As a Max Payne 2 fan, the opening chords of Late Goodbye by Finnish band Poets of the Fall always give me a shiver of nostalgia. The atmospheric song plays over the end credits, but has always felt like the game’s theme to me. When I think about Max Payne 2, I think of that acoustic guitar and those low, swelling strings. But in an example of developer Remedy’s knack for clever world-building, Late Goodbye is more than just a credits song: it’s threaded into the game itself, and deeply connected to the story.

“We have in-game television shows in Max Payne 2 that become a larger part of the world, such as the Address Unknown theme park,” says Sam Lake, creator (and face) of Max Payne, lead writer at Remedy, and co-writer of Late Goodbye. “In the same way, I didn’t want this song to just play over the end credits. I wanted it to exist in, and be a part of, the world we created."

You overhear snippets of Late Goodbye throughout Max Payne 2. A janitor sings it as he scrubs graffiti from a wall, and you can hear the song blaring loudly from his headphones. Later, a contract killer plays a beautiful rendition of it on a piano, over which the body of one of his victims lies slumped and bloodied. And after making his way through the Address Unknown funhouse, Max hears his love interest, Mona Sax, singing it to herself in the shower.

“It all comes down to world-building,” says Lake. “How do you create an imaginary world that feels like a real place? In a contemporary setting, things like music, television, and movies are very much present in our daily lives. And when you’re building a world, these details become opportunities to bring colour to it and add to and comment on the story’s themes.”

While studying screenwriting at the Theatre Academy of Finland, Lake wrote a treatment for a movie script that would eventually become Max Payne 2. “Coming up with these stories is a winding road,” he says. “You try something, it doesn’t work, and then you go a different way. Early on, the idea was that Max would be involved in some kind of traumatic event and forget all about it—except for a snippet of a song called Late Goodbye.”

Lake worked on the script for a month before deciding to take it to Remedy and turn it into Max Payne 2. In the earliest version of the script the song would awaken Max’s memories of this traumatic incident, and he would realise that it was playing on a car radio while it happened. But in the end, it didn’t play such a pivotal role in the storyline—an example of that winding road.

Now Lake needed someone to write the song. Luckily he was close friends with a songwriter, Marko Saaresto, who had just formed a new band. “Sam and I have been friends since childhood, so the connection was already in place,” says Saaresto, co-founder, lead vocalist, and primary songwriter in Poets of the Fall. “Then one night while driving we started talking about the possibility of the band writing a song for his new game, Max Payne 2. In the end we wrote three songs, one of which would eventually become Late Goodbye.”

“At the time, Poets had just formed,” says Lake. “Marko and I go way back, and he’s interested in writing too. He writes the lyrics for all the band’s songs, but he has written other stuff too. And we started talking about this idea of writing a custom song for the game. I had never written lyrics before, but I had this poem that contained elements that I wanted to be in the song. I sent it to Marko and gave him permission to modify it to make it work as lyrics."

“Sam sent me one of his train of thought-style poems to illustrate the mood of the game,” says Saaresto. “Then I took the overall atmosphere of the piece and the phrase ‘late goodbye’ and wrote the lyrics around those themes. Working with a writer like Sam is a relief in many ways, because he’s someone who can really understand what you go through as an artist during the creative process. With him it was especially fun because we’ve been best friends since forever and know each other really well. The process was very free and open-minded.”

As well as capturing the dark, downbeat tone of Max Payne 2, Late Goodbye also contains some direct, if subtle, references: namely the line about staring at yourself in the ‘john mirror’, which anyone who followed the story of Address Unknown will understand. But Saaresto prefers people to interpret the lyrics for themselves. “That’s how humans operate,” he says. “We experience the world through our own lens. So even though I sometimes shed light on what our songs mean, I like people to have their own theories.”

Late Goodbye became a huge hit for Poets of Fall, and put the young Finnish band, suddenly, in front of an international audience. “We’re very grateful for that,” says Saaresto. “It was a great stepping stone for us to get that kind of worldwide exposure. It was also a really tough test for our music. If people hated the song I don’t know what would have happened. But they seemed to love it, and that gave us a nice confidence boost early in our career."

“It was great to get the band’s music out there, and I love what we’ve done together throughout the years,” says Lake. “They had an even bigger role in Alan Wake. There was a Poets of the Fall song, but the band also assumed the role of a fictional band called Old Gods of Asgard, which was really a logical progression of using music as an element that’s inside the world. We just went a lot further with it in Alan Wake than we did in Max Payne 2.”

Almost 15 years later, Poets of the Fall still plays Late Goodbye at their live shows. “It definitely has a special vibe to it, since it was our first single release,” says Saaresto. “We played it so much in the early days of our career that, for a time, we didn’t really want to perform it live anymore. But it’s been back on the setlist for some time now and it’s a fun song to play.”

“I’m always looking for ways to get Poets of the Fall into our games,” says Lake. “The band wrote a song for Quantum Break called The Labyrinth, but unfortunately we didn’t have time to put it in because of some contractual issues. But we’ll see what we end up doing in Control.”

