What would you do if you came home one day to find your beloved family murdered by a bunch of psychos? Become a manic depressant? Turn to drink? Drugs? Not rest until you had hunted the scumbags down and wiped them off the face of the planet? Well, Max Payne did all of the above. Now, after a lengthy nine-year hiatus and with the franchise firmly in the hands of Rockstar Games – proprietor of titles such as Red Dead Redemption, the Grand Theft Auto series and LA Noire, – Max Payne is back, gulping painkillers down like no tomorrow and killing his foes softly and…erm, not to mention slowly. But has the wait been worth it?

Rockstar Games have built a solid reputation in creating games of high calibre. Just look at their back catalogue. They don’t release a game without it being tested to extinction, they flourish in building deep storyline arcs and cinematic traits in all their titles, and in nearly all their games, they invest highly in intricate details. Plus, they’re unafraid of raw violence. Max Payne 3 might not rank as their best title to date – let’s just get that out of the way – but let’s also be clear, it doesn’t fall too wide of the mark.

The quality in Max Payne 3 shows from the moment you load up the disc. Faithful to the original game, it starts at the end and rewinds to the beginning. Strong cinematics give you a taste of what his world has become introducing you to some of the main characters with real vigour and energy. Max is now a reluctant bodyguard charged with looking after a millionaire’s family who like to live fast, and die young.

The in game graphics are superb

Looking at the screen as the sequences unfold, you can’t help but take pleasure in the quality of the animation and Rockstar’s trademark dialogue. If you enjoy movies, you’ll find it draws parallels with movies of its genre – the chromatic aberrations and the dialogue between characters where key words appear on screen – there are flavours here of ‘Man on Fire’, ‘Miami Vice’,  ‘Wanted’. ‘Domino’ and ‘Lethal Weapon’. Oh, and not forgetting ‘The Matrix’.

A shootout in a nightclub demonstrates all that’s good about bullet-time – moving from cover to cover in slow motion, flying through the air delivering headshot after headshot to save a woman from being kidnapped,  shooting a vehicle’s tyres so it has to stop or taking out foes while you dangle helplessly from a helicopter. It’s scenes like this that make you semi-orgasmic and pleased you bought this title.

Max Payne is simply a badass with badass guns and badass quips, even when he takes painkillers to restore his health. Having lost everyone he cared about in his life, he really couldn’t care less and is ‘damaged goods’ with inner demons – a reluctant hero who would be happier doing other things.

As the storyline develops, it is hard not to be engaged with Max and the struggle he gets drawn into. And wow! What a struggle he has on his hands…or rather, you have. Max Payne 3 will prove to be one tough game for some players and some levels especially can be hugely frustrating. Enemies are just so numerous and hard to kill, leg shots won’t do it, chest shots won’t always do it and if they have head gear expect to expend a whole clip. Even when enemies go down, they will fire a last few rounds to take you down with them. Now, some will argue that my criticism is unfair, after all, a game where enemies fall to the ground like dominoes would quickly become boring and let’s be honest, Max Payne himself only needs a handful of painkillers to restore his entire health. However, when some guy you have shot point-blank in the chest gets up a few seconds later and comes running at you, and delivers a head shot that means you have to restart, excuse the pun, but it is a tough pill to swallow.

It’s flaws like this that start to creep in, and the longer you play, the more apparent they become. Painkillers are few and far between and the checkpoints are unevenly and unforgivingly spread which means if you die, you will often have to redo entire sections again, and with the game as challenging as it is you can expect to die more than once.

Because of this, frustration quickly sets in. I think the programmers realised this because if you die in a section too many times the game will restart you with extra painkillers. It’s a weird compensation, especially thinking you may have to die a good number of times to get it. The steep difficulty curve also means that to survive you are forced to engage bullet-time more often and then entire stages just become a repetitive matter of slowing things down and holding out long enough behind cover.

It’s also a shame too, that unlike the original game, Rockstar did not build in some kind of bullet-time reward system so that you could increase the length of time you could enter slo-mo. I can’t help thinking it was a bit of a missed opportunity. However, if you do manage to stick with it ,you are rewarded with a dark and deep storyline full of betrayal and deceit, not to mention some of incredible set pieces.

In multiplayer, Max Payne 3 delivers excellently too. At first you’re limited to straight death-match and team death-match modes and it all feels slow and a little second-rate, but prolonged play provides benefits.

Bullet-time makes all the difference, with its use balanced by the same post-slow-mo movement issues as in the single-player game, and by the fact that it also affects line-of-sight targets, not just your character. Gain enough kills in the boot-camp scenarios, and you can also join in a Gang Wars mode. This sees two teams running through objectives in a themed mini-campaign. It’s another example of a game that can start off on the wrong foot, but that works hard to turn your initial impression around.

My Verdict
Max Payne 3 might not be Rockstar’s best work to date, but it probably is the best example of its genre. What Rockstar brings to Max Payne 3 is style, personality, cinematics, gritty rawness and an exciting and memorable experience. Max Payne 3 might not be perfect and might be frustrating as hell. But one thing’s for sure, it packs a mean punch and, despite its flaws, is a quality title

9/10