"You need to replay Max Payne 3" gotta be in my top ten intrusive thoughts I've acted on, right up there with "fill your whole entire fridge with cans of NOS."

Unlike my fridge full of NOS, the compulsion to revisit this game wasn't as sudden as waking in the middle of the night, drenched in a cold sweat and driven by chemical dependency, though I suppose the fact we both nurse our problems rather than confront them does make Max somewhat relatable (well, that and the baldness.) Rather, Max Payne 3 has ended up in front of my face several times over the past few weeks by pure happenstance, with the untimely passing of James McCaffrey acting as the catalyst to sit down and start it up for the first time since 2012.

McCaffrey's performance is of course outstanding, effortlessly selling you on an older, even more broken version of Max from the second he sets foot in his clean new apartment. Monologuing about the need to move on and start fresh with a few cracks at the expense of his weight and the poor choices that have led him to Brazil. The scene devolves pretty quickly as Max sets aside unpacking and decorating for drinking, stumbling, and self-pity.

The strobing effects, neon after-images, and punctuation of key words and phrases cutting through the cacophony of visual noise places the player right into the middle of Max's delirium, and while I'm sure some people were upset that Rockstar pushed away from the film noir design of the previous games, I am 100% into this sort of Man on Fire "tape roll" editing style, and I think it's used to great effect, keeping the player spinning in Max's fucked up headspace.

Despite how fundamentally broken Max is as a person, there was some real risk in inadvertently casting him as the "white savior," but I think this trope is pretty effectively subverted. Max is notoriously bad at saving anybody, and in fact makes most situations substantially worse by simply being there, drunk on the job and armed to the teeth. He is unwilling or perhaps unable (again, due to his inebriation) to understand any language that's not New Jersey English, frequently resulting in misunderstandings and botched attempts at negotiations, resulting in the loss of human life. I don't see how Max hopes to save anyone when he intentionally blows up an organ farming operation without making sure anyone got out, or by shooting up an entire airport, later revealed to be avoidable had he simply taken a ride offered to him to go directly to the bad guy's private hanger. As he puts it, "I'm a dumb move kind of guy." Sure, he gets the bad guy in the end, but when the game is popping accolades for killing 1000 enemies, you have to wonder if the math shakes out.

The shootout in the favela, which occurs about halfway through the game, feels heavily borrowed from Elite Squad. There are a couple notable moments during this sequence that are lifted from the movie, but one thing Max Payne 3 lacks over Elite Squad is that element of humanization, particularly for those in the favela. There's plenty of lip paid to the class divide and the animosity the rich have for the poor, and vice versa, but the fast pace of the story and action doesn't really provide time to peel back those layers and examine them. That's not what Max Payne 3 is about, it's more action than drama, and to do so would also mean providing subtitles and having Max not go "huh, what?" and immediately shoot dodge into a wall, so Rockstar probably made the right call there, too.

On the more mechanical end of things, Max Payne 3 carries over enough systems from the previous two games to feel authentic to the Max Payne experience and is otherwise just a very refined third person cover-shooter. A bit punishing, but in a way that feels satisfying. The action never dries out, and there's some really great set pieces, especially during the climax in the airport, which includes one of my favorite needle drops in games. At this point it feels trite to say a game feels like playing a movie, but Max Payne 3's action is paced in this very specific way that makes it feel like possibly the best translation of an action movie into interactive media I've come across.

Remedy has announced remakes of the first two Max Payne games, and I've been told there's plenty of allusions to the character in Alan Wake 2, potentially setting up something more. I haven't played that game and my friends have been careful to avoid spoilers until I do, so I really only know the vague points, like Sam Lake's character being voiced by McCaffrey. I'm curious where they go from here, though at the same time I don't want to speculate, as it feels a bit too callous to do so in the wake of McCaffrey's passing. Perhaps the best answer is to not do anything at all. Max Payne 3 is an excellent final chapter to Max's story and maybe my favorite entry in the series.