Matthew Kane
Supreme [H]ardness
- Joined
- Dec 1, 2007
- Messages
- 4,233
Wow you pretty much don't play anything then. (Don't get me wrong I agree with at least half of that list though).
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That game that's so popular with everyone, but you just can't...
- Thread starter theplaidfad
- Start date
Wow you pretty much don't play anything then. (Don't get me wrong I agree with at least half of that list though).
DOTA
Warcraft
Team Fortress
HALF LIFE
FINAL FANTASY
Counter Strike
Assasins Creed (yeah I'm a loser for missing one half of my life not playing this series)
any kid to teen stuff things like MMORPGs
grew up loving platformers, run and gun, shmup, beat em up, 2d fighting games
playing only mainstream games like;
GTA V
Splinter Cell Blacklist and Chaos Theory (old school shit I know LOL)
BF3 and 4
COD Series (IMO went bland after Black Ops 2)
Witcher 3
Street Fighter Series
more modern FPS
maybe Metal Gear Solid later on?
Warcraft
Team Fortress
HALF LIFE
FINAL FANTASY
Counter Strike
Assasins Creed (yeah I'm a loser for missing one half of my life not playing this series)
any kid to teen stuff things like MMORPGs
grew up loving platformers, run and gun, shmup, beat em up, 2d fighting games
playing only mainstream games like;
GTA V
Splinter Cell Blacklist and Chaos Theory (old school shit I know LOL)
BF3 and 4
COD Series (IMO went bland after Black Ops 2)
Witcher 3
Street Fighter Series
more modern FPS
maybe Metal Gear Solid later on?
NukeULater
Gawd
- Joined
- Sep 12, 2006
- Messages
- 917
Any Assassins Creed game
Any CoD after CoD4
TF2
Portal
Dead Island
Any CoD after CoD4
TF2
Portal
Dead Island
jeremyshaw
[H]F Junkie
- Joined
- Aug 26, 2009
- Messages
- 12,511
The Last of Us. Neither the gameplay style nor plot appeal to me.
M76
[H]F Junkie
- Joined
- Jun 12, 2012
- Messages
- 14,039
Max Payne 3
Let's start by saying that, this game is only a Max Payne game by name, any character could be the main protagonist, it doesn't feel like you're playing a sequel to the classic games. It's more like a reboot, with hardly any connections to the past glory of the franchise.
It's a typical remake like for example John Rambo, with a staggering body count, but it still fails to live up to the predecessors.
The film-noir atmosphere went down the gutter, as well as the comic-book style cutscenes. There is hardly any night levels in the game, this is a typical TPS game, without much added value. Of course there is bullet time, but that's the only thing remaining from the legacy of the previous games. The atmosphere is shifted to a South American cartel, drug trafficking thing. Which wouldn't be bad, if you weren't expecting a Max Payne style noir game.
Story wise by far the biggest shortcoming of the game is that it offers no rewards, no satisfaction at all. Almost all your missions end in some sort of failure, not even the final big confrontation offers any kind of a satisfaction. You retire a corrupt politician and a corrupt police boss, so what? There are hundreds more of those in South America. As one character in the game put it very wisely: "You're not making any difference"
A game in which pathetic street thugs mug and shame Max Payne, like he was a nobody. I just don't want to assume the role of such a character. And on top of that he's constantly murmuring miserable self pitying lines to himself. The only thing more pathetic than that are his stupid, pointless actions during cutscenes you can't do anything against. And to keep reminding you how pathetic and broken your character is, every time you pick up painkillers during the game, he drops some snide remark about it. Sometimes I was under the impression that this is a parody of Max Payne.
So enough about the story, let's talk gameplay. I don't even know where to start with the small but all the more annoying design oversights.
Of course the game has no proper save system, why would it? Only checkpoints, and the worst kind. It doesn't even record the amount of health you have when you reach a checkpoint. If the checkpoints are well placed then this system is only mildly annoying. This is not the case here. Some checkpoints are so far apart, and so badly placed that your head burns into a piece of coal out of anger by the time you pass some segments. Like there is a heavy hard to defeat enemy, and there is no checkpoint before it, so if it defeats you you have to complete a whole segment leading up to it again. I'm not against a challenge in a game, but it's no challenge that I have to complete some parts of the game 20 times, it's madness.
And then here is the aiming. Which is perfectly good, up until the point you turn on bullet time mode which of course is the most recognized and famed part of the franchise, now rendered useless.
Because in bullet time mode, not only time slows down, but the aiming speed as well, making it pointless to use. By the time you nudge the crosshair to the enemy in bullet time they shoot you to hell just as they would've without using it, only now you can see your death in slow motion. It has some use against enemies far away, so you aim at them roughly and then fine tune in bt, but in every other case there is no point to it.
