Remedy’s second game after Death Rally, Max Payne is their first game to feature a real story and set the stage for the rest of Remedy’s specific brand of storytelling and writing (especially by Sam Lake).

The plot oozes noir tropes and rockets between a crime drama, political thriller, science fiction, and psychological horror in some parts, with each part feeling perfectly in sync with one another despite their desperate genres.

The gameplay, however, is significantly more hit or miss due to the bugged adaptive difficulty system, which causes the game to start causing you to instantly die while pills only heal you for 1/16th of your health. However, when it actually does work it feels like a frantic take on the third person shooter, especially with the bullet time and shootdodging mechanics.

I want to highlight the level design by the way, namely on how much it owes to Duke Nukem 3D’s design ethos (realistic-ish spaces, high levels of interactivity in the environment, various puzzles in the environment requiring you to find the correct button to press, etc).

They were all dead. The final gunshot was an exclamation mark to everything that had led to this point. I released my finger from the trigger.
And then it was all over. The storm seemed to lose its frenzy. The ragged clouds gave way to the stars above.
A bit closer to heaven.

Um pouco mais bruto do que deveria, mas um belo diamante.

A história não é por si só muito complexa, mas consegue te envolver com a apresentação estilosa, as referências aleatórias e o fato do Max ser um personagem que te cativa sem sequer precisar de muito. Não tenho muito a comentar, mas não posso deixar de elogiar esses elementos todos.

De gameplay, primeiro eu preciso dizer que joguei a versão de PS2 por conta dele não ter na Steam e eu estar experimentando jogos em 4:3 com filtro CRT, e o interessante foi que, apesar do esquema de controle ser um pouco diferente do habitual principalmente pro que a gente tem hoje em dia, é MUITO bom e intuitivo. A gunplay é bem boazinha também, sendo um pouco mais permissiva pra quem joga no controle, e o level design é bem bacana também, tudo é relativamente simples de passar, e sempre vai ter uma salinha extra pra quem gosta de explorar arrumar uns painkillers a mais. Sobre a dificuldade, me surpreendeu um tanto até, mas é bem coisa de tentativa e erro, só insistir que dá tudo certo!

O que eu não gostei, e acho que todo mundo, mesmo na épca, odiou, foram as tentativas de ''plataforma'' do jogo. Os controles pra isso são horríveis, com aquele pulo super esquisito. Toda vez que você não tá atirando em algo, parece que o jogo tá perdendo tempo com bobagem, sinceramente.

E eu zerei um jogo pela primeira vez desde......... janeiro....... é......... minha cabeça tá tão ruim quanto a do próprio Max Payne.

Pretty awesome game, the story of Max Payne is very tragic, and the atmosphere of the sound design of the game really works here, the controls have also aged really well for a 2001 game which is awesome, and the slow motion mechanic is really awesome, the only issue with the game however is I got stuck during some missions, there was no hints at what you need to do at points, so you're kinda stuck there until you figure it out, or you look a video which sucked, despite that I really recommend this game, it's awesome, and now I want to play 2 and 3 really bad now.

I played Max Payne again with the First Person Payne mod.

Turning Max Payne into an FPS serves the game well. I didn't find it nearly as difficult as when I played through it last week, even with the higher difficulty and the bonus of remembering (most) of this game's tricks. The parking lot stage that gave me so much trouble last time was mostly a breeze but still an enjoyable non-stop action shooting gallery. Shoot dodging and rolling in first person actually work really well.

The only minor problem I had with the mod was not seeing which weapon I had equipped. You can see the text saying which gun you're holding, but being able to see the model would've been nice. The last nightmare sequence gave me the most trouble with the floating jumps not working and it seemed like Max's feet got caught up on the blood trails.

I consider the Max Payne series to be "honorary FPSs" meaning that FPS will enjoy them and using this mod made me certain Max Payne as a full blown FPS series would've worked perfectly.

