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When we finally got our first look at Rockstar's reboot of the Max Payne franchise, the man at the centre of the action was a rudderless, burnt-out husk of a man. But, hey, what's new? While Max had left the chilly New York winter seeking out the more tropical shores of Brazil to do contract security with friend Raul Passos in Sao Paulo, old habits die hard, as Max once again tried to protect the women around him. We recently got an exclusive look at some more of the single-player story in action.

The fact that our hero was still sporting healthy-looking locks of dark hair meant that the events of our latest demo predate those of the bus depot shoot-outs in our last preview. Fabiana, the wife of our boss, Rodrigo Branco, has been kidnapped, and we've been summoned to assist in the hunt. While the city may be different, the situation was the same. As Passos arrived at Max's apartment, he attempted to rouse us from the comfortable-looking slumber that comes from a night spent head down on a wooden table. Discarded Chinese food containers of indeterminable date lay strewn, while empty bottles of booze lined most available surfaces. Passos took playful verbal jabs at Max as he stumbled around looking for pants, but there was a stern, and concerned, edge to his voice. Clothes really do maketh the man, and nowhere is this a more evident reflection of the wearer. Passos' clean, pressed linen suit was in stark contrast with the grimy, wrinkled appearance of Max's outfit.

Upon arrival at Branco's office, the conversation flitted between unsubtitled Portuguese and English, as a high-ranking member of the local law enforcement, Marcelo Branco (the hard-partying yin to brother Rodrigo's wealthy, but respectable, yang) and members of staff discussed Fabiana's disappearance. The steady stream of language barely paused for air, and Max's limited language abilities further exemplified his fish-out-of-water status, being located in a foreign place and roped into situations that he didn't completely understand.

Ever the trooper, once the group dispersed Max found himself back in his comfort zone: less chat and more splat. Armed Cracha Preto gunmen stormed the building, and while Branco had taken the initiative and installed an elaborate, and expensive, alarm system, it was immediately clear that there was a problem with the plan when it failed to activate on command. A big-haired IT support staffer rushed into the room, unsuccessfully attempting to override the system with some furious keyboard massage, but to no avail. Branco hunkered down in his office while we played babysitter to the IT guy, who shared more than a passing resemblance to Moss from British comedy series The IT Crowd. Bullets flew, and while our sidekick didn't know one end of a gun from the other, we stalked the hallways with confidence, pumping round after round into enemy soldiers as they crossed our path.

Bright sunshine streamed in through the floor-to-ceiling windows in the office building. Desks appeared to be worked at, stocked with piles of carefully filed paper reports, knickknacks, and architectural model mock-ups of buildings in progress. All became casualties of battle as we returned fire, bullets whizzing past, and the glass of desk dividers shattered as we inched our way towards the server room to reboot the security system. Cover quickly became shredded, necessitating our need to push forward, while a combination of low-slung furniture, diving jumps, and bullet time provided its fair share of dramatic Hong Kong-cinema-style action moments.

While we half expected a survival-style mission where waves of attackers would descend on our position as we protected our frail, intellectual buddy, it wasn't the case. In true help-desk style, all it took was a flick of the power switch and a few keyboard strikes to get the system back online, and only moments later, large metal doors slowly began to slide down from the ceiling to seal us in.

Branco may be wealthy and connected, but he's certainly no Tony Montana. Commanded by Max back to the safety of his office, he scuttled off, pleading with us to "try not to completely destroy the place." Our move to the lobby revealed a slain receptionist with her phone headset still attached. The image didn't have much time to sink in, though, as another of the game's set-piece moments was triggered: a jeep smashed through the glass doorway of the building. Time slowed, and reloading and bullet conservation were no longer our concerns as we took aim at the driver first. Gun-toting passengers were second on the list, closely followed by the stream of armed men rushing in through the now-destroyed entrance. Reinforcements arrived when a white van pulled up and the doors flung open. Anyone we hadn't already filled with lead was picked off one by one as we ducked behind pillars and returned fire. The foyer's opulent facade was stripped bare in the skirmish, revealing a functional, but unattractive, steel rebar below. With the bodies finally beginning to pile up, we were presented with one last challenge: a significantly more heavily armed soldier wielding a machine gun. Our rounds appeared to bounce off his helmet and thick body plating at first, but after working him for a bit with a mixture of blind fire from the remaining cover and some well-placed bullet-time shots, a final, fatal blow forced the camera to zoom forward, tracking the slug as it burrowed deep into his flesh in slow motion, kicking his body back violently in the process.

