Almost half-way through this review, and I’ve yet to mention gameplay. Throughout the game, you're never sure if Payne's searching for absolution, trying to save another man's wife, or if he's really on a protracted suicide mission, trying to embrace his own destruction. It’s gnarled and bitter, as you would expect – he effortlessly delivers the script’s many Chandlerlisms with calloused cynicism – but it’s also a surprisingly nuanced turn. And nowhere is this better exemplified than in James McCaffrey’s standout performance as Max Payne. Max Payne 3 does the latter – it’s a game that is fully literate in the genre of which it strives to be a part, and judged on those terms it’s one of the finest executions of game noir to date.
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If you’re not a fan of genre fiction, you might find the supporting cast risibly generic, the plot a bit flimsy, but there’s a marked difference between using archetypal characters because you’re creatively spent and deliberately tapping into a rich tradition.
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The non-linear narrative, the cast of suspicious characters, a plot twisted by deception and corruption – it’s all present and correct.
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Despite swapping the shadows for the sun, the series hasn’t lost its hardboiled heritage. But it’s not just stylish gloss – like everything in the game, it feeds into the characterisation of Max, emphasising his jaded disconnection from the world around him. Initially, it all seems a bit much, too noisy and distracting, but after a while you acclimatise and it becomes part of the game’s distinctive texture. The change of location is underscored by a raft of cinematic effects: scan lines, chromatic aberration, shifting film stock.