"Max Payne 3" is a game that weighs heavily on my soul. As a big fan of Remedy, the developer of the first two games, Rockstar's Man On Fire-inspired rendition of the gritty, sorrowful character just didn't feel right. From its grim seriousness to its burly bearded face, it was not my Max. [The recently released Sam Lake Mod changes Max's character model to an eerily accurate recreation of the first film's face model, Sam Lake, the original creator of Max Payne.

Lake's natural polygonal facial features are perfectly integrated, and somehow his facial features alone are enough to inject some silliness into the rock star's much darker story. The way he preserves lip-sync and facial animation is also impressive, and he appropriately changes his appearance and hairstyle in different sections of the game. Considering that there are apparently 14 different hairstyles over the course of the story, this is quite a feat.

In addition to the face swaps, the new models' physiques are also modeled after those of Lake and Payne in the previous game, making this version of Max much tighter than the dumbed-down interpretation of the rock star. Naturally, all costumes have been adjusted accordingly.

I dread to think how much work goes into a mod like this, but in my eyes, this is professional enough to be official DLC. Now if only someone would dub a cheesy noir monologue or insert a bizarre mythology-based secret society, we'd finally have a comforting sequel.