First played this 5 years ago and "loved the style :D" but hated moving/shooting/taking painkillers/any other thing you do while actually controlling Max Payne. I'm genuinely kinda embarrassed this was my take because it turns out I was just playing it entirely wrong? There were moments in this newest play-through where I winced a little bit after remembering how I dealt with combat encounters coming back to them. Felt like I was doing parallel play with my 19 year old self and screaming at her for getting frustrated with scenarios I was enjoying. "Yeah no wonder you hated the gunplay you were barely using its central mechanic!! Stop trying to duck behind cover!" "Remember when you forgot you had a sniper rifle for that section in the Aesir building where you're being shot with grenade launchers from unreachable playforms? And you thought it was "broken" because you couldn't clear it easily with a Desert Eagle?" Just a constant parade of "Jesus Christ what were you doing".

Maybe I shouldn't be quite as harsh to 2019 me but I do think this game clicks a lot more once you accept that it's very difficult and requires you to use all the tools at your disposal. Individual rooms are little gunplay puzzles that you need to maybe die to once or twice before using bullet time to clear effectively. Thinking bullet time was "style over substance" or w/e just meant I wasn't really playing Max Payne at all. To be fair I was originally playing this out of obligation a guy who thought I would be hotter if I also liked Remedy games so it's not surprising I just wanted the whole game to be over.

I think I also just wasn't into it enough to appreciate how genuinely fun a lot of the storytelling is- started playing Max Payne 2 at the time of writing this and I like the pacing and cut-scene direction in it even more but here you can see a lot of that same style even as it seems they have to stretch their budget way thinner. The graphic novel sections are wonderful and I love seeing all the photo-sourced panels- you get the impression the devs were having a blast, they're leaning into the camp of it all. Still, other sections manage to be much darker in a way that feels effective. Any section set in Max's house or a nightmare variation of it is genuinely uncomfortable; the bit in the one nightmare section where almost all the walls in the house are replaced with the disgustingly cheerful wallpaper from the baby's room and rock-a-bye baby is echoing through the house got me pretty bad. Like Max's brain is actively taunting him with how disgusting and backwards the irony of finding the murdered corpse of his infant son in this room designed to feel safe and Lovely is. The "Huggies!" poster in the baby's room in particular feels extremely cruel.

Love the goons. Love how the killer suits are revealed through their dialogue to be LARPing idiots who want to live out the same power fantasy the player is. Just having played the opening chapters of 2 last night "My gun's name is Dick Justice" contrasted against the appearance of Dick Justice as a TV show that's very clearly a parody of Max himself in 2 also feels like it's retrospectively calling attention to Max's own state as a roleplaying weirdo, which from what people have told me/what I've played thus far is a thing that gets explored a lot in 2. Feel as if another review on here by Woodaba illustrates this point much better than I could.

Gunplay is obviously very tight and stylish. Chugging painkillers while mid-shoot dive then switching your weapon is tons of fun and can help you choreograph genuinely excellent little shooutouts, and when you get the grenade launcher it becomes indispensable to beat the reaction time of late-game enemies while also ensuring you don't blow yourself up. VATs got absolutely lauded when FO3 came out but I think this game is very impressive for bothering to make sniper shots bullet-cams and slow-motion enemy deaths into a source of flair in the same way that game does but in 2001. Feels as if every weapon is designed around how cool it'll feel to be used in bullet time. I will say, however, that I wish the shotgun felt a bit more viable in the late game without having to use the Jackhammer. I felt like I was still able to use most of my other weapons towards the end aside from the one-handed variants of the Beretta and Ingram, but pulling out the sawed-off or pump-action just felt like an easy way to get killed. Feels like it limited the scope of what an encounter could look like at the end of the game just a tiny bit.

Overall this was a blast. Managed to pull me away from the Hitman: Freelancer Hardcore doom spiral (which I want to write about at some point because it's so fun but also so insane both in how it twists Hitman into a roguelike and the thematic shit weirdness that comes with that) which I can only thank it for because I need a break from beating my head against a wall due to being Bad At Gaming. Love you Maxwell! Just keep being yourself and you can do anything! :)

post-review note: Jesus Christ does Rockstar need to do some serious patching work on this. I know the remake is coming out but c'mon man. Got softlocked in the Vinny chase because white men can't jump unless they're running at or below 60 FPS. Dude just fell into a pit because his movement in that cutscene is framerate dependent and I spent the rest of the mission watching goons react to a guy who wasn't there tell them to whack da crazy bastard. I was able to move cut-scenes for some reason and the section ended when the camera eternally hung on a scene that seemed to have its completion dependent on Vinny reaching a certain place which he couldn't because he was invincible and stuck in a hole somewhere. Needed to download a hex editor at one point, an expanded, open-source version of the NVIDIA control panel, add some framerate limiters on, etc. Pumping the game full of community patches and screaming "WE'RE LOSING HIM!" as something else with my rig causes visual fuckery every other chapter. Glad the game was good enough to make constant troubleshooting worth it.

