First I was pissed that after one night of playing I got through to the half of the game, so it was going to be a 10 hour ride tops. And didn’t like the fact that it was basically a rail shooter with cutscenes and shootouts following directly one another.
Then in the second playing session it just clicked: the story got grimmer by the minute, the events went gruesome, Max Payne turned into a killing machine as in John McClane meets John Wick but way darker and with booze and pain killers, and I felt the rage of Doom but with the inherent feeling of the nothing-left-to-loose death wish. And then, getting close to the finale when I had to shoot my way through an airport terminal while Health’s Tears was thumping overwhelmingly in my ears, that moment made this game finally unforgettable.
Totally didn’t expect Max Payne 3 to be anything close to the first or even the second, and it wasn’t, it was a completely different setting but the mood, they nailed it again. Oh, and the writing, quotable quotes all over, Max Payne is a poet.