Hot damn, am I enjoying Max Payne 3. Though… well, "enjoying" might be the wrong word for it, you know? It has me in a vice-grip, and every time I play I find myself locked in a tense, curse-shouting battle with the deadly enemies inside of my Xbox 360.

The game is relentless, always pushing forward, throwing me into deadly, sharp situation after deadly, sharp situation. And underscoring every blood-drenched shootout and explosive setpiece is HEALTH's undulating, astonishing soundtrack.

It's an uncomfortable experience, this game, from the blurred alcohol haze that covers everything to the way my enemies keep shouting in Portuguese to the sheer disorienting lethality of it all. Even on "normal" difficulty, every nook and cranny holds another ignoble death. In every gunfight, I almost forget to breathe. Here I am, I've got a hair of health left, and yet I know there are more enemies ahead. Around this corner lies the unknown, and almost certainly death… time to reload my weapons and plunge in.

HEALTH, a Los Angeles-based four-piece, provided all of the music that pulses beneath each of Max Payne 3's many action scenes. Their music is never overly cinematic or dramatic; rather, it's dark and driving, with few peaks or valleys to break up the dirge. It's the music of drug-addled hangovers, of splitting headaches and metallic stink. It is, in many ways, the music of death. It's perfect for Max Payne 3.

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How does Rockstar keep doing this? How can their musical tastes be so far out front of every other AAA game developer? I ask that mostly rhetorically—clearly, these folks pay attention to modern culture in a way that few other game studios do. It would have been so easy for them to simply farm out the Max Payne 3 soundtrack to any of a number of Hollywood-influenced composers who would have added dark strings, electronic beats, and other familiar sounds.

By choosing a band like HEALTH, a band with a distinctive sound and a clear sonic identity, Rockstar improved the quality of Max Payne 3 remarkably—the game's story is a bit of a mess, its protagonist is a lunk with no clear arc... there's really not much to it but a series of increasingly unbelievable combat sequences. But it is a goddamned unforgettable experience, and it's an experience driven hugely by music.

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Despite the all the driving darkness, HEALTH's work has, at times, a similar low key, mournful vibe to Cliff Martinez's excellent work on the film Drive, which took a different tack by offering both dirge-like and remarkably celestial electronic music as a counterpoint to the weighty, pushing action onscreen. For example, HEALTH's now-well-known track "Tears":

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So excellent.

You can buy the Max Payne 3 soundtrack on iTunes, and while it makes for stressful work-music, it will certainly pump you up every time armed thugs burst into your home or apartment. You can also read more about the background of the soundtrack on Rockstar's page, and listen to several more tracks, including "9 Circulos" from Brazillian rapper Emicida, on Rockstar's Soundcloud page.

Hey you know what? Let's close out with that one.

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Okay, every other action-game developer in the world. The gauntlet has been thrown. Please rise to the challenge.

Whatever was bothering the Xbox Live Marketplace download of Max Payne 2, which some purchased to brush up on the series during Max Payne 3's release week, the problem is now over. Users report the title now downloads fully, which I just confirmed for myself.

If you bought the game and your download froze, go back to the Marketplace and select "download again." It should work fine. If you demanded and received a refund, check to see if you have the download-again option lit. Who knows, you might get a free game for your inconvenience.

Someone on GTAForums.com pried apart the files inside Max Payne 3 and found a vehicle list shot through with callbacks to past makes and models from the Grand Theft Auto series.

There is an enormous thread going on both there and on NeoGAF, about the subject. Noting that this isn't the first time Rockstar Games has included source files representing assets found in other games, both sites are buzzing with speculation that this gives up details in Grand Theft Auto V.

As to that: "Skimobile" and "Chairlift" would indicate something taking place in the snow. There was a "Cablecar" in San Andreas of course. But 10 helicopter varieties are listed, as well as — gasp! — the Faggio 2! I expect the successor to GTA's iconic motor scooter to be mentioned during the E3 keynote.

Rumor: GTA V Vehicle List Leaked [NeoGAF]

This only marginally qualifies as a spoiler alert because, if you've played Max Payne 3 longer than 20 minutes, you've encountered this mission already. It revolves around a shootout in the locker room of the Galatians FC in Sao Paulo, Brazil which, as a quick Internet search plus common sense reveals, ain't a real team.

