Def one of my fav shooters ever now, the best enemy AI I've seen in a shooter yet and really fantastic gun feel. I also love the environments, great mix of uncannily sterile modernist spaces (assisted by the stark lighting) and dirtier worn down spaces with great use of pitch black lighting. The smoke and blood effects here really add a lot to the feel of the game too, firing your gun and entering slo-mo can often make it hard to see enemies through all the chaos, lots of tension there! Gonna try and get to the expansions soon, glad to see they have the same composer too bc the music in this was extremely good.

No FPS comes close to the way every gun in your arsenal feels in SOF, the weight and heft in the animations and sound design, the variety, the enemy reactions! Game also stands as an interesting example of what terror looked like in the popular US imagination pre-2001, don't think you could make it now for a variety of reasons- only a couple aging better than others. Definitely for the best, as fun as fighting Yakuza ninjas are. I also find the soundtrack really underrated, subtle and ambient most of the time, but explosive when needed.

So above and beyond what a tactical police shooter would reasonably need to have in so many different areas that you wonder how it even came to be. SWAT 4 may sit at the top of the very narrow category of most anxiety-inducing simultaneous first and second person shooters with needlessly detailed environmental storytelling, but it’s led me to a much broader, more general thought – for how saturated and longstanding a genre it is, how much has what you can do with a shooter really been explored?

A few things about it bring this question to mind, but the main one for me’s its morale system. Each enemy and civilian has a different level of morale which affects how likely they are to surrender, pretend to surrender before pulling some kind of stunt or be nakedly noncompliant whenever you and your squad shout at them. By themselves, these kinds of reactions go a long way toward making it so that the player can never guess what’ll happen when they open any given door, but what takes this system to the next level is the sheer amount of factors which can affect it; whether they’re a group of trained gunman or a single inexperienced gangbanger, whether they’ve been stunned with some form of nonlethal attack, whether there are any hostages for them to take advantage of or hostiles to point you in the direction of, how many of you there are versus how many of them, how much damage they’ve sustained to each of their limbs and, my favourite, surprising them with warning shots. I’d never realised until playing this that hitting or missing a target in a shooter doesn’t necessarily have to be a dichotomy between success or failure – here, the latter can also be a tool for intimidation when Officer Backloggd User’s vocal chords aren’t cutting it alone. Firing a shotgun near someone’s feet to twist what’d normally be a failure state into something potentially advantageous extends past the fantasy of feeling like a Michael Mann character and gets the mind wondering about the uncapitalised potential of not just this genre, but others too. Why, for instance, do RPGs still often limit us to dialogue boxes labelled (Intimidate) or whatever when a far more organic implementation of that sort of interaction’s right here?

This sort of unpredictability which causes each attempt at the same level to play out differently every time’s a specialty of SWAT 4. Choosing different entry points coupled with NPCs’ semi-randomised spawns contribute a fair amount to this too, especially when specific characters are part of the mission’s objectives in some way, though the fact that the aforementioned limb-based damage system also applies to you and your squad plays a large role as well. While the extent to which this game wants you to take it slow’s immediately felt in the pairing of its relatively low movement speed and how harshly guns’ crosshairs widen, it becomes even more apparent when you’ve got an injured leg, head or arm. Suddenly, you find yourself even more hesitant to attempt to follow a fleeing suspect through a series of doors they’re shutting behind them, and whatever strategies you had in mind when selecting your long-range equipment have been scuppered by your diminished accuracy. If it sounds restrictive, don’t worry, because it can open up about as many avenues of play as it can close; one example I particularly enjoyed involved clearing a mission which heavily encourages you to use nonlethal weaponry by instead aiming for unarmoured limbs with 9mm FMJ rounds, since it’s easier to skirt around score penalties by incapacitating hostiles rather than killing them.

Although there’s an easy comparison to be made in terms of the replayability of individual encounters with its contemporary F.E.A.R., down to how heavily this stems from the AI’s dynamic behaviours, there’s another, less expected parallel in how thickly it lays on all things atmospheric. Breaching a two-storey room filled with explosive canisters and over half a dozen heavily armed death cultists is nerve-wracking enough, then it decides to hit you with a scene like this just moments after. It’d be easy to think of moments like this or a much earlier, loose equivalent of VTMB’s Ocean House Hotel as borderline genre pivots, but they’re more tonally synergistic than they seem at first. This is a game in which you die in two clean hits regardless of difficulty, so much as taking your eye off a bodycam for a second can prove to be fatal and, as noted above, you can never fully anticipate what’s going to greet you on the other side of a door, so it makes sense to ensure that the player can never anticipate what’s up next on a conceptual level in addition to a mechanical one, as well as to occasionally dial up the horror and exacerbate the uneasiness that average Joes with Uzis are already so good at instilling.

