2.5/5 ★ – heyitscarter's review of Max Payne 3.

Max Payne 3 is a deeply cynical game amongst a deeply cynical franchise. I am of two minds as it relates to this game as there a lot of aspects I liked about it - and a lot of aspects I really did not like. A year after Remedy finished work on Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, they would sell the IP to none other than Rockstar games, primarily famous for the Red Dead and Grand Theft Auto games. Eight years later, Rockstar Vancouver would develop and release Max Payne 3 - one year before the release of the now 8.5-billion dollar grossing Grand Theft Auto V. I have a sneaking suspicion that there was an internal push for smaller projects in the years preceding GTA V that could be used as a sort of engine test while developing Rockstar's "RAGE" or Rockstar Advanced Game Engine, which powered GTA V the year following Max Payne 3. Both MP3 and L.A. Noire feel strangely out of place in Rockstar's catalog around this time as shorter, more focused experiences with an emphasis on engine fidelity. Max Payne's signature buttery-smooth, crystal clear, beautifully precise gunplay now has the veneer of Rockstar's vaseline all over it - slow ragdoll-layered animations feel as if you're driving Max like a vehicle from waist-high barrier to waist-high barrier. Your reticle sways and slides around clumsily as the camera shakes. Credit where it's due - this is fun in it's own way. Very fun. As is Rockstar's wheelhouse, every movement has an incredible sense of weight, punches connect with intense verisimilitude and crowded environments erupt into very real-feeling chaos. As is evident by the success of GTA V, the RAGE engine's fidelity has aged like fine wine and this 14 year old game still looks good by the standard of today. The level design is colorful and interesting with an emphasis on verticality not seen in Max Payne 1 or 2, and the game offers a myriad stunning cinematic set pieces ala Uncharted. Personally, my favorite level is Chapter 3: "In the stadium" - where the player is offered to take slow-motion leaping headshots while tumbling down angled bleachers. I had so much fun I replayed it a few times. Speaking of the locales, they too further divorce Max from familiarity. São Paulo leads to some refreshing fish-out-of-water moments between Max and the rest of the (completely new) cast of characters who come straight out of a GTA game. For every boon the tropical sun offers, I think it detracts as much if not more. The parts of Max Payne 3's setting that feel thematically relevant aren't exactly kind - and viewed through Rockstar's bitter lens they're all the less so. Drawing parallels to Max's senseless violence of mobsters in NYC to real gang violence among impoverished nations is interesting - but it isn't treated with the respect it deserves. Instead, Max refers to himself as a "gringo" two dozen times as he roams the streets of São Paulo with a shaved head gunning down brown people. Max Payne 1 & 2 work as an extremely solid duality on their own about a man losing everything. Not just his family, but his life - his soul, his morality, his very sense of being. He is so transformed by his grief that he has become something else entirely - and the tragic beauty of the finale of 2 is the acceptance of this fact. After a game teaming with Rockstar's bleak bile, Max Payne 3 wants to offers a final optimistic note to the story that some form of redemption is possible for Max. That he can channel his rage into something more than destruction. The problem for me is that this is unearned. It undermines the entire point of the "fall" of Max Payne. Max doesn't get redemption, and he doesn't get to be a new version of himself. He isn't a "dime-store angel of death" that is sober and wears Hawaiian shirts, aviators and flip flops - he is a psychopath and a mass-murderer. He kills for love - he kills for justice, but he kills. And there is no atonement in death.