Despite being a decade old and from three console generations ago, Max Payne 3 still remains a classic that has yet to be rivaled within its genre. It plays to all of Rockstar Games’ strengths, from fantastic writing to embracing their desire to craft linear spectacles. Max Payne 3 has left many longing for more whether that be through a sequel or a remaster. Despite these calls for a more modernized version, this is a game that still holds up tremendously well, and in some ways, feels more advanced than some of Rockstar’s more recent games.
Max Payne 3 raised the bar for third-person shooters with its gameplay. Remedy Entertainment had already redefined how to make a shooter with the first two entries, but a nearly 10-year gap between Max Payne 2 and 3 allowed technology to evolve and give Rockstar the opportunity to apply its detail-oriented approach to game design to the series. Remedy created the foundation of Max Payne, a slick shooter that made you feel like a cool action hero, but was burdened by the technology and budgetary limitations at that time. Max Payne 3 heightens all of Remedy’s ideas, giving them a much more tangible, immersive quality that removes a lot of the barriers between the player and the character on screen, ultimately unifying them as one entity. Max Payne 3 gives players full control over Max. Not just his arms and legs, but his whole body. Rockstar applied its animation-based movement to create a smooth and fluid experience that immerses the player in the chaos.
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The gunplay in Max Payne 3 is a big piece of this. It’s all about precision, and it is relentlessly satisfying. This is a game that largely dissuades the player from using any kind of auto-aim and encourages the game’s free aim system instead. It really helps sink the player into Max’s shoes and creates a truly rewarding experience. You earn your cool kills, you save yourself from a close call – it’s all you, not the game assisting you to give you the illusion of control.
That precision is extended to the game’s movement too. Rockstar created a movement system that allows a very flexible Max that doesn’t have to rotate his entire body 90 degrees just to turn to his right. If the player is running straight down a hallway, but there are enemies shooting at Max from his right, Max can maintain his momentum and twist his hips to shoot back without stopping dead in his tracks or awkwardly begin moving toward his attackers. Max Payne 3‘s gunplay works because it feels loose and not tight and restrictive. Even if you throw yourself into an object during a Shootdodge (Max Payne’s signature diving move), forcing you out of the slow-motion moment, Max doesn’t automatically get up to make himself open to a storm of bullets. The player can lay there and roll around on the ground until they’re ready, allowing themselves a moment of brief cover on the ground.
Max is like a bullet train with the brakes ripped out, nothing but an absolute permanent end will stop him from achieving his goals. He is always hurtling himself through each level to rescue someone, escape a hairy situation, or kill someone. The momentum is always building towards the game’s explosive climax and there isn’t much time to catch your breath. You’re not allowed to stop because it only takes a few well-placed bullets to take Max down, so you must always be moving which is why mechanics like Shootdodging are so crucial to survival in this game.
You’re forced to act instinctually by picking up weapons off the ground while dodging bullets, diving through things or off of balconies, shooting objects to cause environmental destruction, etc. Although Max can take a few painkillers and heal himself, it doesn’t take much to kill him. He is incredibly vulnerable and it forces the player to be on their toes and actively improvise. As Tom Cruise’s Maverick says in Top Gun, “You don’t have time to think […] If you think, you’re dead”.
The game’s insistence on having the player improvise goes beyond shooting guns and strategic movement, though. The game’s physics and animations are another tool for the player to abuse and use to their advantage. If you shoot someone in the arm or leg without killing them, they may stumble into the person standing next to them, making both of them vulnerable. You can jump into someone and knock them over, shoot someone until they’re off balance and fall down a set of stairs, or make someone trip over a body in front of them. The AI aren’t perfect killers who make zero mistakes – they stumble as much as the player does. In a game where it can be easy to run out of ammo in your preferred weapons, it’s incredibly helpful to be able to strategically utilize a few bullets to cause an enemy to flop around for a moment or even use Max’s own body against the enemies by diving straight into them.
Beyond the gunplay and combat, perhaps the most interesting thing about Max Payne 3 is that it’s the last linear game Rockstar made, and it has some of their best level design. Many have criticized Rockstar for having incredibly linear and on-rails missions in its wildly massive open-world games like Red Dead Redemption 2. In Red Dead Redemption 2, unless the game explicitly tells you otherwise, you’ll often be punished for not doing something exactly the way the game wants you to within a mission. For example, there’s a mission where you must sneak into an office at an oil refinery. The game asks you to sneak through the building to get to the office, but the player can actually avoid all of this and climb on to the roof to reach a window that leads into the office. However, if the player does this, they will immediately fail the mission.
Part of the reason for this is because Rockstar has deliberately crafted all of their missions in a very specific, cinematic way. Some players hate this, some people, like myself, don’t mind it all that much. These missions are telling a story, and they’ve carefully orchestrated the levels to reflect that, but it can be really frustrating or break your immersion if you mistakenly derail this cinematic moment.
Max Payne 3 doesn’t have this problem whatsoever because it is linear by design and isn’t in direct conflict with Red Dead Redemption 2‘s open-world exploration and freedom. There aren’t any objectives that require you to sneak inside a building or something, the only goal is to mow everyone down. The game even doubles down on this by having extra modes that allow you to prove your skill through time trials or score attacks. The levels themselves are also nothing but tight corridors, enclosed buildings, which leaves very little room for the player to color outside of Rockstar’s meticulous lines. They are intricately designed to give you a small playground to play with the mechanics of the game, but purposely ensures you won’t stray from Rockstar’s vision and simultaneously disrupt your own power fantasy.
There’s a giant battle in a police station that is simultaneously experiencing a civilian uprising, an music-driven firefight in an airport terminal, a shootout in a loud nightclub with strobing lights, and even a moment where a woman drives a speeding bus through the streets of Brazil while Max hangs out the side of it, firing an SMG. It is constant chaos and these kinds of moments keep the game feeling varied. There are no tailing missions or any other obnoxious types of missions present in some other games: It’s just shooting all of the time but with flashier ways of presenting it. In any other game, that could be really dangerous. You risk wearing the player out by making them do the same thing for 10+ hours, but Rockstar has nothing but confidence in its gameplay, and rightfully so.
The linearity of Max Payne 3 still offers freedom because of the control that you’re given over Max in every scenario. You’re given the opportunity to be the action hero without it feeling like it’s overly choreographed or staged. The game trusts you to be a badass instead of taking control from you to make you think you are via quick-time events. Even in scripted moments, such as Bullet Time setpieces, the game doesn’t fail you if you don’t kill everyone in front of you. It’s offering you a strategic advantage to kill as many people as you can before the Bullet Time runs out, where you will then be left to fend for yourself with the people you didn’t manage to finish off. Once you’ve really mastered the game, it begins to feel like the closest we will ever get to a true John Wick adaptation.
Rockstar was able to create a singular action experience with no distractions. They don’t have to split up teams to make side quests, ambient life, and whatever else is needed to craft a rich open world.That immense focus on just perfecting something as common in video games as shooting because every single thing in the game had to revolve around that idea which resulted in Rockstar creating one of the most refined gameplay experiences of the last decade. Max Payne 3 was built around a very simple and central concept and they were able to excel with it.
Max Payne 3 is like the Doom of third-person shooters and should serve as the foundation for another Rockstar Games title. After Grand Theft Auto VI, is Rockstar really going to go sink itself in another open world game for 5-10 years? I love those kinds of games, but it would make far more sense to take a brief break from all of that and have Rockstar invest itself in another linear action game where it can play to all of its strengths. It may be easier said than done, but Rockstar should have no issue making something linear with great gunplay, varied level design, and thrilling setpieces with a meaty narrative driving all of it.
