Max Payne 3 Review (TiuXico)
Just finished the story mode on hard.
As a Brazillian, born and raised in the state of São Paulo, I can say that the team responsible for getting the info about the favelas, criminality, corruption and stuff based themselves primarilly on the 2007 movie "Elite Squad", which shows a little bit how things work in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, with lots of gang wars, the infamous "microwave" scene, kidnappings, the police incursions with bulletproof vehicles and stuff. In São Paulo, the organized crime is not as brutal as in RJ, of course we still have al lot of the things depicted in the game, but it's not as common. Also, if someone walks into a crime-taken favela as dangerous as they made Nova Esperança look like, that would be just a death sentence. Max would be dead before he could think of what he did wrong.
Also, I've noticed quite a few lines that either were spoken with the wrong accent (in SP there is mostly an accent of our own, or the northeastern one, and in the game it's possible to note both the RJ accent and also a little bit of Portugal natives too), or just wouldn't be spoken by any brazilian at all. It's the kind of thing that was not written in portuguese, and the translation job was good, but not perfect.
On the other hand, there are some lines that just someone from SP would say, and those lines really shine throughout the game. It's amazing to play a game developed in a foreign country, by a foreign team, where you can hear someone cursing just like your neighbors do on a daily basis.
Misconceptions aside, it IS a really good game, with an interesting story, most people who play it can't understand shit in portuguese and/or have never been in Brazil so those things I just pointed will make no difference at all, and even for someone like me, those mistakes are just something that adds some sort of funny touches to the game.
Putting it in short words, excellent game, but looks more like Rio de Janeiro than São Paulo.