Pills 'n' Thrills and Gunshot Wounds

Max Payne - silly name, great games. For the first two at least, and they were a long time ago. Indeed, it's been nearly a whole decade since we saw NYPD's finest in action. The comeback for his third run out has been highly publicised with adverts on TV and in cinemas, posters on bus shelters all over Manchester. I admit to being intrigued and buying it days after release. I completed it last night -  so here's The Tedious World verdict.

So, we find our Max at something of a low ebb. Still understandably haunted by the murder of his wife and child, he's quit working for the Plod and retired to New Jersey where he embarks on a life where a good night is one spent washing down painkillers with a bottle of the hard stuff. Doubtless his habit worsened when he found out there was a terrible film put out in his name. Unfortunately, Max commits something of a social faux pas and has to quickly leave town. Luckily, an offer doing apparently easy bodyguard work in Sao Paulo, Brazil, comes up at the right time, and off he goes.

Thankfully for us, it's not that easy and before long, Max - the sorry sonofabitch - is caught up in all manner of carnage to which the only solution seems to be lots of gunplay. And what fun it is! Violence of the highest order is in store throughout, with not much time to breathe: when a game starts (like the first one, the story starts near the end) with the hero standing over a still-alive body that has lost an arm and been very well cooked from an explosion, ready to execute him, you know this isn't going to be a calming experience.

In the previous games, the use of bullet time was pretty much all there was to the action. Enter a room, see mooks, do a cool dive in bullet time while emptying your clips into their bodies. Job done. Now, it's a wee bit more complicated. Going in face first against five well-equipped bods wearing body armour is only going to end up with a rapid course of facial realignment through gun surgery. Essentially, you need to use cover to time your moves. Naturally, this can slow the combat down by the pace of the older games, but also adds tension of using your bullet-time at the exact right moment to emerge from behind a pillar and quickly dispatch a bit of lead into head.

A great feature is the slow motion shots of the final kills in an area: fire off the round and watch it glide through the air before it makes contact with the target, blood covering nearby surfaces while the body collapses limply. Yes, I'm probably a bit sick in the head to enjoy this so much.

All the same, Max is beyond burnt-out, the screen jarring and blurring to reflect his pickled state of mind. Neck a painkiller at a bad moment and it's a lot harder to get a clear bead on anyone. Diving into a room in slow-mo might look awesome, but our poor hero isn't as young as he used to be and he'll slowly get back to his feet - a fatal mistake if timed wrong.

The main strength for this gamer, however, is the story. Rockstar have a reputation on this front from the Grand Theft Auto series and they carry it off here in style. Mixing the insane action set-pieces from Hollywood shooters with a character straight out of a Humphrey Bogart flick: indeed, the first few chapters see our hero well under the influence of a few over the eight. Luckily, James McCarthy once again does a top-notch job voicing Max, being able to bring pathos and plenty of humour to the proceedings.

All these factors make that this is pretty much a totally linear game not a huge issue. Normally, I'll get frustrated by such games from feeling limited in my control. With Max Payne 3, you're having way too much fun watching Max go from one mess to another, from the penthouses and nightclubs of the rich to the extreme poverty of the slums, stumbling his way through hell motivated apparently only by sheer stubbornness.

One line that tickled me immensely is when Max reflects that he and the woman he is protecting from an endless stream of goons aren't exactly a SEAL team. Given his bodycount over three games must be well into four figures, he's a bit hard on himself. Mr Payne is nothing less than a human killing machine of the highest order, mowing down masses of helpless thugs with no help, taking insane risks fuelled only by large amounts of Scotch and pharmaceuticals. Top man!

A highly recommend experience in my book then, and I've not even touched the multi-player mode, which I'm told is pretty handy. The tourist board in Sao Paulo may want to give this a miss though...