Setting Max Payne 3 in São Paulo is Rockstar’s bravest creative decision to date. We’ve witnessed the company explore everything from an intricately structured school environment to an insane asylum where people throw their own poo in its decade-past output, yet tackling the troubled Brazilian city shows how able the company is to dive into gaming’s untested waters. Sci-fi clichés and mafia-strewn gangster premises are ten-a-penny in the industry, but capturing an almost City Of God-like realistic South American setting is blatantly unique. It’s also an ideally damaged location to match the personality of its titular hero.

Max Payne has been chewed out by life, with 12 years passing since the conclusion of his second chapter. We’d never have imagined he’d pour on the pounds, jump continents and head into private security, but that’s who he is now, broken as he ever was in this new, difficult locale.

Questions hang over how this new story will be told. Whether the comic book narrative sequences (which drove the story of the original two games) return is still up in the air. Obviously, with the RAGE technology behind Max Payne 3, there’s an opportunity to make the game cut-scene-based, the animation capabilities being as high-end as they are, but this could clash with the established Payne style. If Rockstar Vancouver’s mandate is to maintain the noir trappings of the series that Remedy put in place, we don’t think their return is entirely out of the question. We’d expect them to be a little more dynamically presented if they happened to re-emerge, however.

Expect environments to be open, but not sprawling. We suspect the idea of Max Payne 3 is that, with both bullet time and a cover system at your disposal, there’s an element of adaptability to the gameplay. We, for example, are ready to throw off the shackles of the cover system for once, but you might not be. Hopefully, the game will be diverse enough to encourage use of both systems, depending on the situation at hand.

All of this has to be levelled off against Max’s physical capabilities, of course, which will be lesser in his new, flabbier incarnation. The animation on Max will reflect his age and physical condition, too, making it less easy for him to dive around as it was 12 years hence. As a character, Max is emblematic of Rockstar’s current approach towards protagonists in mature, narrative-driven titles. Whether we’re talking the troubled Niko Bellic of GTA IV or the seen-it-all former outlaw James Marston in the upcoming Red Dead Redemption, there seems to be an emphasis on creating characters that are fascinatingly out of sync with their backdrop. For Max, this’ll be a particular problem, given the unconventional foes that he’ll go up against.

In real life, São Paulo is a place where numerous street gangs tag locations, to mark territory. The under-funded and often corrupt police force is overwhelmed by these powerful groups that have practically been marshalled into armies. If these screenshots are anything to go by, the city’s gangs (whether real or fictional) will likely compose the majority of Max’s enemies, untraditional given their intriguing real-world garb. They reflect the grittiness of the environment, that beautiful real-world location ravaged by poverty and decay.

This is what Max is trapped within – an unruly spiral of violent crime, created by authorities that have let the wealth gap expand without nipping the problems in the bud.