MAX PAYNE 3

I bought this game more on the strength of Rockstar's previous games 'L.A.Noire' and 'Red Dead Redemption'. That was my first mistake. The second was actually attempting to play the game. The game starts with a long and boring prologue complete with credits as per a movie - so long that I could nip out to the kitchen and make a cup of coffee and a cheese sandwich. Then 'the game' started with yet another long drawn out part of the storyline followed by a bit of player action that was interupted by another cut scene followed by....well, the whole of Chapter One was more lenghthy cutscenes than game. Chapter Two didn't look much better. BUT....that is not the worst aspect of 'Max Payne 3'. The cut scenes and monologues are delivered in a continuous monotone and accompanied by flashing split screens, supposedly important capitalised words from the dialogue, blurred images that double and triple on themselves in such a flashy way that the developers seem not to understand why games contain an 'epilepsy warning'. After a chapter and a half I was suffering max pain - a headache. Not only that but watching a man wallow in self-pity while downing bottles of Jack Daniels gets a little boring and any attempt to skip it is met by a message 'still loading'. I could see that as Max Payne grabbed another bottle. Still what little gameplay there was was pretty good - pity some decisions are taken out of the players hands with slo-mo cutscenes. XBOX World carried one of those boastful articles about getting their hands on this game a couple of months before it came out. Give them their due their 'hands on' as they admitted was a chance to play the multiplayer parts of the game. However they did say that they had played one level of the solo campaign - one would presume from that that there were no cutscenes added to the demo that they played. Still there is an interesting point in their article and that is that, to my mind, the online multiplayer games now outweigh the the solo campaigns. When a player compares games with others it just amazes me that they have scored on-line achievements but no in-game. I'm not a great fan of the Grand Theft Auto series but I would rate them above this mess. Talking of which isn't it about time the British branch of Rockstar came up with a 'Grand Theft Auto: London'? Surely, an update on the old Playstation One game is well overdue.