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It's one of few games that improves at a higher difficulty, Max's signature shootdodge becoming a far more essential tool in your arsenal, slowing time as he leaps with an exhausted grunt, before gravity kicks in and Max hits the ground. What really stands the test of time about Max Payne 3 is its impactful and consistently thrilling shooter mechanics. Not unlike the aforementioned Wick, Max is hounded and hunted throughout MP3, his new job as a bodyguard becoming an increasingly distant memory. And while Max remains something of a force of nature, able to shrug off bullets by necking painkillers, he's far more vulnerable, especially during his time lost in the Brazilian favelas. When one of the members of the Branco family is restrained within a stack of car tyres and set alight, it's at once a shockingly sudden, brutal reminder that consequences in Max Payne 3 are very real.

Where the first Max Payne was set exclusively on the snowy streets of New York and conjured instances of troubling and surreal weirdness (tightrope-like lines of blood, wailing babies), and Max Payne 2 leaned more heavily into noir, Max Payne 3 seemed more anchored in the real world. By comparison, Payne 1 and 2 took a slightly more comic book approach – quite literally, in the case of its storytelling, much of it told through wonderfully grimy photographic panels, stylised as if they were lifted from the pages of a hardboiled crime novel. Playing Max Payne 3 ten years on, it seems to me an action game that feels way ahead of its time, preceding the surgical gunplay and brutality of the John Wick movies and their ilk with moments of raw, unflinching violence - rendering bullet holes and bodily damage in forensic detail. Rockstar striking out on its own, having never really created a pure shooter, beyond Red Dead Revolver in 2004 - until then, versed almost entirely in the slightly wonky shooting of Grand Theft Auto - was always going to be a risk. Where Max Payne 1 and 2 delivered their harrowing, nasty imagery with an almost wry, knowing wink, Max Payne 3 played things down the line, eschewing pulp for something more savagely realistic. As a first outing for Max without Remedy at the helm, and with Rockstar choosing to go it alone with a darker, grittier take, Max Payne 3 could really have gone either way. When I was invited over to Rockstar to take a first look at Max Payne 3 in October 2011, it was immediately apparent that it was going to be a pretty major departure for the series, grounded as it once was in a pulpy, noirish style, that has since become developer Remedy Entertainment's signature dish.