And damage system, which is another mind shattering thing in the game. It feels completely random, both for the player and enemies. Sometimes one shot drains half of your health, other times, someone is pumping bullets into you from point blank range, and your health only moves a little.
And occasionally you can kill an enemy with one bullet, but most of the time they get back up after filling them up with three magazines of bullets. And then there are armoured enemies, that are the most random. Sometimes I can't defeat them even by emptying all my weapons into them, other times somehow they just die after a few dozen hits, and I'm not doing anything differently.
There is a cover system in the game, which has one problem: By the time I got used to it, I almost finished the game.
It's so archaic, that the only way to come out of cover is by pressing the cover button again, you can't simply move out of cover by moving away from it like in most modern games. And most of the time the camera view is so awkward that you can't aim at the enemies in cover. And there is no jumping from cover to cover in the game either. And on top of that coming out of cover seems like bullet time even in real time. So if you see a grenade hurtling towards you and you're in cover, don't bother, just reload immediately. Because there is no way in hell that you can come out of cover in time to avoid the blast.
There is also an interesting new feature in the game, which in concept is a very good idea. This is called Last Man Standing, it works this way: If you have painkillers, and someone shoots you and your HP reaches zero. Then you don't die, but the painkiller is automatically used up, and you have to kill your wannabe killer in a bullet time stand-off. This all sounds good, because if you kill your attacker then you don't die, and so the flow of the game is not interrupted by having to reload a checkpoint. But due to the miserable cover system most of the time you can't aim at your attacker, and the stand off turns into watching Max die painfully slowly, and then having to reload. Because you guessed, you can't use the reload function during the stand off. So the very thing they intended to keep the game flowing achieves the exact opposite of that, truly marvellous.
And if we're talking interruptions to the gameplay, then the most annoying one is this: Every door in the game is a cutscene, you don't simply walk through doors here, the game has to show it in a cutscene. And with every animation the game automatically switches weapons to the primary weapon. EVEN IF THAT DAMN GUN HAS ZERO AMMO IN IT.
And another thing bothering me in the game is that it seems that all your enemies have an army of soldiers everywhere. You go into a completely random building and it's filled with enemy combatants, everywhere. Even on the streets: you travel through the city and on every corner there is a battalion of enemies. There is absolutely no reality to it. The number of enemies in the game is staggering. I stacked up more than 1700, yes that's seventeen-hundred kills. Just in one playtrough. And if that wouldn't be enough to keep you from getting immersed in the game, they decided to show every single hit from enemy fire as a bullet hole on your characters body. It's so disillusioning that it's almost unbearable. It would be good if you were a T800 terminator, because then it would be ok, to have 50 bullet holes and move like nothing had happened. But why do you have to do this with a human? Why can't you leave me believing that my character is so lucky and badass, that hardly any bullet touches him? Why do you have to remind me after each firefight that this is only a pathetic and unrealistic game?
Let's start by saying that, this game is only a Max Payne game by name, any character could be the main protagonist, it doesn't feel like you're playing a sequel to the classic games. It's more like a reboot, with hardly any connections to the past glory of the franchise.
It's a typical remake like for example John Rambo, with a staggering body count, but it still fails to live up to the predecessors.
The film-noir atmosphere went down the gutter, as well as the comic-book style cutscenes. There is hardly any night levels in the game, this is a typical TPS game, without much added value. Of course there is bullet time, but that's the only thing remaining from the legacy of the previous games. The atmosphere is shifted to a South American cartel, drug trafficking thing. Which wouldn't be bad, if you weren't expecting a Max Payne style noir game.
Story wise by far the biggest shortcoming of the game is that it offers no rewards, no satisfaction at all. Almost all your missions end in some sort of failure, not even the final big confrontation offers any kind of a satisfaction. You retire a corrupt politician and a corrupt police boss, so what? There are hundreds more of those in South America. As one character in the game put it very wisely: "You're not making any difference"
A game in which pathetic street thugs mug and shame Max Payne, like he was a nobody. I just don't want to assume the role of such a character. And on top of that he's constantly murmuring miserable self pitying lines to himself. The only thing more pathetic than that are his stupid, pointless actions during cutscenes you can't do anything against. And to keep reminding you how pathetic and broken your character is, every time you pick up painkillers during the game, he drops some snide remark about it. Sometimes I was under the impression that this is a parody of Max Payne.
So enough about the story, let's talk gameplay. I don't even know where to start with the small but all the more annoying design oversights.
Of course the game has no proper save system, why would it? Only checkpoints, and the worst kind. It doesn't even record the amount of health you have when you reach a checkpoint. If the checkpoints are well placed then this system is only mildly annoying. This is not the case here. Some checkpoints are so far apart, and so badly placed that your head burns into a piece of coal out of anger by the time you pass some segments. Like there is a heavy hard to defeat enemy, and there is no checkpoint before it, so if it defeats you you have to complete a whole segment leading up to it again. I'm not against a challenge in a game, but it's no challenge that I have to complete some parts of the game 20 times, it's madness.
