As Max, I approached one particular section that contained stuffed models of two American explorers clothed in 19th-century gear and posed as if they were surveying the Central American landscape. See, there I was yesterday, playing through the final sections of Max Payne 3, when I came upon a museum display dedicated to the creation of the Panama Canal. Yes, I promise I’ll get to the crucial bit in just a moment, but first you need a bit of background info. I have no insider knowledge that what I’m about to tell you is in any way accurate, but it does sound quite nice, so if nothing else, you can use this information to impress cute members of the opposite sex with thick-rimmed glasses and a surfeit of designer clothing featuring the face of Che Guevara. Before we get to that, though, let’s cover the disclaimer: The following text is based entirely on inference, caffeine, sleep deprivation and a surprisingly vast, yet mostly useless, understanding of geopolitical history. Oh, but there are yet more layers to this story, boys and girls. At one point, Payne himself describes the experience as “another futile quest for revenge.” Instead, everything is awash in fatigued, melancholy overtones. ![]() Granted, this is routinely expressed by Max shooting up the place in spectacular fashion, but the overarching mood of the game is far from jovial, adolescent posturing. He’s a hero, but the fact that he does good is more an incidental side effect of his ongoing battle with internal demons than anything else. Our titular ex-cop is an emotionally broken wreck, haunted by the murders of his wife and daughter, and seeking to either kill the pain with booze and prescription narcotics or throw himself into one more firefight that just might end it all. Peel back a few layers, however and, much like the majestic onion, Max Payne 3 reveals itself to be a hard-boiled noir detective story, very much akin to the classics of the genre. Diving down stairs, pistols akimbo, raining a torrent of hot lead that would seem more fitting spouting forth from the vengeful maw of an ancient Aztec blood god – Max Payne 3 is the pure, raw distillation of everything gamers crave in their shooters. Superficially, Max Payne 3 is an action game centered around blowing the heads off of thugs in ways that would give John Woo a giddy erection.
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