Max Payne 3 and a Free-aim Bender

Aim Assist is for the babies, Max is no baby, great article

dig the article - the fact it's an option is what's realy key here... different strokes for...

and damn is this game pretty fn sweet... gamegasmed when i heard bulletime was in multiplayer - now that im playing it i gotta give rockstar credit, hit the ball outa the park with this one.

Everyone was hype for Diablo 3..i give it a month before MP3 becomes a craze.

Aim assist let's you breeze through the games.... But you need intense wind to blow the games away if you wanna be hardcore...

Great article, good read

Thanks for the article!

Aim Assist = Casual gamers
Free Aim = True Gamers

Ottomatic, not necessarily true. In this post, I note how I often rather play games with assist on to cut down on the use of focus and coordination.
It's not every day I'm in the mood for edge of my seat action.

RAGE was the last game I played without aim-assist...

Also...it's funny to consider Call of Duty a casual FPS, but it does use a manditory aim-assist.

Thanks for the love guys!

Thank you writer. Great article. I spent a lot of my younger days playing video games of all kinds during the larger portion of my free time. I remember buying cod mw2 when I first started cramming long hours at Penn st and a 24 hr gas st. When I started up the campaign I remember feeling puzzled by the then rare auto aim.. that's... cool I guess" I remember thinking, little did I know of the coming trend in shooters. Like you I have a favorite chair and footstool that I take comfort on after a long day. When I bought Max p 3. I was so happy to see the option of free aim. I tried a level with soft lock and was very dissapointed when I would line up a headshot before the cross hairs show up during precise. Aim and have the reticule pulled down to the dudes chest olhaving to realigning my headshot during the action. I automatically felt bad for the people who will use this and find the game to be simply ok. Some good games that come out have a brilliant pacing that slowly steps up while your skills improve, while Payne 3 does this and more. While playing on normal and hard w free aim, you are basically learning a skill-craft that makes you feel like you are growing from a sprout to a tree. The difficulty spikes are great for throwing a curveball at you when you start to become more comfortable. The level design and enemy placement-strategy feels so organic, throwing capeable enemies at you while your at a disadvantage from first glance. I am so supprised at how much strategy becomes the main event of what looks to be a simple third person shooter with slow motion. Even while Max feels sluggish at first, you will find that it provides a dynamic for risk,,reward, and consequence. Resident evil 4 has great gameplay mechanics because of the restricted movement mixing with how the enemies move and react. Max is faster and more free than Leon but the principal of balance is similar. Especially with the auto aim turned off. If you are a gamer who wishes more shooters had character and strategy involved with its gameplay wrather than a stop n pop or mindless tag n kill, this is the game. Not to mention one of the greatest told stories in videogame history. Def a game where the cinematics blend with the gameplay so well that a live action flick could not do a good job recreating. The voice acting alone stands taller than some great movies choice of dialogue. Beyond the surface of this good game is a great game that gave me what ive been waiting for for a while

I put on soft aim assist for the sole reason that the character controls suck ass, like they have in all rockstar games coming up from GTA:IV, slow, sluggish, animation heavy, it just makes for a really clunky combat system, at least a real slow Max Payne game, I don't wanna fuckin use cover, I'm MAX PAYNE, I should be throwing in a grenade, take out two guys, dive head first into the encounter, capping three guys in the head before finishing off the last one laying on the ground.
It's why this game has felt like a linear GTA:IV, with slightly better controls to me, not a Max Payne game.
so thus, some chapters in I realized this wasnt gonna allow me to play it as a Max Payne game SHOULD be played, I bumped down the difficulty, and it was way more true to experience. I'll do that on all Rockstar games unless they make their games not physically painful to play.
/end rant

I think the word you're looking for is masochistic (you "enjoy pain"), not sadistic (you enjoy inflicting pain).

Great article! It makes me happy to know there are others out there who enjoys a challenge now a days. I will always turn off the auto aim in all games. To me I feel like whats the point of the playing the game. I can understand wanting to play for the story and whatnot, but games are more than just a story; there's game-play.
People today complain about everything in games today. What they don't understand is that's the way the developers made the game. This is the same thing every one was saying about Alan Wake, but still this day I still think the game feels and plays like no other game before it and after it. It is it's own game; however, I haven't played Max Payne 3 yet, so In reality how would I know.

This is the one thing that really bugs me about Rockstar games. I really am baffled at how they haven't gotten off of the Autoaim craze. It's made their multiplayer modes in GTA and RDR messy and just plain not fun.

When I get this game, that's the first thing that I'm changing.

There were one or two times I tried soft lock when I was really struggling, but it just made things too easy and took all the fun and challenge out. Am proud to say finished on hard with free aim, the end boss was insanely hard, took me 2 hours.. Haven't had a boss fight like that in ages, was immensely satisfying when I beat it..

Excellent game btw, best shooter in ages. Max and the story was 5 star. Really felt like I was playing a film.