Max Payne 3 is a jumbled mishmash of all those games, taking bits and pieces and cramming them into a rough approximation of the first two Max titles. GTA was always merely tolerable and clunky, Manhunt was excessive, but Bully was sublime, simply because it embraced and breathed the kind of sophomoric juvenilia that seems to be the hard limit of what Rockstar can write. Their titles have always been hit-or-miss for me. Maybe it’s just bad luck, but pretty much everything that’s annoyed me about Rockstar for the past few years shows up in Max Payne 3. Remedy is no longer at the helm, which leaves publisher Rockstar to develop the game internally…and all that it implies. Max Payne 3 isn’t a bad game by any stretch but it has clearly sacrificed some of its wit and soul on the path back to prominence. Max Payne 3, then, focuses on Max as a drugged out, liquored up mess, and this is fitting. Max Payne liberally broke the fourth wall in the first two games but when the jibes were over, the titles served as some of the best third person shooters of their era.

They wore their nostalgia for film noire and Hong Kong cinema on their sleeves, but were also cuttingly self-aware, pointing out the more ludicrous aspects of their own genre with a protagonist who could sometimes scarcely believe the situation he was in.

Remedy’s first two Max Payne titles were a real rarity in the lurid world of action games.

Max payne 3 game