Poll: Max Payne 3 difficulty.

[violent_quiche]

The difficulty wasn't so much the issue as never getting long enough with the mechanic to get used to it. I understand it had something to do with masking loading screens, but it just felt like someone reefed the controller off me ever 3 minutes just as I was getting into the flow. It didn't help that I just didn't warm to Max at all, which just made the cut scenes drag. At least games with anti-hero protagonists like Red Dead gave you action & non-speaking time to fill in the blanks on your character, whereas the devs seemed determined to nail at every opportunity what a hard boiled, miserable self-hating drunk my character was.

Of course, that's when the difficulty is behaving itself, which it only seems to do for approximately 70% of the game. That other 30% is divided between waltzing carelessly through ridiculously easy fights that have no business being in any mode besides easy, and arduous over-long grindfests that have no business being in a single-player game at all.

That too

 

[Broady Brio]

I played through a game on Hard for the first time before. I'll admit I died a lot, but what do you expect on the HARD difficulty? I may play through on Old School mode, but not sure yet due to lack of Last Man Standing.

I used LMS a lot more than I'd like to admit.

 

[Mr_Terrific]

I started off playing the game on Hard but....I thought the game was to hard based on the crappy tps shooter mechanics and cheap pass or fail moments. I can't count how many times I've died because Max shifted out of cover instead of smoothly around a corner. Or how he always locked into an animation that MUST play out in several situations, like how he falls to the ground during last stand, or how he stands straight up (getting shot in the process) after slow motion diving to cover. Also, Max will occasionally have his gun stuck in terrain during last stand, so you'll be unable to kill the guy that killed you. I was usually forced to shoot at the floor during these moments. There's even a point in the game that face off against a heavily armored gunner. If he catches you out of cover, you're as good as dead thanks to last stand. He'll kill you before you have a chance to get up...and god forbid you have more than 1 pain killer on you.

As for the pass or fail sections, you could tell Rockstar let a little GTA creep into MP3. There's too many points that cause you to die if you don't do exactly what R* wants, and not in a sensible way like what happens in Uncharted. In UC, if you jump off the cliff the wrong way, you should die in a hole. In MP3...say, the grave yard fight where you must defend Passo. You come up behind a bunch of guys and the game wants you to slo mo dive (instead of regular bullet time..wtf??) and kill off all of these guys, or retry it because your partner died. Of course, you won't be able to kill them all in that one dive and the only cover is slightly out of range to just roll into, so you get shot to death (again..the hard setting).

I thought the game was cheap as hell and was pretty much just an excuse to slow motion shoot a bunch of guys in the face (the game got completely stupid once Max hits the slums), so I didn't bother finishing the game before trading it in.