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Max Payne

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A Techtite Review

Timing is everything. This should be the mantra for MaxPayne in many ways. Not just because of its unusual "bullet time" visuals, though also because this game was hyped, promised, and anticipated for so long, expectations were bound to reach unreachable heights. It doesn't make it any easier when I had just completed Anachronox before playing this game, whose RPG-inspired game world was quite frankly, much larger, and much more interactive. Don't get me wrong; Max Payne is still several notches better than most games of the shoot-everything-moving genre --and far better than what Hollywood offered this summer-- and yet it still is unlikely to be Game of the Year, either. It's an A-minus game that, so very easily, could have been a solid "A."

First, let me summarize the story (which, in a single-player game, is all the more important). Max Payne is a bad-attitude cop with a chip on his shoulder, out for revenge. You get to see why, via flashbacks of a fateful night three years ago, when he came home to find his wife and infant child brutally killed by unknown assailants. These killers left their ominous calling card on the wall --a symbol for Valkyr, the latest "designer drug"-- and this leads Max Payne to devote his life to the DEA...in a vendetta to defeat any and all drug kingpins responsible for killing his family.

Here's where things get interesting; all fighting within this action shooter --just like popular action movies-- is done within the slow-motion world of "bullet time." A mere click of the right mouse button allows Payne (for short intervals) to fight the bad guys in the luxury of slow-motion. What this means is that you get to see bullets slowly whiz past, dodging their shots better, yet at the same time, you're controlling Max in regular time, with the better advantage to aim your shots while dodging theirs. Furthermore, defeat of a tougher enemy offers a slow-motion of their fall to the ground, in grandiose, action-movie fashion. Use of the "best weapon" --complete with a sniper scope-- offers a camera angle which follows the trajectory of the slow-motion bullet, right to its villainous target. Any fan of The Matrix should really love this novel approach to slow-mo game play, right down to a salute to that film's classic lobby shoot-out scene.

Of course, any 3D-accelerated game is only as good as its game maps. If you have a high-end graphics card, get ready for high definition textures which make even trips through the subway station seem both alluring and foreboding. Character faces are scanned from actual human models, making the people you meet seem even more realistic. Unfortunately, this world is still a step less life-like than the one in Anachronox (most TVs when turned on show only static, while most phones only beep at you). Regardless, nearly everything in this game can be shot, destroyed, or completely blown up...which in an action game is all part of the fun. Shoot a fire extinguisher and see its foam shoot all over the place. Shoot an office water cooler and see it leak. Combustible tanks explode into smithereens, often taking all nearby criminals with them. This all leads to a action-movie-savvy urban war zone that would make even an Arnold Schwarzenegger film look tame in comparison.

The overall structure of the game --where to go, what to do-- is frequently very linear, though that is to be expected in a strictly action-oriented game such as this. It at least takes you to a few very intriguing, realistic, well-designed locales, like a dilapidated building, a glitzy corporate skyscraper, and a chase above snow-covered rooftops.  While there isn't much exploration per se (nearly every hall has all doors locked except one), extensive searching does uncover many Easter Eggs, including one that salutes Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I also liked the interwoven humor; shoot an annoying elevator music speaker, and Max will say, "Thank you!"

There's certainly a lot of aspects of this game to admire. For one thing, this story is no mere "Kingpin," so the dialogue is without excessive, overdone four letter words every 6 seconds.  In short, this is a story that is mature and R-rated, without resorting to cheap, juvenile potty mouth one-liners. In fact, the dialog in the cutscenes --shown as if from a modern "graphic novel"-- is often very intriguing and even a bit wittily told. Best of all, while there is the obligatory "demon worshipper" to defeat, the story itself doesn't turn into an overdone hell-spawn cliché, where (YAWN) the final level takes place in a parallel dimension of death where you fight a giant demon blah blah blah. This is a crime drama through and through, where the crime involved is quite plausible, thereby enhancing the story's strength.

However, with any game comes the game gripes. One of my biggest is simple; this is a shoot-everything-moving game, which is a premise about half a decade too old. Sure, the game explains the lack of any "innocent bystanders" standing about, due to a major blizzard keeping everyone indoors. However, I've certainly never seen New York City seem so...deserted! Ever since Unreal and Half Life, the reality of "innocent bystanders" has offered both an added challenge, as well as a reward if you kept them alive long enough to show you a secret area, or a safer detour. Max Payne is strictly from the old school of action gaming, with only a small piffle of "innocents" to meet, nearly all of whom are shot by the criminals if you don't accidentally shoot them first.

Unfortunately, this is not the only gripe to be seen. First, I never decided if the slide-show, graphic-novel cutscenes were a good idea or not, given how cool an in-game 3D cutscene would look. Second, unless you use "bullet time" to uneven the odds, battles in this game are tough; one pipsqueak bad guy with a shotgun can kill you with one shot if your health isn't at 100 percent. Speaking of health; health packs --or "painkillers," as this game calls them-- are a rare commodity, and restore your health ridiculously slow (Why...? just "zap" my health up again, without having me look at my watch as the health bar slllllooooowly crawls upward). As for enemies, they aren't very diverse, and often look way too similar throughout each level; guard #1 is rarely any different from guard #17. This is all made even worse by rather dated facial "animation," where Max Payne seems to have the exact same cocked eyebrow throughout the whole game. After playing a game like Anachronox, with its changing character expressions and mouths moving along to the voice acting, this seems like too much of a step backwards...even if the game elsewhere, quite frankly, is very, very fun.

Of course, the finale of any single--player game is what inevitably divides the good game titles from the bad ones, and while I won't spoil it for you, I will say that the eventual finale is both at once ultra-totally-cool, and yet, like most of the game, lacks that last certain something extra. On the plus side, the defeat of your very "mortal" worst enemy almost rivals the final battles in Lethal Weapon 2, or perhaps a Die Hard movie. It's also cool that, if you complete the game at "Dead on Arrival" difficulty setting, you get a special bonus level for your troubles! On the other hand, Max Payne's finale still relies a lot on you figuring out for yourself that he's already got his "happy ending" covered, based on earlier cutscenes. Why couldn't they show him receive the happy ending he deserves just as much as Stallone or Schwarzenegger ever did...? Such little flaws make me feel like the mean ol' teacher, who gives the class brain an A-minus for work that so easily could have been an A plus. In the end, Max Payne is a game that is truly, very, very good...yet it's a shame it isn't quite the Game of the Year it could have been.

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You may also be interested in : Max Payne Official Strategy Guide