Just started playing the game again on PS3. I'd only played a few chapters back in 2013 before putting it down and, for the life of me, I can't remember why I stopped playing it. For those folks who say Max Payne and Max Payne 2 are much better than Max Payne 3, ok, whatever. I'm not playing those games. I have them; I played through the first one a long time ago on my original XBox, and I thought it was really good, but I thought Max, himself, was a drunken loser who needed to pick himself up by the bootstraps and clean up his act. Can't change the past, so move forward. In other words, he was too flawed for me to care about. In Max Payne 3, it seems he finally has picked up the pieces.
The graphics were exceptional for 2012, and they still hold up fairly well in late 2022. The Max voiceover is good; he's interesting and the story is engrossing enough to keep you entertained. The gameplay still holds up surprisingly well, and I liked the fact that I could change the aim/shoot buttons from L1/R1 to L2/R2. There are some long cinematic sequences, so sit back and enjoy the story. The music/sound effects are good. And the only negative I can say from what I've played in 2022 so far is that, like many PS3 games, the picture is dark and enemies blend into the shadows. I found the medium setting really challenging because of the darkness, and that's even after adjusting both the contrast in the game menu and the brightness on my tv. I'm playing the game on easy setting now, and it seems more manageable.
Long story short, it's one of the better games for the PS3, so if you have the itch to fire up that old console or to jump back into your backlog of unplayed games, this game, Max Payne 3, is definitely playable, engrossing, and enjoyable in 2022, and I don't feel like I'm wasting my time playing it...even though I could be playing my PS5 right now.