Control being, of course, Remedy’s next game—a supernatural shooter where you play as a member of the Federal Bureau of Control, an organisation that investigates unexplained phenomena. As for Poets of the Fall, the band is currently working on a new album, Ultraviolet, which is due for release on October 5, which they’ll also be touring. You can find the dates here, and who knows, maybe they’ll even play Late Goodbye.

With videogames so full of long-running series it's inevitable that even the ones we enjoy will cough up the occasional dud. Whether you didn't like the combat focus of Fallout 4, or the sci-fi setting of Grand Theft Auto 2, or the underwhelming aliens of Mass Effect: Andromeda, or pretty much anything about the first Witcher game, it's easy enough to think of examples. So that's our PCG Q&A this weekend, where we ask both you and our team members: What's your least favorite entry in an otherwise good series? Give us your hot takes in the comments below.

Samuel Roberts: Assassin's Creed 3

Assassin's Creed's quality has been pretty variable over the years, but most of the main entries are worth playing for one reason or another—usually the environments. But Assassin's Creed 3 oversimplified every interaction so that I barely felt like I was doing anything, even when my character was performing rad shit like fighting a bear or climbing through a forest outside Boston. 

It soured me on the series for five entire years. Then I finally came back to give Origins a proper go, which is a much better game that I actually managed to get passionate about. AC3 was a complete waste given its choice of setting.

Andy Kelly: Resident Evil 0

This is a frustrating game. The idea of a Resident Evil prequel, revealing the events leading up to the outbreak in the original, could have been something pretty special. Instead we get this miserable, plodding, obtuse game featuring one of the most maddening inventory systems in history. You spend most of the game shuffling items back and forth between the two characters, or trying to remember which room you left something in an hour ago that you suddenly need. The locations are all rehashes of places we've been in Resi games a dozen times before, but less interesting. And the two-character puzzles aren't as clever as they think they are. There are almost certainly worse entries in the sprawling, inconsistent Resident Evil series, but the wasted potential of this one makes it extra bad. 

Tom Senior: Final Fantasy 13

After being consumed by Final Fantasy 12's deep squad combat systems I was bitterly disappointed by the 13th game's stifling corridors, endless dungeons, and a combat system that didn't get interesting for about 20 hours. It's technically a good-looking game, but its characters look like they wandered in from different universes. Plus the story, even by Final Fantasy standards, was turbo-bollocks, full of nonsense concepts you need a wiki to decipher. I hear it opens up after about 30 hours, but screw the effort it would take to get there. I'll go back on the road with my FF15 boyos instead, thank you very much. 

Wes Fenlon: Max Payne 3

Max Payne 3 is not a bad game. It's pretty amazing, in a lot of ways: the physics and shooting feel fantastic, the way it transitions from cutscenes to action is Rockstar's Hollywood obsession at its finest, and that soundtrack sets the mood. But I played the entirety of Max Payne 3 disappointed that it didn't feel like Max Payne. It's supposedly the same character from the first two, but without Sam Lake's writing, it just isn't Max. Max Payne 1 and 2 are bleak and cynical but temper that darkness with pulpy dialogue and inner monologues. They're more surreal, and more fun, and give Max more personality. Rockstar's writers totally missed the spirit of the first two games, turning Max Payne 3's story into pure bleak nihilism. Max just says the most depressing shit over and over again for 15 hours. It's repetitive and never really goes anywhere. Max is just never quite right. 

Jody Macgregor: Silent Hill: Homecoming

Some people might disagree with "otherwise good" when it comes to the later Silent Hill games, but I thought Downpour was a solid six-out-of-ten thing with a handful of good ideas (that sidequest where you follow the trail of ribbons in search of a missing child, for instance) and Shattered Memories was genuinely great. 

It's just a shame those are console exclusives and the only thing that shows up if you type Silent Hill into Steam is a terrible port of the worst game of the lot. Homecoming had way too much fighting, never a strong point with Silent Hill, and recycled the series' imagery like rusting walkways and faceless booby nurses in a weirdly joyless way. It's a bummer.

Of the three Max Payne games released so far, Max Payne 3 is the odd one out. But that’s only because Remedy is so good at imprinting its games with its own idiosyncratic personality. The third game may share a lot of the same DNA, and may also feature a metaphor-loving ex-cop killing gangsters in slow-motion, but it’s a very different experience. Over the years I’ve developed a greater appreciation for the risks Rockstar took in breaking Remedy’s established, and beloved, mould. 

It’s a Rockstar game through and through, with lavish production values, gorgeous world-building, and confident, cinematic direction. Max is still depressed, still haunted by the death of his family, and still selfmedicating with painkillers and booze. But after a deadly run-in with the hot-headed son of a local mob boss, he leaves the mean streets of New York behind and moves to São Paulo—the largest city in Brazil—to work as private security for the wealthy Branco family. It’s a bold change of scenery. 