The scene skipped ahead slightly to avoid storyline spoilers, and whatever went on during that period trashed the building even further. Bullet holes had been replaced with smoking craters, fire burned intensely out of control, and the multistorey structural integrity had clearly been weakened by the mystery assault. Max was covered in a thick coating of ash, his once-grey suit now a new, darker shade, but, on the plus side, conveniently hiding many of its wrinkles. In your face, ironing! He was badly injured, grasping at his chest in pain as he struggled to pull himself up a flight of stairs.

Blaze and ember effects looked particularly impressive, as pockets of flame fell on the floor and clung to the walls. A brief gunfight with some dedicated goons who stayed behind ensued, and after disposing of them like we did their counterparts, we pushed over a large metal filing cabinet to gain access to a precarious-looking high-rise path. We sighed with relief as it held together long enough for us to safely cross, and we struggled onwards, only to fall through a collapsing cement walkway, tumbling down and encountering a wounded Cracha Preto grunt with horrendous injuries. With a leg missing, and fire slowly consuming his ravaged body, the downed bad guy attempted to crawl away as our demo came to a close.

The two demos that we've seen have given us a look at some of the indoor and outdoor environments that we can expect, and given the focus being put on destructibility, we're glad that there's plenty to shoot at. Max is nimble, but steady, with gun in hand, and while maybe we didn't exactly follow Rodrigo Branco's orders about keeping the place in one piece, we were still alive to fight another day.

Has a game protagonist's new haircut ever drawn so much scorn? Even dark-haired Dante didn't irk folks as much as Max Payne's freshly buzzed scalp in the Max Payne 3 debut trailer. For wary fans, it signified a radical departure from everything they loved about the first two games. More than even the change of location from wintry New York to sunny Sao Paulo and more than the newly gritty look and feel, it stood for Rockstar unforgivably tampering with the formula established by Finnish studio Remedy. But was it fair to take Max's new do and deduce a franchise ruined forever? One hands-off demo from Rockstar later, we can talk about what's new, what's different, and what's gone, besides the hair.

Bullet time has been brought over, so slow-motion shoot dodging is again the action centrepiece. Dual-wielded weapons and painkiller pickups still figure prominently, and the environments are still traditional, linear levels rather than sandbox worlds. New additions include a cover system and staged but interactive cinematic set pieces: moments of compulsory bullet time along the lines of the slow-mo breach and clears in recent Call of Duty games. The visuals benefit from eight years of progress in game-making, specifically from Rockstar's upgraded Rage engine. The series' graphic-novel-style cutscenes are also in there, though they don't much resemble the distinctive style of those in the old games, and James McCaffrey, previously the provider of Max Payne's gravelly voice, now lends his likeness to the character as well.

As we join our hard-boiled hero early in the game, that likeness is much closer to classic Max than baldy Max: he's brooding in his grimy New York apartment, sporting a familiar-looking tie and trench coat (also, hair). His apartment is a lavishly detailed mess, with reddish light filtering in through the blinds and onto the clutter of a man who is past caring: peeling paint, empty takeout boxes, an unmade fold-out sofa bed. Raul Passos, Max's former NYPD colleague, is trying to talk him into a new job in private security in South America. Max, ever morose, asks if he can't get a job drinking and feeling sorry for himself instead. It has been eight years since the events of the second game, and he apparently has spent the time since sinking into alcoholism and, more recently, killing the son of a powerful mob boss. So it is that said mob boss rolls up outside, in convoy with a pack of goons, to take revenge.

Cue our first look at Max Payne 3's cover system and bullet time. The front-door frame splinters as Max shelters behind it, firing at and fired on by mobsters at the end of the hall. It's a sticky-looking cover system that Rockstar has thrown into the mix: a "refinement," we're told, of the outfit's previous schemes--so think of the from-cover shooting in Red Dead Redemption and L.A. Noire. When Max makes a run for it down the corridor, bullet time lets him dive-dodge past sniper fire from outside, windows shattering as he goes. These are tastes of the game's key action elements and of Rockstar's take on the series' noir-flavoured New York, but the latter is not for long. Once Max fights his way up onto the rooftop, we're treated to a striking city skyline--New York on a winter night, all hazy light, distant sirens, and piles of slushy snow--but then it's off to Brazil, Max fleeing New York and the bereaved gangster father with it.

