Take Man on Fire's directional identity and dial up the filtered work ten fold, saturate scenes, and disrupt the flow of play by interjecting with needless cutscenes to demonstrate Max performing the most unremarkable of tasks. It's just so painfully evident Rockstar wanted to do their own take on Max Payne at the expense of what came before, pissed away Max Payne 2's character development, and just wanted to clone Man on Fire into a Max Payne skin. Some of Max's quips are sufficiently melodramatic philosophy.

The dialogue is, as per most of Rockstar's work, strong and full of character.

Rockstar's story is a drab riff on Man on Fire, their regression of Max to a miserable self destructive drunk was creative bankruptcy that undermined Max Payne 2's utterly perfect ending, the level pacing combined with cinematic editing is genuinely fucking abhorrent as the game routinely interjects with some dumb, over filtered and (at launch) unskippable cutscene to show Max opening a door or vaulting a rail or looking in a particular direction because Rockstar (even more evidently now after Red Dead Redemption 2) are incapable of telling story through play, and many of the encounters are cheap shit that lack the polish and tight, system driven gameplay that made Remedy's outings so memorable and their subsiquent work (especially Control) continually outstanding in the third person shooter genre. I was mixed on it at launch but soured on it over time.

I hope someone else does Max Payne 4 if it is ever to happen.

Max payne 4 rumors