The cinematic qualities of Max Payne still shine. Noir York during a freak blizzard is a beautiful thing, especially in these crisp early 2000s 3D graphics. Large skyscrapers shown as the camera flies through a blizzard and Max running in slow motion from an underground lab that's self destructing. Max isn't at his most self-destructive yet, it takes Mona to bring him there.

Remedy had peppered this thing full of cheap deaths. Sometimes you'll survive a shotgun blast and others right after you get out of one of the many comicbook cutscenes several armed goons will spawn in behind you. I was surprised that the parking structure shootout was one of the most difficult. Gunning your way all the way down is a pure gauntlet. Another levels filled with trial and error is the mob restaurant that catches fire. That one took like 15 tries to learn the right path. For some reason I found fighting the trained mercenary soldiers to be way easier than the mobsters. The AI director in this is a strange beast.

Max Payne 2 is my favorite game but this one is right up there especially considering this has a world that's a lot more vivid. Ragnarök is both a nightclub and the end of the world. Jack Lupino mixed the occult, including Cthulhu, and supersoldier drug Valkyr. There are plenty of mobsters, like the Finito brothers and the 'Trio', who have silly names but are deadly killers. Max Payne 1 turns into Half-Life 1 for a couple of levels with you fighting mercs, some of which lurk inside shipping containers, and has you blowing up lazer trip mines and going into an underground lab. There is a whole secret society plot going on.

One of the reasons I really love this one is that feels like a 3D Realms game even though it was developed by Finnish Remedy (3D Realms guys helped produce it). All the destructible environments (these mobsters really love blowing up their own businesses) and all the sinks you can turn on and toilets you can flush. There are secrets everywhere if you look. The lazer trip mines always remind me of messing around with these things for hours in Duke Nukem 3D. Duke Nukem 3D was a riff on all 80s and 90s action heroes, Shadow Warrior was a riff on kung fu and ninja movies, Blood was a riff on all things horror and Max Payne is a riff on film noir, John Woo, and all things heroic bloodshed.

"The past is like pieces of a broken mirror. You try to pick them up, but you only end up cutting yourself."

I'm not one for neo-noir stuff, but I'm quite surprised by how much I enjoyed Max Payne! The only experience that I had with Sam Lake's writing prior was with Alan Wake and Control, and it's absolutely stellar to see how much of that uniqueness was present much earlier in gaming, finding a way to brilliantly meld together a drug trafficking conspiracy and a revenge for murder with Norse mythology. It's bizarre, themed like a graphic novel, and really unlike anything I've played from this era.

Gameplay is great as well, for the most part. The main feature of "bullet time" is a nice addition to the third-person action genre, but I only ever used it in sequences involving a ton of enemies at once. (I started this game on both PC and Xbox, and the former is a bit tougher to play without the controller's auto-aim features. Perhaps, the "bullet time" mechanic is more beneficial on that platform.) What also quite impressed me here was the interactivity of the world itself. I haven't played many PC games from the late-90s/early-2000s era, but I've noticed that this attention-to-detail is present in most that I've played, notably Half-Life. Not every asset and boundary is interactive or has physics to them, but you can press buttons and break glass and the like to your advantage.
Really, the only part of this game that I think could've used a bit more work is some of the level designs, especially towards the final sections when rooms begin to feel repetitive. The stiff platforming, although obviously not the main selling point of this game, is noticeable when required to walk on thin platforms or maneuver around lasers.

Max Payne really is great, and I can understand its following. An early example of the 3D action genre that manages to tell a unique tale with shooting that feels good and cutscenes that are fueled with adrenaline and campy detective dialogue.