Max Payne 3 (PC)

Rockstar may make awesome games, but they’re also notoriously known for rather lackluster PC ports. Considering Max Payne 3 for the PC weighed in at around 30GB, people immediately feared the worst. They were expecting a rather bloated, clunky and troublesome game, but to their and our surprise, Max Payne 3 is one of the Rockstar’s finest PC accomplishments yet. Sure the 30GB install size borders on overkill, but if you’ve held on to buy Max Payne 3 on the PC so far, you’ve made the right choice.

PS: As far as content is concerned, Max Payne 3 for the PC is identical to its console counterparts so if you haven’t read our review, head here to get enlightened.

As you boot up Max Payne 3 for the first time, you’ll have to sign into Rockstar’s Social Club and once you’re in, the Social Club will start tracking all your stats from the single as well as multiplayer side of things. To play multiplayer with friends or your crew, you can send them invites through the Social Club, but this aspect is a bit buggy on PC. Sometimes the Social Club will show both you and your friends offline, while invites will have to be sent multiple times before they’re actually received. I never faced such issues with the Xbox360 version. The game also has the annoying tendency to hang forever in during the loading screen and you’ll be forced to hard restart the game. This isn’t a deal breaker per say, but it can get quite annoying especially when you’re dying to jump into a few rounds with friends.

Rocking a beard...and a hawaiin shirt

On the technical side of things, I personally had no issues with this game, whatsoever. The game immediately scanned my hardware and automatically detected in-game settings that were bang on. I never really felt the need to experiment with in-game settings the way I do with most PC games, because everything just felt right from the get go. However, I strongly recommend you update your graphic card drivers because in all probability the game will crash to the desktop without the latest drivers (happened to me as well).

The default control scheme is not bad, but there are definitely more keys than I would like. I mean why couldn’t the game bind picking up weapons and interacting with objects to the same key? Instead I have “F” to pick up weapons, “E” to interact with objects, “G” to roll dodge and in the case of multiplayer, “X” or Middle mouse click to melee. Still, I’ll take this control scheme any day over aiming with a controller. The game feels like it was meant to be played with the mouse and keyboard and the accuracy awarded with the mouse is just sublime as pulling off headshots feels a lot more natural than it did with the controller. Of course, this is a personal issue, but most PC gamers would probably agree.

Nothing stands in Max's way

While I do consider myself to be lucky, I know quite a few people who’ve been having issues with the game. In some cases, the game has even refused to start and it sucks for them, but thankfully such instances aren’t widespread. Rockstar has mentioned a few fixes in one of their blog entries, so if you’re one of those unfortunate souls, I definitely recommend checking them out.

Minor issues aside, Max Payne 3 is still a very solid PC game and has been well worth the wait. Even if you’ve played this game on a console before, I suggest you sell that version off and double dip for the PC version. It looks better, it plays better and just feels better overall.