While there are the Sport Club Corinthians Paulista of Sao Paolo, their logo looks nothing like the one on the wall there. Galatians FC is likely also a reference to the Corinthian FC, an English amateur team founded in 1882 and dissolved in 1939. Why is it significant? Corinthian FC handed Manchester United its worst defeat in history, an 11-3 beating.

That took place in 1904. The logo of the fictitious Corinthian FC suggests the team was founded in 1903. Likewise, in the Bible, Galatians immediately follows Corinthians. Additionally, the real-life Corinthians of Sao Paulo were founded in 1910.

I think it's also a direct reference to English football as well as Brazilian. The founders of Max Payne publisher Rockstar Games, Dan and Sam Houser, grew up in London.

I can't tell if they back a rival side of United's or if they're merely tipping their cap to football history, but the reference is obvious.

Above is a video providing some context of the run-up to the mission and its earliest stage. Payne is assigned to protect a Brazilian playboy named Marcelo, who evidently favors the Galatians, a team based in Sao Paolo. He's unhappy that the table at his preferred club has been given to Claudio, a player Marcelo implies isn't good enough for the European football leagues. Soon the game shifts to the Galatians' home pitch where, yes, a deal goes wrong, with attendant gunplay.

Max Payne 3 throws a lot of highly stylized violence at you and almost all of it is beautiful to look at. But you've got to keep moving through Rockstar's latest release in to order to get Max the answers he desperately craves, which means you can't necessarily enjoy the ambiance as much as you'd like.

Fear not! These postcard GIFs—courtesy of Kotaku's own Chris Person—let you take a little piece of Max's angry American tourism with you wherever you go. Collect ‘em, share ‘em, use ‘em as motivation to get through the day. However you use them, just know that Max is just like you… only balder, deadlier and more addicted to drugs and drink.

Now that Max Payne 3's out, maybe you figured you'd catch up with Max Payne's drug-addled life by playing through the character's previous games. A great thought!

But reports are coming in that users aren't able to fully download and play the Xbox Live version of Max Payne 2 after purchasing it. The problem for some seems to be a download that gets stuck at 99%. Here at Kotaku headquarters, several attempts to download the full game went exceptionally slowly despite a very robust internet connection. Apparently, Microsoft are refunding the purchases for dissatisfied customers if they contact customer support over the phone.

Now, you don't really need to play Max Payne 2 to fully enjoy Max Payne 3. But if you want to do so on Xbox, it seems you're out of luck right now. Kotaku has reached out to Microsoft for comment and will update this story as needed.

Update:
After nearly an hour of download time, our attempted download of Max Payne 2 has stalled at 99% just like other users, confirming for us that there's a problem here.

[Thanks, tipster Thomas]

I've seen quite a few slow-motion CGI kill shots in my life, really. That's part of what it is to play a game featuring guns, in the modern era: you take a shot, and you spend a moment with time slowing around you, watching blood and bone part ways.

Max Payne 3 brings the artistry of murder to a strangely poetic new level. Final Killcam and Last Man Standing modes create violent cut-scenes for certain key kills. During these, the player has the choice to slow time—watching the scene play out in all its grisly gory. You could even call it hypnotic (our reviewer did).

Kotaku video man Chris Person wanted to see what happened when you held time for as long as you could; these are his results. There's a lot of blood (like, a lot), and yet the deaths, in such slow motion, look strangely artistic. Especially when set to music.

Today, Rockstar was kind enough to send me a copy of Max Payne 3, along with some violent (but cool) promotional swag. A bullet keychain, a t-shirt with some bullets on it, another bullet in a box, and… a pill container. Also, a nifty ashtray that I could probably melt down and make into bullets.

I laid the stuff out on my desk, and it hit me. Sitting right next to this shiny new promotional junk was my crusty, trusty Max Payne mousepad.

I've had that mousepad since I bought the original Max Payne back in 2001. I still remember buying it - PC Gamer magazine had me really looking forward to playing the game, and so I walked into Target close to opening day and picked it up. This was before I was even aware that people camped out for video game launches. I heard the game had finally been released, so I thought, "Cool, I'll go pick it up."