Irrational’s prior experience with horror isn’t the only instance of their ancestry rearing its head in the least likely of places, either. If you weren’t aware that they originated by splintering off from Looking Glass, having played one of the first two Thief games prior to this will probably clue you in, because SWAT 4’s incomplete, often hand-drawn, hastily annotated maps are straight out of those. You can only ever make a rough mental approximation of the layout of wherever you’re about to raid because of it, and chances are it’ll have geographical changes, potential hazards or other objectives they can’t possibly account for. It’s a small but brilliant touch which makes every eruption of overlapping GET DOWNs and WHERE’S MY GODDAMN LAWYERs mixed with gunfire all the more hectic as you’re inevitably forced to piece together your own whereabouts in the thick of it, usually while juggling your own perspective with that of a squadmate’s bodycam or a sniper feed to boot.

Despite how spur-of-the-moment all of this makes it sound and how many different ingredients are packed into it, up to and including some of Eric Brosius’ funkiest work, SWAT 4’s really a game of exceptionally singular focus; as the objective menu puts it, restoring order to chaos. It’s felt even in the size of its levels, which are just right for how many moving parts they each have and the number of ways in which those parts can be manipulated – you can charge me on account of lying if I told you that it’s always fun hunting down the last remaining suspect regardless, but it is always intense, and in general the most minor of blemishes on what’s otherwise one of many attestations to the fact that we’d probably be grand if games had just stopped progressing past what they could do in 2005.

Keep your cool, fiddle with your squadmates’ equipment and make regular use of the command menu to breach whatever obstacles are between you and giving this game a try, boss.

"After Y2K, the End of the World had become a cliché. But who was I to talk? A brooding underdog avenger alone against an empire of evil, out to right a grave injustice? Everything was subjective. There were no personal apocalypses. Nothing is a cliché when it's happening to you."

In Max Payne, New York City comes first. We have a few moments just with the city, and the chatter of police scanners cutting through the howling snowstorm, before Max hits us with one of his characteristic delightfully purple parodic noir metaphor.

This might not seem worth noting, given what a tiny slice of the game it is, but I think it's important in the context of how the rest of the game's narrative is portrayed (mostly from Max's narration) and from the rest of Remedy's games that followed in Max Payne's lineage. Control, Quantum Break, and Alan Wake all open with their protagonists and their narration before the world, giving the player no time to form an impression of it outside the lens of our central character. Alan Wake offers the greatest window of time for this at a whopping two seconds before he starts banging on about Stephen King. So Max Payne giving us about a minute of time in snow-covered New York feels almost luxurious in comparison. And then Max Payne barges in, bringing Helheim with him.

I spend so much time pointing this out because any attempt to talk about what Max Payne is doing on any level below the surface makes one sound like a particularly unhinged conspiracy theorist, something that Remedy are explicitly aware of and has playfully prodded at in their future game Control in particular. Part of this is the conscious silliness of the surface-level: comic-sans narration boxes filled with prose so purple it can make fine wine, and, of course, the way the entire story is told through delightful school-play images made from the developers and their friends and family putting on ill-fitting outfits and making silly faces. There is a pervasive charm to all of this that invites luxuriating in it, but I think a common mistake one can make when reading any work is to simply assume that something is thoughtless because it's a bit silly. Remedy was not somehow unaware of the fact that they were a bunch of nerds and their relations playing dress-up, and indeed, lean into it.

The archness, the artifice, and the absolute over-the-top-ness of it all, evokes the tropes and styles it is pulling from so bluntly that it becomes solid in the mind, manifesting into a brick thrown at your face that then falls into your lap, remaining there and weighing on you, never letting you forget what it's doing. From the comic panels, to the tvs throughout the levels playing broad parodies of soap operas, Twin Peaks, and, uh, The News, to Max Payne himself, as he intrudes upon the serenity of New York at the beginning, a noir cliche diving in through the door from one of the better issues of Frank Miller's Sin City (the comic panels and narration and image of a city in white bearing greater similarity to those comics than anything starring Philip Marlowe) and leaving reality covered with bullet holes in his wake.

But here's the thing. He doesn't close the door behind him. And slowly, other things start to creep in.

A superhero with a baseball bat climbs out of a comic strip and into the head of a mob torturer who is a fan of the comic. The apocalyptic snowstorm that blankets the city of New York, and the pervasive Norse Mythology references that litter the game, crawl out of a book about Ragnarok being read by someone in the club Ragna Rock. Max's actions are fed into a news cycle that makes entertainment out of it. The game's genre references become recursive and circular, wrapping in on themselves over and over. Max becomes aware of his own status as a loose cannon cop out for revenge. Mobsters make themselves into occult monstrosities in order to survive. People write fiction. Fiction crawls into peoples' heads, influences them, and through them, the world. And then people carry those ideas back into fiction. People imposing on fiction, fiction imposing on the world. On and on it goes.

