Payne in the ass: Max Payne 3 (360)

Max leapt and spun like a leaping and spinning thing, puking bullets in every direction, but unable to hit anything he aimed at. He grumbled to himself, dry and overly serious, deeply committed to the newfound film noir tone the original game had parodied. Max drank and took some painkillers, because that’s what haunted men do. They also shoot people.

A lot of people.

The simple joy of the original Max Payne lay in its mechanics rather than its all too self-aware neo-noir pastiche. While it did feature some truly haunting moments, the general tone of the game was a celebration of the inherent cheesiness of noir. 

The fun lay in the ability to leap into a environment littered with enemies, pistols akimbo, and engage bullet-time, slowing the action to a crawl. Everything except Max would creep like molasses’s giving the keyboard and mouse wielding player razor sharp control.

Max Payne 2 updated the look but not the feel, replacing the blocky models with more polygons but retaining the bullet ballet aesthetic of the first game. With a slightly more complicated and less bizarre plot, Max Payne 2 is an underrated gem, though it does have it's own points of frustration. Like the horrific level in the first game of following a trail of blood towards an infant's screams in a nightmare, the second game has a brutal escort mission featuring a costumed character that waddles on flippers.



Max Payne 3 retains the bare bones of the mechanical joy of shooting, but, at least on console, lacks the precision necessary to make bullet time work. Combined with a corridor-based level design of cramped quarters and waist high walls, a cover mechanic is forced into the game, rendering the initial hook, bullet time, nearly useless. Only during what is essentially QTE sequences rendered in forced bullet time does the original mechanic sing.

I suspect PC will be the best control scheme for Max Payne 3

Where MP3 drops the ball carried by the first two games, it more than compensates in story.

Unlike the pyschodrama comic-book noir of the first two games, Max is a truly tortured soul in the third. Addicted to painkillers and a barely functional alcoholic, bad choices lead to Max working as a bodyguard in South America. Lost, both in spirit and body, Max struggles to make sense of the machinations and violence that surrounds him by shooting everyone he sees.

The final act outlasts its welcome, the emotional impact of the story already complete, leaving only a hollow revenge story to supply closure.


Max Payne 3 misses the mark in terms of replicating the bliss of slow motion shooting that inspires it but tells a gripping noire tale of a man descending into darkness.