Played this as I follow along with Blake Hester and Jacob Geller's wonderful podcast Something Rotten.

Third crack at the Max Payne character, and along with it another fresh interpretation. This time he's a quip-y old dumb alcoholic on a quest to be the most Rockstar Games Guy in Brazil. I for one like the setting change because I don't think there were any Italians left alive in NYC after Max Payne 2. In a flashback, Max discovers that Italians also live in Jersey, and gets to work.

Max runs through expensive and unarguably brilliant level design, and engages in some of the most elegant and weighty gunplay, in search of...what exactly? This game wants to step on thorny issues of class, violence, race, etc. but doesn't want to push the gamer to ask the hard questions or to implicate themselves. All we can do here is bear witness to suffering. A lot of it. A very 2012 brand of political cowardice.

On the other hand, the game represents Max's alcoholism and road to sobriety in stark terms and with real care and purpose, to the point where the game uses visual effects to induce an actual hangover.

Maybe this is the distinction between mere depiction vs. something more meaningful. It's very OK for piece of art to have nothing important to say (I'm about to move on to Kane and Lynch, after all), but if it's trying to convince you that it does, and remains completely incurious about dipping more than a toe into the bloody waters, it kind of pisses me off.