ diaries kept by soldiers as a method of release.

“The vent book is where it all started. I was actually just flipping through it the other day. There are definitely moments that are lifted directly from that book.”

“Other scenarios were starting points that inspired our designers to create amalgams of locations and events. And of course, we infused a lot of Medal of Honor into the story.”

“Originally, Warfighter was going to be an original IP at EA. But the decision was made, rightly so, to combine the two franchises for one epic experience. We feel the game, the story, and the franchise is in the best place it has been in for a very long time. And we owe it all to that little red tattered notebook that has been there, done that, travelled the world, and seen it all.”

Which makes the book sound a little bit Disney to us, bring to mind images of a novel tying its belongings into a bindle and heading out across the dusty desert. Still, the right decision has doubtlessly been made, as about three people would have played a game entitled ‘Warfighter’ alone.

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Darksiders 2 art director Han Randhawa has revealed to 360 Magazine that Vigil Games’ choice of Death as a leading protagonist for its sequel came as a result of the character’s depth, and War’s relative simplicity. Discussing the order in which characters should appear, he offered the following.

“You want to get Death and War out the way first anyway. The key thing is to focus on the ones that everyone’s familiar with and I think what we wanted to do with Death was a lot more expansive.”

“Doing that in a first game for a new studio, getting all that developed was probably a little bit too much. So, War, who’s your typical warrior-type character – that made a lot more sense for our first game because you can make a much more structured game much more rapidly, much more quickly.”

“Death is more involved. We really needed the first game to exist to be able to make this game.”

So, it turns out that a character that just wishes to rush around clobbering things is more difficult to create than one who is the gatekeeper between mortality and the afterlife. Who’d have thought it?

American History Xbox

It’s all Desmond’s fault. Despite protestations to the contrary, we’d pledge good money that, given the chance to restart, Ubisoft Montreal’s creative team would quite happily erase him from existence entirely.

Ever since Altaïr set foot in the Holy Land, the true star of Assassin’s Creed hasn’t been its narrative intrigue, engaging characters or even gameplay mechanics, but rather the chance to walk across history’s pages.

To emerge from the Borgia’s backstabbing corruption unscathed. To witness first hand the death and rebirth of a mighty empire. To participate in the foul and barbaric persecution of wandering minstrels who just won’t bugger off.

Our point is, without the far-fetched sci-fi contrivance at its heart, what exactly would Ubisoft lose? An opportunity to chronologically confuse its players? Bizarre soliloquies delivered through the mists of time by characters aware of their status as a mere avatar? Anyone who persevered with Revelations will likely agree with that one.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We’d argue that gamers would have more of a stomach for period drama if the answer weren’t always the appropriate historical version of “the butler did it”. The tale of Connor Kenway, son of a British colonist father and Native American mother during the American Civil War, certainly provides players with a rich historical playground in which to frolic.

There’s a sense that what you’ll have the opportunity to witness will be the most exciting aspect of the game, despite the addition of freerunning mechanics tailored to a wilderness environment, speedier combat and the chance to hunt down bears.

After all, the series has already tackled open country environments, less built-up settlements and NPC commentary on the wider implications of your actions – and all are still present in an enhanced form here.

The ultimate test will come when those overly familiar salesmen, bustling street children and startled townsfolk come together to form a society that transcends how one man might swing a tomahawk.

Five Reasons Ubisoft Should Leave Desmond Where He Is:

• He serves no narrative purpose other than to reminds players the Templars and Assassins are still at war in the future.
• We’re really sick of hearing Nolan North play the same character over and over and over and over…
• Compared to the assassins we’re playing as, he’s a wimp and a whiny one at that.
• Every time we have to play as him, he’s stopping us from enjoying the actual game. You know, the bits where you’re an assassin?
• He’s so lame!

In season

The news that changes of season will actually affect the game play directly certainly intrigues us. Winter and autumn missions, for example, will now force our hero to be at a hasty retreat through treetop canopies. When muskets are being shot in Connor’s direction, the ground is just too sodden with mud or topped with snow to wade through with speed.

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If you liked this article, there’s plenty more where that came from. You can download the latest issue of 360 Magazine (also available in all good newsagents) through iTunes to your iPad or iPhone for just £1.99 per issue. Bargain!

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Resident Evil 6 director Yoshiaki Hirabayashi has told 360 Magazine that his game’s control system has changed greatly since Resident Evil 5′s action-heavy bombast.

Speaking on the balance between more slow-burning survival horror and immediate action in his upcoming title, he revealed that “we didn’t want to make a straight up action-type control scheme for the game. We’re still trying to make a horror experience.”

“This is horror as entertainment. To that end I think it was necessary to open up the controls a little, make them smoother, so you could immerse yourself in this world more easily.”

“But that doesn’t mean you’re going to lose control over the player in terms of how they experience this world we’ve created.”

After recent comments fro the Resident Evil Revelations team that the series should strengthen its action in order to capture the Western market, these tempered words come as a relief indeed. Not everyone wants to dudebro their way through the bowels of hell, y’know.

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A brave new world

“I think we were all aware of the challenge going in and that was one of the things that attracted us to Halo 4,” explains 343’s creative director Josh Holmes.

“It’s just not something you can dwell on as a creative team, you can’t keep thinking about all the potential ways it could go wrong.”

“You have to find, what you think is the right vision for the game and stick to your guns.”