The Sao Paulo sequence we're shown takes place much later in the game, which spans several weeks. At some point along the way, Max's hair has gotten the chop, and we rejoin him on the sunlit streets of the city, where he's looking bald, burly, and bearded. He has taken the job his buddy Raul was pushing: protecting the wealthy Branco family, the target of violent Sao Paulo gangs. Here, though, he's protecting Giovanna, Passos' girlfriend, who is on the run from a military group. Though some of the storytelling is given over to conventional cutscenes, there are also scenes played out in multiple split-screen, black-framed shots. Though it resembles an episode of 24 more than a comic book, using in-engine video rather than stylised still images, this is Max Payne 3's equivalent of the older games' graphic-novel cutscenes.

The Sao Paulo level we're shown runs through a deserted bus depot, taking in a scrapyard, a warehouse, offices, and a bus terminal. There's variety enough to see how Max Payne has been recast for players in 2012; this is a glossy action shooter in which you can detect the series' heritage, though it's heavily overlaid with some inevitable modern inclusions. The cover system is the foremost of these, although as Max hunkers down in the shell of an old bus in the depot yard, we're told cover is "optional." It's not a cover-based shooter, that's for sure--the ever-unfair advantage of bullet time lets Max spend plenty of time out in the open, running and gunning and shoot-dodging circles around his foes.

The addition of cover is doubtless about making a game with the broadest appeal; today, a third-person shooter like this lacking deliberate cover would verge on quaint. On the other hand, recharging health is as much a staple of the modern shooter, and that's nowhere to be seen. Max's health is restored by picking up pain pills, as it was in the days of old. Likewise, the dual wielding of single-handed weapons--pistols, Uzis, and so on--is still present and correct.

The level is an extended escort-and-protect mission, with Giovanna hiding behind a dumpster here, getting stuck up on a high warehouse catwalk there, while Max clears out enemies from a string of areas. The final kill in a group of baddies is still highlighted by a satisfying cinematic killcam, swooping around the last enemy in slow motion, flaunting the kind of dead gangster rag-doll physics of which the first two games could only dream.

The march of progress likewise benefits the slow-motion shoot-dodge animations, driven by the dynamic animation engine Euphoria, which makes character movement convincingly weighty. The shoot dodge, that most Max Payne of manoeuvres, is no longer a stiff-limbed dive, but is natural-looking and context-sensitive; if he's diving sideways into a wall, Max raises an arm against the impact. The 360-degree prone is a nice touch, too: having slid to an elbow-grazing halt on the deck, Max can still fire in all directions before getting to his feet, twisting to the side or rolling over.

Inside the depot building, we get a moment of staged, compulsory bullet time: Max descends from a walkway onto the warehouse floor on a crane hook, with a few moments to clear out the enemies below as he falls. We expect plenty of these scenes in the finished game; the demo ends with another choreographed action sequence, albeit not in bullet time. Max bundles Giovanna onto a bus, making her drive them to relative safety while he hangs out of the door, clearing the way with an Uzi.

The set-piece-heavy cinematic action amounts to a game that plays much as you'd expect of a bullet-time-driven action shooter made eight years after Max Payne 2. The fiction and general tone, though, fall a bit farther from the tree, with the story stripped back to a more "realistic" plot, for one, and the overwrought, metaphor-laden internal monologue of the earlier games toned down into more prosaic narration ("Giovanna was a brave girl. She wasn't giving up, and neither could I"). Gone, too, is the quirky in-game meta-material; though it could still materialise in the finished game, says Rockstar, there's as yet no counterpart to the earlier games' Twilight Zone parodies or Captain Baseball Bat Boy cartoons. Therefore, although this is recognisably a Max Payne game, it is one seen through the lens of Rockstar's multi-studio team and not of the series' creators. But wary fans should keep the faith because there's time enough between now and March 2012 for Rockstar to bring them around with a modern reimagining that gives as much as it takes away.