The dark, snowbound streets of New York and New Jersey are a big part of Max Payne’s visual identity. And although there are a few flashback chapters in Max Payne 3 that take us back there, replacing that iconic setting with Brazil’s sunshine and palm trees was a brave move. The first two games are set entirely at night, while much of this game takes place during the day, giving it a very different atmosphere. São Paulo is as rough, violent, and run-down as New York in places—particularly the Nova Esperança favela—but the overall tone is much less gloomy. 

It’s a radical departure, but it works. It’s always interesting to see a familiar character thrust into an unfamiliar situation, and Max is hilariously out of place in Brazil. As if being a white American in a favela didn’t draw enough unwanted attention, he makes his life even more difficult by wearing the loudest Hawaiian shirt imaginable. He was comfortable in New York, but here he’s an outsider, and the game plays up to it brilliantly. “Here I was,” he grumbles in one of his monologues. “Some hopped-up gringo a long way from home, causing trouble the only way I know how.”

That way, of course, being balletic slow-motion combat. Max Payne 3 is an incredibly simple, pared-down shooter. All you can do is jump and shoot, using bullet-time to slow the action down for a limited period. Kill the last guy in a group and the camera will zoom-in on his bloody, bullet-peppered body, and you can keep firing you if like, you sicko. It’s an extremely limited toolset for a ten-hour game, but the good variety of locations and situations manages to keep things varied and interesting. 

Highlights include a rooftop nightclub where throbbing music and flashing lights provide an intense backdrop for a firefight. Nova Esperança is a narrow, twisting meat-grinder with gunmen emerging suddenly from blind spots and firing at you from rooftops. And the airport is host to a series of brilliantly frenetic, challenging battles with a small army of heavily-armed, and heavily-armoured, corrupt cops. The set-pieces are all wonderfully constructed and choreographed, but occasionally you do wish there was more variation and depth.

The pace is breakneck, and I love the way it transitions seamlessly between locations and times of day by artfully hiding the loading screens with stylish, hyperactive cutscenes. There are far too many of them, though. Approach a door and instead of just opening it yourself, a shaky, over-stylised cutscene will play showing Max opening it. It wrestles the controls away from you far too often, for stuff you could easily have done yourself. 

Much of the game’s power lies in its soundtrack. In a genius move, Rockstar hired Los Angeles noiserock band Health to write the score. It’s an unusual and inspired choice that sets the music apart from pretty much every other game. It’s all pounding percussion, distorted, reverby guitars, and icy synths, and nothing else sounds like it. It’s dynamic too, with musical elements fading in and out to mirror the action. I get goosebumps every time I play the airport level and “Tears” starts thundering on the soundtrack. More developers should recruit bands to compose their scores.

Flashback chapters give us a taste of what happened before. These are set in Hoboken, New Jersey, and the wintry streets stand in stark contrast to sun-soaked São Paulo. An altercation in a bar leads to Max and Passos, his contact in Brazil, being chased by an army of camel-coatwearing wiseguy mobsters straight out of Goodfellas. Through the bullet trails of a rooftop gunfight you see the Manhattan skyline in the distance, lit up against the night sky, which is a wonderful moment of scene-setting. These visits to New Jersey are brief, but they feature some of the game’s best shootouts.

One of the strongest pieces of connective tissue between Max Payne 3 and its predecessors is the presence of James McCaffrey, who’s been the voice of Max since the first game in 2001. His performance is a highlight, delivering the ex-cop’s tortured metaphors and hard-boiled film noir monologues with a likeable weariness. And his face is even in there too. In the first Max Payne it was Remedy’s Sam Lake; in the sequel it was actor Timothy Gibbs; and in the third game it’s McCaffrey. I’m glad Rockstar didn’t recast, because I can’t imagine anyone else playing Max. 

My biggest gripe with Max Payne 3 is its lack of humour. Sam Lake’s writing in the first two games is a lot more colourful and tongue-in-cheek—especially in the heavily selfreferential second game. Rockstar’s writers, however, play it much straighter, and there’s nothing to compare to the surreal Address Unknown theme park or the absurd Dick Justice TV show. It’s a pretty dry revenge story and, for the most part, grimly self-serious. The first two games also had an esoteric, mythical quality, with their references to Norse paganism, and there’s none of that here either. Remedy’s off-key quirkiness is a big part of Max Payne’s success, and I wish Rockstar had gone more in that direction. 

That aside, Max Payne 3 is a worthy, if overly earnest, sequel. I admire Rockstar for taking a chance with a new setting, because while I’d love another Max Payne game set in New York City, it’s been done twice before. It’s a pretty basic third-person shooter, but one constructed with an enormous budget, keen attention to detail, a flair for the cinematic, and a lot of talent. And, honestly, it doesn’t matter where in the world Max is. If he has a gun, a bottle of whisky, and a few dozen metaphors, he can do his thing anywhere, the only way he knows how.