It came bundled with the mouse pad. It seems like a silly prize, but it actually was pretty cool. It featured the same art as the box—a stencil-graffiti depiction of Max's visage, holding one of his trademark Berettas and looking much younger and cleaner-cut than he does today. Across the image, police tape was draped.

"Do not cross - a man with nothing to lose."

I thought it was a pretty cool mousepad, so I kept it. And kept it. And kept it.

Eleven years later, I still use it as my mousepad. I'm sure it's covered in more dried coffee, food particles and other unmentionable gunk than Max himself, but it's still my mousepad. Looking at all this shiny new swag (and thinking about this shiny-looking new game), I took a moment to reflect on the last decade of gaming, on how much has changed.

And, given that this week we're spending our time playing Diablo and Max Payne, how much has stayed the same.

Maybe I'll finally chuck this nasty old thing and get myself a new, proper mousepad.

Nah.

Just when he thought he could lose his tragic past in a booze and pill-addled haze, Rockstar Games drags Max Payne out of retirement for a third series of unfortunate events. If I were him, I'd go after them first.

Luckily I am not Max Payne. My family is still, for the most part, alive. Going from bald to a full head of hair is no longer an option. And the only pills I take on a regular basis are less about helping me forget all of my troubles and more about making sure grass and pollen doesn't kill me while I'm not looking. My life would make a horrible video game.

May Payne's life, on the other hand, seems to have made a pretty good one. Hopefully none of the assembled video game reviewers scored Rockstar's latest because they identified with the main character.

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Edge Magazine
When Max Payne switches from a two-handed weapon to the handgun in his holster, he doesn't reach behind his back to plant the larger gun firmly on the adhesive outer surface of his jacket. It doesn't vanish inside the TARDIS-like confines of his pockets either, sent to that mysterious alternate dimension called the inventory screen. Instead, he loosely dangles the weapon by his side, while getting to business with the pistol in the other hand. You'd think this would make reloading tricky, but Payne has a system. He tucks the big gun in the crook of his arm, grabs and inserts a clip into his pistol with his freed hand, and lets the larger gun fall back into his grip.

The first time you see this, it's a delight, the smooth animation showcasing Payne's efficient weapon-handling skills, while also throwing down the gauntlet to games that think details such as the practicalities of juggling a videogame arsenal don't, or shouldn't, matter. By the fourth reload, it already looks more canned, but by then the statement of intent has been made.[assocaite]

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Giant Bomb
Even for Max, a lot of time has passed since Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, to the point that the dramatic, traumatic events of the first two games are little more than old scar tissue now. Having long since ruined anything worth ruining in New York with booze and pills, Max has retreated from his own life and taken up reluctant employment as a personal bodyguard for the wealthy, powerful, and treacherous Branco family in São Paulo, Brazil. For as comfortably as Max and his black jacket fit into the shadows of New York's underworld, he's a stranger in a strange land here. His leathery American frame sticks out like a sore thumb in the washed-out sunlight of both São Paulo's rich playgrounds of privilege and its rusted favelas, which he fumbles through with as little grasp on the local language as to why he's really in São Paulo. Max has never been a particularly sunny soul, but here he regards his idle rich clients with about as much simmering contempt as he does for his own half-drunk, careless ineptitude as family members get kidnapped and his bad situation continues to find new ways to get worse.

Rockstar has never been particularly shy about its specific influences, which are often cinematic in origin. With Max Payne 3, the setting, character situations, and overall look of the game make comparisons to the Tony Scott movie Man on Fire inevitable, and apt, though there are strains of director Michael Mann's slick latter-day crime dramas in there as well, all of it spiked with a spare synthesizer score and shocking moments of extreme violence. Though it's not couched in the caricatured satire of GTAIV or the bleak revisionist period trappings of Red Dead, that same authorial voice still rings like a gunshot.

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Joystiq
The shooting is a revelation. It's so good it evokes a worrisome existential crisis: Yes, it's another eight-to-ten hours of killing everyone in the world, but what if this is, and will always be, what games are best at? Max Payne 3 nearly makes you roll over in defeat, knowing that Rockstar has harnessed impeccable technology to make people die real good.