When we finally got our first look at Rockstar's reboot of the Max Payne franchise, the man at the centre of the action was a rudderless, burnt-out husk of a man. But, hey, what's new? While Max had left the chilly New York winter seeking out the more tropical shores of Brazil to do contract security with friend Raul Passos in Sao Paulo, old habits die hard, as Max once again tried to protect the women around him. We recently got an exclusive look at some more of the single-player story in action.

The fact that our hero was still sporting healthy-looking locks of dark hair meant that the events of our latest demo predate those of the bus depot shoot-outs in our last preview. Fabiana, the wife of our boss, Rodrigo Branco, has been kidnapped, and we've been summoned to assist in the hunt. While the city may be different, the situation was the same. As Passos arrived at Max's apartment, he attempted to rouse us from the comfortable-looking slumber that comes from a night spent head down on a wooden table. Discarded Chinese food containers of indeterminable date lay strewn, while empty bottles of booze lined most available surfaces. Passos took playful verbal jabs at Max as he stumbled around looking for pants, but there was a stern, and concerned, edge to his voice. Clothes really do maketh the man, and nowhere is this a more evident reflection of the wearer. Passos' clean, pressed linen suit was in stark contrast with the grimy, wrinkled appearance of Max's outfit.

Upon arrival at Branco's office, the conversation flitted between unsubtitled Portuguese and English, as a high-ranking member of the local law enforcement, Marcelo Branco (the hard-partying yin to brother Rodrigo's wealthy, but respectable, yang) and members of staff discussed Fabiana's disappearance. The steady stream of language barely paused for air, and Max's limited language abilities further exemplified his fish-out-of-water status, being located in a foreign place and roped into situations that he didn't completely understand.

Ever the trooper, once the group dispersed Max found himself back in his comfort zone: less chat and more splat. Armed Cracha Preto gunmen stormed the building, and while Branco had taken the initiative and installed an elaborate, and expensive, alarm system, it was immediately clear that there was a problem with the plan when it failed to activate on command. A big-haired IT support staffer rushed into the room, unsuccessfully attempting to override the system with some furious keyboard massage, but to no avail. Branco hunkered down in his office while we played babysitter to the IT guy, who shared more than a passing resemblance to Moss from British comedy series The IT Crowd. Bullets flew, and while our sidekick didn't know one end of a gun from the other, we stalked the hallways with confidence, pumping round after round into enemy soldiers as they crossed our path.

Bright sunshine streamed in through the floor-to-ceiling windows in the office building. Desks appeared to be worked at, stocked with piles of carefully filed paper reports, knickknacks, and architectural model mock-ups of buildings in progress. All became casualties of battle as we returned fire, bullets whizzing past, and the glass of desk dividers shattered as we inched our way towards the server room to reboot the security system. Cover quickly became shredded, necessitating our need to push forward, while a combination of low-slung furniture, diving jumps, and bullet time provided its fair share of dramatic Hong Kong-cinema-style action moments.

While we half expected a survival-style mission where waves of attackers would descend on our position as we protected our frail, intellectual buddy, it wasn't the case. In true help-desk style, all it took was a flick of the power switch and a few keyboard strikes to get the system back online, and only moments later, large metal doors slowly began to slide down from the ceiling to seal us in.

Branco may be wealthy and connected, but he's certainly no Tony Montana. Commanded by Max back to the safety of his office, he scuttled off, pleading with us to "try not to completely destroy the place." Our move to the lobby revealed a slain receptionist with her phone headset still attached. The image didn't have much time to sink in, though, as another of the game's set-piece moments was triggered: a jeep smashed through the glass doorway of the building. Time slowed, and reloading and bullet conservation were no longer our concerns as we took aim at the driver first. Gun-toting passengers were second on the list, closely followed by the stream of armed men rushing in through the now-destroyed entrance. Reinforcements arrived when a white van pulled up and the doors flung open. Anyone we hadn't already filled with lead was picked off one by one as we ducked behind pillars and returned fire. The foyer's opulent facade was stripped bare in the skirmish, revealing a functional, but unattractive, steel rebar below. With the bodies finally beginning to pile up, we were presented with one last challenge: a significantly more heavily armed soldier wielding a machine gun. Our rounds appeared to bounce off his helmet and thick body plating at first, but after working him for a bit with a mixture of blind fire from the remaining cover and some well-placed bullet-time shots, a final, fatal blow forced the camera to zoom forward, tracking the slug as it burrowed deep into his flesh in slow motion, kicking his body back violently in the process.

