Max Payne 3

My most lingering memory of Max Payne - and it's a long time since I played it - is standing around, in the night rain, trying to find a way into a factory. The oppressive memory of it, even now, makes me do a little melancholy sag.

It was good, then. It was new, then. The comic book presentation may have been a desperate money-saving idea from Remedy, and the voiceover may have been a ham and cheese sandwich, but the relentless unblinking sincerity of the downbeat monologue won us over. Yes, even at the facepalm meta-moment when Max said he felt like he was, you know, in a video game or something.

But something had to change. Not the comic book look - that's still there, although with Rockstar's infinipockets, there's no need to skimp on still images. Every panel is animated, now. And our alcohol and ibuprofen addicted hero still narrates the strips, his words dropping into place in animated captions.

Other things are the same, too. Max still leaps around, too. But now, he's got hand-crafted animations for every angle of leap. It's odd to be impressed by something as simple as a man hurling himself around in every direction. But Max feels much more like a presense, now. The animation achieves this with some subtle tricks, like using a handrail on the staircase. It also pulls off some not-so-subtle tricks, like Max using his landing, prone position to roll around, giving him a full range of fire without ever sitting up.

The bespoke animation of every character - each motion-captured individually - make everyone, and Max in particular, feel like they occupy a physical space. And yes, I realise that sentence sounds utterly moronic, but I'm trying to wean myself off the word "meaty". But it does let me segue effortless into talking about the physical spaces themselve - or locations, as a human being would call them.

The locations are stunning in their detail. The Rockstar engine, so used to dealing with wide-open spaces, contracts extremely well to a single room. In Max's New York apartment block, we inspect the room of a man who, for his own sincere reasons, just exploded himself in the name of God.

It's nothing to do with the story. It's just a door that was left open, and a window into the madman's mind. Newspaper clippings hang from a beam on the ceiling, breaking the right angles of the room. An opened pizza box sits across the gas hob. And the walls are decorated with soldiers' names, some crossed off, presumably dead. I feel like I've learned more about this man than I know about some shooter heroes.

Bullet time works as you'd expect - Max earns credit by being in the heat of combat, and can spend it barreling along a corridor in slow-motion. Yes, bullet-time is old news now. But Max Payne is synonymous with slowing down time. He could hardly not.

Hiding won't accomplish anything. It won't rebuild your bullet time, and your health won't regenerate. The only way to regain health is painkillers, and the only concession to the impatience of modern gamers is the ability to catch a life-saving second wind, providing you can kill the man who landed the fatal blow on you before you land.

The structure of the game allows for Max to have companions in the levels, without ever feeling like you're nannying them. They'll generally get out of the way for the fights, and rejoin you when it's safe, picking up the story. So that story, is woven throughout the levels, instead of bookending them. The moments I'm shown - heavily redacted for spoilers, because Rockstar are nothing if not insanely protective - are spot-on from a writing angle, and acted brilliantly by James McCaffrey, the voice of Max since the beginning.