The best Max Payne mods: from the Kung Fu mod to RTX Remix
Kung fu moves for the first game, path tracing for the first two, classic mods for the sequel, fixes for Max Payne 3 and Sam Lake’s face back on Max.
Pictured: the original Max Payne, without mods
Max Payne · 2003
The Kung Fu mod
Rock Paper Shotgun counts Kenneth Yeung’s Kung Fu Edition among the best fan additions to the first game. It began as a personal project in 2001, and version 3.0 came out in 2003. It brings the style of Hong Kong kung fu films to Max Payne: fists and a fighting staff, more than 20 moves with combos and a skill level that grows, wall runs and wall jumps, two new shootdodges, bodies you can juggle, and a dojo that teaches the basics.
To play it, unzip the mod into the folder with MaxPayne.exe, start the game and pick it under Choose Customized Games in the startup window.
RTX Remix
Path tracing for the first two games
NVIDIA’s RTX Remix lets modders rebuild old games with full path-traced lighting, and both Remedy games have fan projects. In April 2026 the modder Neo_minigan released a path-tracing mod for Max Payne — DSOGaming counts it as the game’s third — that keeps the original art direction and, like the two before it, covers only the prologue and Roscoe Street Station. DSOGaming called it an early beta that may show visual bugs.
The lighting is expensive. In a January 2024 video of an earlier Remix mod, Max Payne fell from over 1,000 frames per second to around 60 on an RTX 4080. Darko9.13’s Max Payne 2 RTX Remix, playable in November 2025 while still in development, adds realistic lighting, physically based materials and better textures; at 4K with DLSS 4 on Performance it dropped to about 40 fps in one scene on an RTX 5080, and 1440p on Balanced came close to 60.
Max Payne 2
Classics for the sequel
Rockstar and Remedy put out development tools for Max Payne 2, and players used them to add weapons, characters and whole new campaigns. Two picks from Rock Paper Shotgun’s 2019 list name their makers. The Old School Team’s Max Payne 2: Old School Mod, made for Max’s eighteenth anniversary, casts Sam Lake as Max again and redraws almost every comic cutscene in the first game’s photo style. Modder Eric Yockey’s Marathon//Max brings team matches against bots, modeled on Bungie’s Marathon games.
Most Max Payne 2 mods unpack into the game folder and let you choose which one to run at launch. Many recommend adding -skipstartup -developer -developerkeys to the shortcut or to Steam’s launch options, and some need the Max Payne 2 Weapon Patch first.
Max Payne 3
FusionFix
ThirteenAG’s MaxPayne3.FusionFix adds options and fixes problems in Max Payne 3; it needs the Complete Edition, version 1.0.0.255 or later. It adds a borderless window, controller icons for Xbox, PlayStation, Switch and Steam Deck pads, an intro skip, a hidden skip prompt in cutscenes, thicker subtitle outlines, SMAA antialiasing and the gamma of the console versions. It also stops the Hoboken Alleys co-op map from crashing the game and the game from dropping into the pause menu at random.
Unpack the archive into the game’s root folder; the ASI Loader it needs comes with it.
Max Payne 3
Sam Lake’s face, back on Max
By July 2023, the modder AlexSavvy had released the Sam Lake Mod, which swaps the third game’s Max for a close recreation of Sam Lake, the first game’s face model. It replaces 98 models and 66 textures, keeps the facial animation and lip sync, follows Max’s hairstyles through the story and brings back the first game’s Hawaiian shirt and leather jacket.
Keep playing
Before you mod, fix the game
Sound, frame-rate and widescreen fixes for the first game on Windows 10 and 11 are on the PC page, along with controller setup for all three.
Read the PC guide