The scene skipped ahead slightly to avoid storyline spoilers, and whatever went on during that period trashed the building even further. Bullet holes had been replaced with smoking craters, fire burned intensely out of control, and the multistorey structural integrity had clearly been weakened by the mystery assault. Max was covered in a thick coating of ash, his once-grey suit now a new, darker shade, but, on the plus side, conveniently hiding many of its wrinkles. In your face, ironing! He was badly injured, grasping at his chest in pain as he struggled to pull himself up a flight of stairs.

Blaze and ember effects looked particularly impressive, as pockets of flame fell on the floor and clung to the walls. A brief gunfight with some dedicated goons who stayed behind ensued, and after disposing of them like we did their counterparts, we pushed over a large metal filing cabinet to gain access to a precarious-looking high-rise path. We sighed with relief as it held together long enough for us to safely cross, and we struggled onwards, only to fall through a collapsing cement walkway, tumbling down and encountering a wounded Cracha Preto grunt with horrendous injuries. With a leg missing, and fire slowly consuming his ravaged body, the downed bad guy attempted to crawl away as our demo came to a close.

The two demos that we've seen have given us a look at some of the indoor and outdoor environments that we can expect, and given the focus being put on destructibility, we're glad that there's plenty to shoot at. Max is nimble, but steady, with gun in hand, and while maybe we didn't exactly follow Rodrigo Branco's orders about keeping the place in one piece, we were still alive to fight another day.

Has a game protagonist's new haircut ever drawn so much scorn? Even dark-haired Dante didn't irk folks as much as Max Payne's freshly buzzed scalp in the Max Payne 3 debut trailer. For wary fans, it signified a radical departure from everything they loved about the first two games. More than even the change of location from wintry New York to sunny Sao Paulo and more than the newly gritty look and feel, it stood for Rockstar unforgivably tampering with the formula established by Finnish studio Remedy. But was it fair to take Max's new do and deduce a franchise ruined forever? One hands-off demo from Rockstar later, we can talk about what's new, what's different, and what's gone, besides the hair.

Bullet time has been brought over, so slow-motion shoot dodging is again the action centrepiece. Dual-wielded weapons and painkiller pickups still figure prominently, and the environments are still traditional, linear levels rather than sandbox worlds. New additions include a cover system and staged but interactive cinematic set pieces: moments of compulsory bullet time along the lines of the slow-mo breach and clears in recent Call of Duty games. The visuals benefit from eight years of progress in game-making, specifically from Rockstar's upgraded Rage engine. The series' graphic-novel-style cutscenes are also in there, though they don't much resemble the distinctive style of those in the old games, and James McCaffrey, previously the provider of Max Payne's gravelly voice, now lends his likeness to the character as well.

As we join our hard-boiled hero early in the game, that likeness is much closer to classic Max than baldy Max: he's brooding in his grimy New York apartment, sporting a familiar-looking tie and trench coat (also, hair). His apartment is a lavishly detailed mess, with reddish light filtering in through the blinds and onto the clutter of a man who is past caring: peeling paint, empty takeout boxes, an unmade fold-out sofa bed. Raul Passos, Max's former NYPD colleague, is trying to talk him into a new job in private security in South America. Max, ever morose, asks if he can't get a job drinking and feeling sorry for himself instead. It has been eight years since the events of the second game, and he apparently has spent the time since sinking into alcoholism and, more recently, killing the son of a powerful mob boss. So it is that said mob boss rolls up outside, in convoy with a pack of goons, to take revenge.

Cue our first look at Max Payne 3's cover system and bullet time. The front-door frame splinters as Max shelters behind it, firing at and fired on by mobsters at the end of the hall. It's a sticky-looking cover system that Rockstar has thrown into the mix: a "refinement," we're told, of the outfit's previous schemes--so think of the from-cover shooting in Red Dead Redemption and L.A. Noire. When Max makes a run for it down the corridor, bullet time lets him dive-dodge past sniper fire from outside, windows shattering as he goes. These are tastes of the game's key action elements and of Rockstar's take on the series' noir-flavoured New York, but the latter is not for long. Once Max fights his way up onto the rooftop, we're treated to a striking city skyline--New York on a winter night, all hazy light, distant sirens, and piles of slushy snow--but then it's off to Brazil, Max fleeing New York and the bereaved gangster father with it.