It is an imposition the player performs as well. I can't bring too much to the table in terms of the mechanical construction of Max Payne's fantastic moment-to-moment gunplay, as in many ways, the sheer joy of diving in slow-motion through a doorway and riddling an entire room of goons yelling "PAYNE!" full of holes simply speaks for itself with more wit than I could ever manage. However, one thing I do want to mention is something has, to a certain extent, been obscured by successive ports to consoles and phones and back to the PC. Max Payne was a PC game first and, I think, foremost, and understanding this is key to understanding how the game handles checkpoints, or, to be more accurate, how the game doesn't. Autosave points are extremely few and far between, and most deaths will take you back to the start of the level, and these deaths come quickly and mercilessly, with only a single mistake standing between Max and the grave eagerly awaiting him.

Of course, the game does not actually expect you to restart from the beginning of each level every single time. The game expects - an assumption that was reasonable given that this behavior was ubiquitous across Max Payne's contemporaries on the platform - for you to manually save the game and create your own checkpoints from which Max can resume his story after his next future full stop. This seemingly innocuous feature might be the game's cleverest ludic move, as together with fast deaths and often-scarce painkillers demanding a certain degree of trial-and-error perfectionism, the player is put into the role of director, cutting the action when they are satisfied with the scene as it played out. It is a system that imposes storytelling structure onto every aspect of play, including even the act of entering the pause screen to save and reload into its all-consuming storyboard.

On every level of it's construction, Max Payne is a game about stories insinuating themselves, loudly and quietly, into the real, and it's surprising to find the DNA that runs through Alan Wake, Quantum Break, and Control already fully-formed in (Death Rally aside) the studio's debut title, arguably more deftly and charismatically than any of those later works would manage. The strength of Max Payne is that unlike, say, Alan Wake, all of this is left to crawl around the periphery, only bubbling up very occasionally, allowing the player to put together the disparate images in their head, like a detective attempting to solve a mystery by staring at connected pins on a bulletin board. Indeed, I don't know if I would have the confidence to make this read if not for Remedy's future work pulling on all this stuff much more explicitly. Max comments on some stuff, but not all, and one of the most compelling images the game has to offer eludes his notice completely.

Late in the game, Max is recruited by a shadowy illuminati-like organization known as the Inner Circle, and learns that pretty much everything in the plot stems from their influence, and in particular, from one of their number who manufactured the US Military super-soldier drug that drives the game's plot: Valkyr. In his own piece on the game, critic Noah Gervais explains Valkyr, the hilariously cartoonish green goop drug that has it's origins in a military super-soldier project, as a kind of uniquely video-game pulp that bleeds in from what was typical for video games in that moment, and I would say that is fairly accurate. Where I deviate from Gervais is that he finds Valkyr to be a kind of ancillary element, something that emerges out of the video game milieu of the time rather than an intentional element, and that is where I disagree. Valkyr is a consciously artificial video game trope that begins this video game, in the same way that Max's dead family is a consciously Noir trope that begins this Noir story, created by a US military project run by a member of a secret organization who's headquarters is draped in conspicuous US historical ephemera, from the room looking like the briefing room of the White House, to the Washington Monument replica at the center of it all.

There was something disturbingly familiar about the letter before me, the handwriting was all pretty curves.

"You are in an American world, Max."

The truth was a burning green crack through my brain. The film noir aesthetic, the American comic influence, even the bullet-time mechanics derived from a filmmaker who, contemporaneously, was being consumed by the Hollywood machine making strange twists on the Hong Kong action films he so excelled at.

I was in a cultural world shaped by the hegemonic influence of American fiction. Funny as hell, it was the most horrible thing I could think of.

Everything after this point, after this moment, is perfunctory. The point is made, the statement is said. As Max would put it, the final gunshot is merely the exclamation mark to everything that led to this point. He fulfills his duties to the game and the genre strangely quietly, defeats the villain, and is taken away in the back of the car, knowing exactly what has, what is, and what will happen.

He releases his finger from the trigger, and then it is over.

Until you start again.

Try Hard Boiled mode or New York Minute mode for the next challenge!

"I don't know about angels, but it's fear that gives men wings."

Still kicks all kinds of ass even after a dozen replays. Max Payne, along with its sequel, slot comfortably into my top 10 games of all time. It still holds up (save for some weird compatibility bugs that are easily patched), plays great and has writing and voice acting that is still unmatched compared to most games that have come out since.

Remedy has been on an absolute tear with Control and Alan Wake 2 so if they can take that magic and apply it to the upcoming Max Payne remakes then a stone cold classic could possibly be made even better.

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.