“The teams been really excited about having this opportunity to take on a franchise that they love and try to bring a new set of eyes and a new creative vision to Halo. We’re in that final stretch and you can see it all now coming together after years of labour and it feels really good.”

It’s not just about ‘30 seconds of fun’ any more. For 343, it’s become about understanding the eclectic multitude of reasons gamers love Bungie’s creation and working out a way of retaining them for its sequel while simultaneously delivering something new.

An unenviable task if ever there were one, Halo 4 has shown its focus and visual design are walking a tight line between innovation and creativity.

Frank O’Connor, 343’s franchise director, has already stated he believes Halo 4 will be one of the most visually arresting games the 360 has ever seen.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Though it looks pretty, it’s a statement we’ll reserve judgement on until this autumn. What we’re more interested in are the minute hints 343 has given to Halo 4’s gameplay and story. The further you delve into Halo’s lore, the more likely it becomes that the Forerunners are the central foe.

As a species, they’ve already engaged humanity in a war long before the firing of the rings, which originally wiped out the Flood’s first attempt at assimilating life. It was this event that destroyed the Forerunners and saw the Ark re-release life back into the universe.

They would certainly make an engaging enemy, but there is another species that predates even them, the Precursors. As if to confuse matters further, the Precursors were an advanced civilisation knocking around long before the Forerunners and are, surprisingly, under-explored in Halo’s fiction.

343 has spoken about returning to Halo 2’s recharging shield system (minus the health pack setup) and the Cyclops Mark II mech, seen in the new multiplayer map Warhouse, will form some part of the gameplay.

There’s so much that can go wrong with Halo 4, but witnessing 343’s genuinely intelligent changes and new direction seems to show that it will deliver on all fronts. It would confirm 343 as a new industry talent worthy of Bungie’s heritage and hopefully convince fans of the series that the Master Chief is in safe hands.

Red Vs Blue: The Game?

When Frank O’Connor explained that Halo 4’s multiplayer will contain a narrative and a justifiable reason the red and blue Spartans were fighting, we could almost hear the hands slapping fan’s foreheads. It’s yet another risky move 343 is taking (along with the COD-like customisation).

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If you liked this article, there’s plenty more where that came from. You can download the latest issue of 360 Magazine (also available in all good newsagents) through iTunes to your iPad or iPhone for just £1.99 per issue. Bargain!

Or go here for the United States iTunes store version.

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The original assassin means business

For some fans, IO Interactive’s changes and tweaks to the classic Hitman formula have raised many questions and even a couple of eyebrows, too.

Will it be too easy? Is it an action game? Why is the film so rubbish? Perhaps not that last one, but you get the idea.

To help put those worried at ease, we caught up with Hitman Absolution’s Game Director, Tore Blystad, to ask a few questions and get some straight answers on the way his game was going to evolve the classic assassin formula…

360 Magazine: Was Agent 47′s ‘Instinct’ ability always present in its current form?

Tore Blystad: As Instinct is a new game feature for Absolution, it has been naturally evolving with the project. There was a need for the player to be able to get more information about the world around him than we were able to provide simply with environment and props and lighting.

And as the AI is very powerful we wanted a tool that was able to predict the movement of the AI which led to the Instinct feature. It ties nicely into the fantasy that a top trained assassin would have finely tuned senses and would be able to predict human behaviour to a certain extent.

There has been some hesitation from our fans about the Instinct feature, where many have, for instance, predicted that it will make the game too easy. But it doesn’t really do much more than the classic map feature of the previous Hitman games did except moving the information into the game world and making it faster to access.

Click here to view the embedded video.

On a personal note, I often find myself reaching for the instinct button when playing other games as it is a great way to gain a quick overview of the situation in a complex 3D game world.

360 Magazine: Would a non-augmented Agent 47 find success in today’s action-obsessed market?

Blystad: This is a tricky question to answer as Agent 47 is a genetically enhanced top trained assassin… it has been a large focus for us on Absolution to create a more empowered main character as we felt this was something we missed in the previous titles. We wanted to shift the gameplay centre of attention from controlling the character to containing the situation. Being a World Class assassin, killing should be easy but getting away with it should be the tricky part.

I do think that our focus could have been different and less “augmented” with a weaker Agent 47, the mechanics of the game would just have to shift to accommodate the kind of gameplay that hero can perform. It’s all about creating a game where there is balance between the different elements.

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If you liked this article, there’s plenty more where that came from. You can download the latest issue of 360 Magazine (also available in all good newsagents) through iTunes to your iPad or iPhone for just £1.99 per issue. Bargain!

Or go here for the United States iTunes store version.

Spec Ops: The Line lead designer Cory Davis explains to 360 Magazine that good AI programming isn’t simply about making NPCs more intelligent. Speaking at a press event in Berlin, he suggested the theatre of the moment is actually more important.

“AI is an interesting thing. What we perceive as good AI has nothing to do with it being intelligent, rather it has to do with them looking right when you see them – the sort of the danger and threat they present in the moment gives them believability.”

“There’s a huge debate behind how shooter AI should be. If you look at our competition in the military shooter genre, a lot of games have gone almost purely to a scripted AI system. That can give you a really believable experience, but at the same time it’s a predictable experience, and when you look more closely or get into situations the designers perhaps didn’t expect, everything falls apart.”

“For me, once that happens, it’s hard to get back into the combat.”

So, there’s a very real sense in which Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is more realistic than your average war sim precisely because its AI is so rigidly controlled. Consider that the next time you complain about an over-abundance of scripted set-pieces.