At
last, fans of dark, gritty third-person shooters about rogue cops
mowing down hundreds of people in slow motion won't have to resort to
playing Dead to
Rights: Retribution
when they want to enjoy the genre on a current-gen system.
It's
sort of remarkable that there hasn't been a Max Payne game in eight
years, considering how popular and influential they were, but at long
last he's back, now working in the private sector in Brazil.
Presumably the New York Police Department decided that keeping him on
the force after his second
three-figure body count killing spree was too much of a lawsuit risk.
Or maybe the entire Police Department was disbanded by the city
government as a cost-cutting measure once the violent death of every
criminal in the New York Metropolitan Area over the course of the
first two games made it superfluous.
In
any case, he's now working in South America as a bodyguard for the
wife of a wealthy Brazilian guy, still struggling with the demons of
his tragic past. I'm assuming they went with the regular ending of
Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne and not the secret one shown for
beating it on the highest difficulty setting, which means that Max is
now 0 for 2 on the “the lifeless body of the woman he loves not
lying
in a bloody heap in front of him because he couldn't save her”
front. Then the woman he's working as the bodyguard for is kidnapped,
and Max takes to the streets of São Paulo, Brazil, to get her back.
I'm wondering- and this is meant solely as an observation, not a complaint- if the developers were influenced by the 2004 Denzel Washington movie Man on Fire. (Which is a great, underrated movie that I highly recommend if you like action/thriller films or have ever wanted to see Denzel Washington cut off a man's finger while Oye como va is blasting on a car radio.) The similarities are striking:
1.The hero is an American expatriate
and psychologically damaged stone-cold killer with a terrifying
capacity for mayhem and a horrifically violent past who is now
working as a bodyguard in Latin America.
2.The girl he's supposed to protect is
kidnapped by dangerous criminals.
3.This displeases him.
4.
Refer to my previous remarks in Part 1, in
re
“psychologically damaged stone-cold killer, etc.”
I'm
pretty pumped about this one. All the trailers I've seen look great,
and it's nice that it's available for PlayStation as well as Xbox.
