Was excited to revisit this one. After all, this is probably the most successful clone of Max Payne and based directly on Max Payne's original inspiration. Unfortunately, the way it didn't click before, it doesn't click now.

I'll say that the game is entirely carried by its destructible environments. The base mechanic of slow-mo + diving copied directly from Max Payne obviously works here too, but all the additional gimmicks like running on the railings or gliding over objects just don't. For example, the former relies heavily on a botched auto-detection, which forces you to pause in the middle of a fight and tinker with your position just to get it to register the railing as interactable, the latter becomes annoying because it activates automatically on every object you bump into, which there are a lot of objects because it's John Woo, you gotta tear shit into debris. One solution to this problem would be a modifier-button like in Assassin's Creed. In fact, I believe this is exactly what Sleeping Dogs (also a partially John Woo-inspired game) did, and it worked great there.

The character's movement itself is rather janky, and the levels are built like mazes. They're very linear, but very convoluted. Most locations are narrow corridors with tons of invisible walls, and your character can't jump, only dive, so you're often forced to backtrack spiral pathways when the destination seems to be right in front of your eyes. Enemy placements are completely uncreative. They mostly just pour out of specific spawn-points and often rush at you in a straight line, allowing you to headshot the whole crowd in a quick succession. The AI is really stupid.

But really this game's main problem above all else is its repetitiveness. You go from location to location and dispose off hordes of endless enemies and repeat the same tasks numerous times (e.g. find and destroy 10 drug labs). It's kinda exhausting after a while. This time I played till the first turret section and bailed.