It's a simple process served up with peerless presentation. You enter one side of the room and the henchmen, who rarely differentiate in their plan of attack, dutifully show up to be blown away. As a grizzled grump who reeks of alcohol and sweat, your movements are rugged but reliable – and you can forget about the frantic momentum of Vanquish, or the nimbleness of Drake in Uncharted. Max is an expert at falling down with style.

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Telegraph
As a rule, Max Payne 3 is dutifully considerate to its players, considering its brutal difficulty. As well as seeing to it you don't get too stuck in a rut, the game offers varying degrees of aim assist and difficulty levels to tailor the challenge to your needs. Meanwhile, small things like the briefest flicker of your crosshair when you register a kill offer an excellent level of feedback, essential when in the midst of a chaotic firefight. So it's strange that Max Payne 3's most glaring flaws are so counter-intuitive to that. Checkpointing is infuriatingly mean at points, asking you to replay large, difficult chunks of areas to progress. It's faintly wearying at times, particularly when the game is tough enough as it is. It also has the odd habit of switching your assault rifle or shotgun for a pistol following a cutscene, and considering the cutscenes tend to bleed fabulously into action, that split-second to swap to a more powerful weapon can be damaging.

It's also something of a shame that the game's best bits tend to be closer to the beginning. The opening two acts are stuffed full of spectacular set pieces: Max using a sniper rifle to cover his ally as he sprints unarmed through the bleachers of Sao Paulo's football stadium; using an enemy as a surfboard as he smashes through the window of a nightclub's VIP lounge to the dancefloor below, picking off bad guys under the neon lights; a rain-swept infiltration to a dockyard at night that leads to an astonishing speedboat chase. It's a game full of highlights, but it's a little too front loaded. As the story reaches its denouement, the levels become harder and more stuffed with enemies. It can become a little gruelling, exacerbated by the staccato nature of reloading checkpoints. Still, there are some stunning moments right up until the end, and that raw excitement of the shooting endears across the game's campaign.

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Game Informer
Max Payne may not seem like a franchise that lends itself well to multiplayer, but Rockstar has found a way to keep Bullet Time alive and well for deathmatching purposes, and uses it to anchor a robust offering of competitive modes.

Deathmatch and team deathmatch prove to be fun, grinder-like experiences with average lives lasting for 20 to 30 seconds. Becoming Max or Raul Passos (an old colleague of Max's) in Payne Killer mode delivers that "how many foes can I down before I fall" thrill. This mode starts with a standoff between all of the players in the match. The first player to land a kill becomes Max. The player that was killed becomes Raul. These two characters are more powerful than the others and must work together to earn as many points as they can before they are taken out. The player that takes out one of these characters takes ­their ­role.

The coolest multiplayer mode offered is Gang Wars. This mode pits two teams against each other and incorporates story threads from the campaign to shape the five rounds. How a round ends dictates what the next objective will be, a design that keeps the battles fresh.

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G4TV
Max Payne 3 is a technological tour de force that will have you screaming "Dear lord!" more times than midnight mass. The performances are top notch, the action plays out with unrivaled fluidity, and the multiplayer is deep and rewarding. Silly distractions aside, Max Payne 3 is an action lover's wet dream that also happens to employ some of the slickest direction and transitional trickery this side of a David Fincher box set. Lock and load. It's bullet time...time.

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Kotaku
Noir isn't about heroism, you see. It's about failures and foibles and the innermost demons lurking inside human nature that some unlucky slobs just can't outrun. Horrible, horrible things happen in Max Payne 3, many of them because of the title character's superhuman ability to fuck things up. Things that made me gasp out loud and avert my eyes. But this game isn't a fuck-up. In fact, it's anything but. If you get Max Payne 3, you'll see how good it feels to have your stomach heave with this anti-hero's signature brand of self-loathing and cunning. And then go online and see just how you manage the balance of caution and carelessness with thousands of people trying to do the same. Welcome home, Max. It's good to see you again, you poor bastard.

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I've already popped some painkillers in anticipation.

If you're planning on picking up Max Payne 3 when it releases tomorrow, Max will be urging you to hurry the hell up while playing the game. Sometimes it's to give you clues as to where to go next. Other times he just wants you to get on with it.

This is no time to be lingering in the VIP lounge of the club. There are people to burst out of the back of vans, and others to save from being thrown off balconies.