And then here is the aiming. Which is perfectly good, up until the point you turn on bullet time mode which of course is the most recognized and famed part of the franchise, now rendered useless.
Because in bullet time mode, not only time slows down, but the aiming speed as well, making it pointless to use. By the time you nudge the crosshair to the enemy in bullet time they shoot you to hell just as they would've without using it, only now you can see your death in slow motion. It has some use against enemies far away, so you aim at them roughly and then fine tune in bt, but in every other case there is no point to it.
And damage system, which is another mind shattering thing in the game. It feels completely random, both for the player and enemies. Sometimes one shot drains half of your health, other times, someone is pumping bullets into you from point blank range, and your health only moves a little.
And occasionally you can kill an enemy with one bullet, but most of the time they get back up after filling them up with three magazines of bullets. And then there are armoured enemies, that are the most random. Sometimes I can't defeat them even by emptying all my weapons into them, other times somehow they just die after a few dozen hits, and I'm not doing anything differently.
There is a cover system in the game, which has one problem: By the time I got used to it, I almost finished the game.
It's so archaic, that the only way to come out of cover is by pressing the cover button again, you can't simply move out of cover by moving away from it like in most modern games. And most of the time the camera view is so awkward that you can't aim at the enemies in cover. And there is no jumping from cover to cover in the game either. And on top of that coming out of cover seems like bullet time even in real time. So if you see a grenade hurtling towards you and you're in cover, don't bother, just reload immediately. Because there is no way in hell that you can come out of cover in time to avoid the blast.
There is also an interesting new feature in the game, which in concept is a very good idea. This is called Last Man Standing, it works this way: If you have painkillers, and someone shoots you and your HP reaches zero. Then you don't die, but the painkiller is automatically used up, and you have to kill your wannabe killer in a bullet time stand-off. This all sounds good, because if you kill your attacker then you don't die, and so the flow of the game is not interrupted by having to reload a checkpoint. But due to the miserable cover system most of the time you can't aim at your attacker, and the stand off turns into watching Max die painfully slowly, and then having to reload. Because you guessed, you can't use the reload function during the stand off. So the very thing they intended to keep the game flowing achieves the exact opposite of that, truly marvellous.
And if we're talking interruptions to the gameplay, then the most annoying one is this: Every door in the game is a cutscene, you don't simply walk through doors here, the game has to show it in a cutscene. And with every animation the game automatically switches weapons to the primary weapon. EVEN IF THAT DAMN GUN HAS ZERO AMMO IN IT.
And another thing bothering me in the game is that it seems that all your enemies have an army of soldiers everywhere. You go into a completely random building and it's filled with enemy combatants, everywhere. Even on the streets: you travel through the city and on every corner there is a battalion of enemies. There is absolutely no reality to it. The number of enemies in the game is staggering. I stacked up more than 1700, yes that's seventeen-hundred kills. Just in one playtrough. And if that wouldn't be enough to keep you from getting immersed in the game, they decided to show every single hit from enemy fire as a bullet hole on your characters body. It's so disillusioning that it's almost unbearable. It would be good if you were a T800 terminator, because then it would be ok, to have 50 bullet holes and move like nothing had happened. But why do you have to do this with a human? Why can't you leave me believing that my character is so lucky and badass, that hardly any bullet touches him? Why do you have to remind me after each firefight that this is only a pathetic and unrealistic game?
Halo series ( I just don't see the fascination and popularity of this series )
Elder Scrolls ( all of them)
Call of Duty series after the first Modern Warfare
anything Super Mario related. Even growing up during the 80's I just couldn't get into it.
I am on the fence with the zombie crazed video games.
Elder Scrolls ( all of them)
Call of Duty series after the first Modern Warfare
anything Super Mario related. Even growing up during the 80's I just couldn't get into it.
I am on the fence with the zombie crazed video games.
D
Deleted member 83233
Guest
Good call, I didn't think about this one. I worked (hardware compatibility testing) on the PC version of the original. (don't get me started on the QA process for this game
) I honestly had fun in the lab with my co-workers testing it, and doing some MP when we got a chance. However, it doesn't have any long-lasting appeal for me. I went in to do a usability study for the XBox version long before it the XB shipped. I gave them a ton of suggestions (based on a pretty extensive history with shooters) and they ignored all of them. (kinda like my bug reports during testing
)Anyway, yeah, it was fun for a short period of time, and then became absolutely transparent. I can see people who've never had the luxury of playing a PC shooter in the heyday of shooters thinking it was cool, but for people like us... maybe not so much.