Max Payne 3 Completed

Back during my Steam Backlog Bonanza, which now seems so long ago that I can barely even remember it, I identified only a few games that I definitely wanted to return to later. For the record, those games were, in the order I encountered them: Life is Feudal, Kholat, Age of Decadence, and Max Payne 3.

Today I can report that I finished the first of those Steam Backlog games: Max Payne 3. I only played through the basic story on the easiest possible setting with the auto-aim set to maximum. In other words, I couldn’t have cared less about the strategic gameplay component of the game, and only wanted to see the super over-the-top noir acting and super over-the-top Hollywood blockbuster explosions in the cut scenes, which I found highly amusing.

It was a lot like watching one of those classic Joel Silver action movies like Die Hard or Predator or Lethal Weapon, except it was a game. Also I can’t express how funny the private-eye noir voiceovers were throughout the whole game. I wish there was a way to extract the audio from Max Payne’s inner monologues and just make a long MP3 out of it that I could play over and over again. It was so delightfully corny.

On the technological side, the game also had a lot of really nicely-rendered “urban decay” maps and level designs. It reminded me of what we would later come to see in The Division and The Division 2. I wondered if any of the same artists had worked on those games.

The only other comment I have on it is that this was the first game on which I tried the in-home Steam streaming feature. I didn’t even know it was a thing I could do until I installed Steam on my laptop in the living room. I just wanted something I could play while I was watching the news or something. It turned out that I could plug a controller into my laptop (with an adapter because my laptop only has USB-C ports) and play Max Payne 3 almost flawlessly in the living room on a laptop that shouldn’t have been able to play it very well.

Almost flawlessly because there were occasional hitches when the streaming didn’t quite keep up. It wasn’t bad enough to affect this game, but I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to play anything competitive with the screen occasionally freezing up.

All told, it was worth the $4 I paid for it.