Games like Max Payne: what to play next
What to play after Max Payne: the games RAWG’s list and an October 2025 Steam thread both suggest, Remedy’s own games, the thread’s story-first picks and RAWG’s shooters.
Both lists
The picks two lists agree on
Red Dead Redemption 2 is the closest relative in the family sense: Rockstar Games developed and published it, and it first came out in 2018. Two players in the thread named it. One had not finished it but had heard its main characters are morally compromised; the other said Arthur is as strong a lead as Max.
Spec Ops: The Line (2012, Yager) turns up both on RAWG’s list and in the same Steam thread. So does Sleeping Dogs, which RAWG lists in its 2014 Definitive Edition (United Front Games, Square Enix London Studios and Feral Interactive).
Remedy
Remedy’s own games
Remedy Entertainment made Max Payne and Max Payne 2, and its other games include Alan Wake, Alan Wake 2, Quantum Break and Control. The ties to Max run through people. James McCaffrey, the voice of Max in all three games, played Alex Casey in both Alan Wake games and Zachariah Trench in Control. In Alan Wake 2, Sam Lake, whose face Max wore in the first game, plays Alex Casey on screen.
Story first
If it was Max himself that got to you
The thread opened in October 2025 with a grown man who recognized himself in Max and asked for games with leads like him. One reply alone listed Final Fantasy VII, Persona 5 Royal, GTA IV, Fallout: New Vegas, Silent Hill 1 and 2, Alan Wake 1 and 2, NieR: Automata and three Metal Gear Solid games (3, 4 and Phantom Pain). Others added Yakuza 0 with the rest of the Kiryu games, and BioShock came up in passing.
One player offered Days Gone as a maybe: its lead grieves his wife while still hunting for her, though, the same player admitted, Deacon is no Max with words. Another reply said the first Last of Us, The Suffering and The Darkness come close in gritty personal drama, but zombies and the supernatural keep them from being much like Max Payne. One answer simply said that Max Payne 3 has no equal.
Gameplay
The shooters on RAWG’s list
RAWG builds its list of games like Max Payne 3 from gameplay or visual style. The shooters on its first page: Hitman: Absolution (2012, IO Interactive), Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes (2014, Kojima Productions), Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine (2011, Relic Entertainment), Sniper Elite 4 (2017, Rebellion) and DOOM Eternal (2020, id Software among others). Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Chaos Theory (2005) and Resident Evil 3 (2020) join them as action-adventures.
What’s next
The next Max Payne is a remake
Remedy is remaking the first two games as a single game, Max Payne 1 & 2 Remake, on its Northlight engine; Rockstar Games funds and publishes it for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC. As of September 2026 it is still in development and has no release date.
The author of that Steam thread, who had played the series from the first game on, left a note worth keeping: some of the dialogue in Max Payne 3 is hard to follow if you skipped the earlier games.
More on the series
The best game like Max Payne
It is still the original: New York in 2001, Max’s murdered family and a drug called Valkyr.
See Max Payne (2001)