I have to admit, on my first playthrough of Max Payne 3, I got my a$$ handed to me in more ways than I can count. I had recently finished the first game several weeks before the third's release in hopes that I would prepare myself for the onslaught ahead. After all my experience with so-called "casual" games with regenerating health, my mind was beginning to betray me. Without regenerating health, stupid moves are more punishing, seeing how the only way to restore health would be to use painkillers (which are rare to find). Enemies are intelligent depending on their background (mafia, gangbangers, etc) which provide a more real difficulty than other games that have enemies that COMPENSATE their STUPIDITY with POWERFUL weapons. By the end of the game, I totaled up to 100+ deaths. Clearly, Max Payne 3 was not the sort of game that was going to hold the player's hand to a flawless victory (beat it 1st on Medium w/ FreeAim).

At first, I felt exhausted, I did not feel like the bad@$$ that I was supposed to be playing as Max. However, the more I played the game, the better I got. It was not just the fact that I was familiar with the enemy locations but I was literally getting better at the game in terms of skill and strategy (to shootdodge, or not to shootdodge?) By the second playthrough, I rarely remember dieing, everything felt like clockwork.

I was not able to play the first two games of the series back then when they originally came out. It was mostly due to the mature rating, not that it mattered, I still enjoyed Max Payne 3 as if I were a long time fan. While it abandoned the campy humor and 4th wall-breaking moments of the first game, it traded them for a more adult, mature style of storytelling. I will probably write a more in-depth review on Max Payne 3 later but for now I just wanted to say that I love the difficulty of the game. It was like a long awaited wake-up call from "casual" games in this generation.