It pains me to say this (no pun intended), but I did not mesh with Max Payne as much as I hoped I would have despite how much I respect the franchise and its contributions.

I learned pretty early on that Max Payne is from the early era of adaptive difficulty; I don't think anyone's exactly figured out the algorithm, but it works something like this. The more enemies you successfully kill without dying, the bulkier enemies get and the more powerful their attacks become. In a sense, it's meant to reward players that play well with a more engaging challenge and pacify players that don't play as well by lowering the level of difficulty so they have an easier time getting by. That said, I can only conclude that this adaptive difficulty is far too skewed in the direction of absurdly difficult. By the time I was on the third chapter of part I, enemies were no longer instantly dying to my shotgun or my baseball bat... which kind of defeats the purpose of using those weapons because I often didn't have enough time to get in a second attack before I would get ended by an enemy turning around and firing. On the other hand, I lost count of how many times I got sniped (quite literally) by enemies firing with a shotgun 50 feet away, with all the bullets lined up; meanwhile, my shotgun can't instantly kill them point blank with a headshot and misses most of the shots if I take five steps back. It is absolutely insane how bullet spongy the enemies get, to the point where they will take 10 bullets to the throat before going down while it only takes a single spray of the Ingram from an enemy to tear you to shreds; the shotguns unfortunately become very useless quite early on for this reason and by the end of the game, the Berettas were following suit and just unable to deal enough damage to quickly knock down the streams of enemies. It's also worth mentioning that for the adaptive difficulty to supposedly kick in and lower itself, you have to wait for the entire death animation to play out before reloaded, which can take a solid 10 seconds or more at times. While almost all the reviews I've read have been glowing, I think it definitely says something that quite a few of them had to resort to playing with cheats on just to get through the story mode. And that was on Fugitive Difficulty, the easiest/normal difficulty mode! I can't imagine how grindy this game must feel on harder difficulty modes due to how skewed the adaptive difficulty felt for me.

I'll quickly point out a few of the other issues too. If the enemies weren't already annoying enough, quite a few of them are placed in locations where they have free reign over you in tightly packed corridors or corners and can lay waste to you with grenades, rocket launchers, or sniper shotguns. A lot of time was spent quick saving and reloading at these locations to clear them out with grenades (which in itself is tricky because I often got shot down with the grenade in hand before I could retreat to change weapons) or luring them out so I could pick them off one by one and attempt to actually use the shotgun; this sort of felt lame and antithetical to the main gameplay so I tried my best not to camp and hide away/sneak attack. In particular, there's one section near the end of the game where three goons were firing rocket launchers upon me (insta kill) so I couldn't approach them to pick them off and had to rely on the shaky sniper rifle. Right after that, I was tunneled onto upwards elevators where a sniper shotgun boy was perfectly firing down his sights, and I couldn't approach both because of the angle and because there was a mine in the way that I had trouble disabling due to the line of fire. Enemy placement in Max Payne can cheapen the difficulty to some extent as well, is what I'm trying to say. Of course, there's some classic 2000s era jank to be dealt with, such as the multiple instances where I got shot and often insta killed by shotguns through walls, or where my individual shots got blocked by the strange hit detection of some corners/rails. (Oh, and the cutscenes are unskippable too as part of this era, so save often.) The sort of shaky and inconsistent aim doesn't help much either; you really want to go for the head because it deals 500% more damage, but aiming for the head will often just not hit so it becomes safer to aim for the body even despite the bullet spongyness that comes with adaptive difficulty. Finally, there are two dream sequences that will make Max Payne go through these dark labyrinths on narrow balancing beams, and you also have to jump between the beams at times; the game was definitely not meant for 3D platforming, and these sections feel way too precarious for just setting up the scene as prologue sections.

Now I don't want to be all doom and gloom, so I'll take this time to talk about the original game's big strength; its game feel and atmosphere. Max Payne takes heavy inspiration from the "heroic bloodshed" genre of Hong Kong action cinema (down to the tragic narrative and combat) and having watched enough John Woo and Chow Yun-fat movies in my time (both of which are actually referenced in the game!), I think the writers nailed it. The story's told through these pulpy, low fidelity comic book strips with very serious sounding voiceovers while foreboding, noir tunes tinker in the background (reminiscent of the "Jazz Club" from Hard Boiled). Max Payne himself is this sarcastic, dry humor undercover cop sold out by both the mafia and the police and finds himself as a loner driven to his wits end thirsting for revenge having constantly been down on his luck. When the gameplay succeeds, it hits hard and emulates the gun-fu of heroic bloodshed films quite well; it's a ton of fun slo mode diving past entranceways or down stairs as you land bullet after bullet into the hearts of countless mobs. Bonus points for the occasional slow motion zoom-in as you finish off some enemies here and there and get to watch their bodies slump to the floor while your bullet passes clean through. And of course, you've got a crazy over the top thriller crime drama as the backdrop to the worst winter in New York City combined with guns, drugs, explosions, and betrayals. The presentation absolutely holds up to modern standards and ultimately is the big selling point for me despite my other complaints.

Having said all of that, I really really wish I could recommend Max Payne more considering all the praise its received and its legacy, but unfortunately I feel the need to be a voice of dissent because the (somewhat misunderstood) adaptive difficulty really turned certain portions of the game into a slog and I cannot in good faith recommend this without reservations. For those of you reading who want another point of comparison, may I suggest Stranglehold? It's actually a video game sequel directed by John Woo starring Chow Yun-fat with all the classic elements of heroic bloodshed films, combined with even more wild shenanigans (like emulating the belly flop cart sliding scene from Hard Boiled) to perform as compared to the original Max Payne, and I found that to be much easier to adapt to thanks to Tequila's many overpowered tricks matching the energy and strength of the opposing mobs. Regardless, I still plan on playing Max Payne 2 sometime after this as I've heard it's a massive improvement over the original and personally recognize the original's contributions to video game history. It's just a shame that I couldn't be one of the ones to get fully engrossed in this classic; they've always said you shouldn't meet your heroes, but I suppose Max Payne was right in insisting he was no hero.

PS: It took me a solid day and a half to realize that "Max Payne" is a pun even after multiple characters in the comics lampshade this. My mind is still blown regarding this revelation.