Melbourne Australia, 30 March 2012.

Thanks to the team at Rockstar Sydney, Impulse Gamer was given a sneak peek and play of the multiplayer experience of Max Payne 3. Even though it wasn’t the final XBox 360 build of the code, there was enough content and information to play and test the multiplayer mechanics. However before I give my final thoughts on the multiplayer experience, let’s see what’s available to the end-user. Firstly, the game supports up to 16-players with three modes of play that include Team Deathmatch, Payne Killer and Gang Wars. Add in the ability to customise your characters, more guns than a small African nation (e.g. .38, M500 or Frag Grenade) and the ability to level-up and Max Payne 3 is shaping up to be a very sturdy gaming experience. Apart from customising your character’s sex or appearance, there are some great items that can be used by your characters such as gas masks (perfect to combat tear-gas) or something bizarre like a gorilla mask. It’s these little things that make the character customisation options so appealing.

However what made Max Payne the game it is today is the inclusion of bullet-time and amazingly enough, Rockstar have included this in the multiplayer mode. In order to keep things fair, bullet-time works by line of sight. This means that when you active bullet-time, anyone in your line of site will be effected by this feature which in turn slows their gameplay down as well. Interestingly enough, it has been well implemented into the multiplayer facet of this game and adds to the overall action movie experience. Another cool feature are bursts. Bursts are special in-game abilities for your characters that awards you on how you play the multiplayer game by shooting, killing and looting corpses which fills your adrenaline metre. Bursts also have 3 levels and offer a wide variety of choices that will affect your gaming strategy. For example, the burst “Trigger Happy” has three levels. Level 1 gives the player armour piercing ammunition for 20 seconds, Level 2 grants the player a LMG .30 and  DE. 50 plus increased accuracy and finally, level 3 grants the player a rotary grenade launcher with extra ammo. These bursts definitely take multiplayer gaming to a whole new level and makes the game quite dynamic.

Let’s talk about some of the modes. Team deathmatch is like your traditional deathmatch game that has team A versus team B. It’s a fun experience that can be heavily tweaked but the multiplayer fun doesn’t stop there. The highlight for me was Payne Killer. Payne Killer is like king of the hill but the goal here is to become either Max or his partner Passos. The rules are simple, the first person to kill in the game becomes Max and the first victim transforms into Passos. Everyone else in the game must then hunt down these two characters from the single-player game in order to become the next “king of the hill”. However just because you kill Max or Passos doesn’t mean you automatically turn into these characters as the game takes into count a variety of factors such as who done the most damage for example. In order to keep things fair, because 14 against 2 is quite devious, these two characters have special abilities and weapons in order to give them the edge and nothing is more fun than robbing your killer the pleasure of the last shot because by pressing “Y”, you force Max to suicide.

Then you have Gang Wars which uses similar threads from the single-player story which requires you to complete certain objectives such as setting bombs in enemy territories or moving bags from point A to B. Add motion-comics and that famous Max Payne voice-over and playing Gang Wars is extremely reminiscent of the single-player mode but with real players. The best part of Gang Wars is that the game really throws some curve balls at the players which means that you don’t know what the next level or objective will be.

Although I had my editorial butt handed to me by various Sydney gaming reviewers such as the nefarious Gamespot Australia, things began to change when Rockstar disabled aim-assisted controls. By disabling aim-assisted controls, it actually took skills to take out your enemies that placed more importance on strafing, bullet-time and the rather sturdy cover system. When you do and respawn in the game, you also have the option to place a vendetta against the person who killed you which gives you additional experience should you kill them. One new inclusion into the gameplay is shootdodge. Shootdodge mechanics not only reduces the amount of damage your character takes but allows you to perform some classic Max Payne manoeuvres. Apart from that, the usual multiplayer mechanics are used such as running or looting the bodies of teammates and victims to find health and ammunition etc.

With only a couple more months to go, I must admit that I’m very excited to play the final code of Max Payne 3 because Rockstar have definitely thought outside the gaming square when it came to multiplayer. It’s great that once you have finished the single-player experience, you can then get involved in the engaging multiplayer game that is just like a Hollywood action movie. May Payne 3 will be available on PlayStation 3 and XBOX from May 18th and the PC version will be available on the 1st of June 2021.