The Sao Paulo sequence we're shown takes place much later in the game, which spans several weeks. At some point along the way, Max's hair has gotten the chop, and we rejoin him on the sunlit streets of the city, where he's looking bald, burly, and bearded. He has taken the job his buddy Raul was pushing: protecting the wealthy Branco family, the target of violent Sao Paulo gangs. Here, though, he's protecting Giovanna, Passos' girlfriend, who is on the run from a military group. Though some of the storytelling is given over to conventional cutscenes, there are also scenes played out in multiple split-screen, black-framed shots. Though it resembles an episode of 24 more than a comic book, using in-engine video rather than stylised still images, this is Max Payne 3's equivalent of the older games' graphic-novel cutscenes.

The Sao Paulo level we're shown runs through a deserted bus depot, taking in a scrapyard, a warehouse, offices, and a bus terminal. There's variety enough to see how Max Payne has been recast for players in 2012; this is a glossy action shooter in which you can detect the series' heritage, though it's heavily overlaid with some inevitable modern inclusions. The cover system is the foremost of these, although as Max hunkers down in the shell of an old bus in the depot yard, we're told cover is "optional." It's not a cover-based shooter, that's for sure--the ever-unfair advantage of bullet time lets Max spend plenty of time out in the open, running and gunning and shoot-dodging circles around his foes.

The addition of cover is doubtless about making a game with the broadest appeal; today, a third-person shooter like this lacking deliberate cover would verge on quaint. On the other hand, recharging health is as much a staple of the modern shooter, and that's nowhere to be seen. Max's health is restored by picking up pain pills, as it was in the days of old. Likewise, the dual wielding of single-handed weapons--pistols, Uzis, and so on--is still present and correct.

The level is an extended escort-and-protect mission, with Giovanna hiding behind a dumpster here, getting stuck up on a high warehouse catwalk there, while Max clears out enemies from a string of areas. The final kill in a group of baddies is still highlighted by a satisfying cinematic killcam, swooping around the last enemy in slow motion, flaunting the kind of dead gangster rag-doll physics of which the first two games could only dream.

The march of progress likewise benefits the slow-motion shoot-dodge animations, driven by the dynamic animation engine Euphoria, which makes character movement convincingly weighty. The shoot dodge, that most Max Payne of manoeuvres, is no longer a stiff-limbed dive, but is natural-looking and context-sensitive; if he's diving sideways into a wall, Max raises an arm against the impact. The 360-degree prone is a nice touch, too: having slid to an elbow-grazing halt on the deck, Max can still fire in all directions before getting to his feet, twisting to the side or rolling over.

Inside the depot building, we get a moment of staged, compulsory bullet time: Max descends from a walkway onto the warehouse floor on a crane hook, with a few moments to clear out the enemies below as he falls. We expect plenty of these scenes in the finished game; the demo ends with another choreographed action sequence, albeit not in bullet time. Max bundles Giovanna onto a bus, making her drive them to relative safety while he hangs out of the door, clearing the way with an Uzi.

The set-piece-heavy cinematic action amounts to a game that plays much as you'd expect of a bullet-time-driven action shooter made eight years after Max Payne 2. The fiction and general tone, though, fall a bit farther from the tree, with the story stripped back to a more "realistic" plot, for one, and the overwrought, metaphor-laden internal monologue of the earlier games toned down into more prosaic narration ("Giovanna was a brave girl. She wasn't giving up, and neither could I"). Gone, too, is the quirky in-game meta-material; though it could still materialise in the finished game, says Rockstar, there's as yet no counterpart to the earlier games' Twilight Zone parodies or Captain Baseball Bat Boy cartoons. Therefore, although this is recognisably a Max Payne game, it is one seen through the lens of Rockstar's multi-studio team and not of the series' creators. But wary fans should keep the faith because there's time enough between now and March 2012 for Rockstar to bring them around with a modern reimagining that gives as much as it takes away.