A game that unfortunately fits into the category of ‘I love thinking about the times I’ve played it more than actually playing it’. The first chapter is an absolute joy to go through at least, admittedly a joy superseded by its sequel but still a joy nonetheless, but from mid-chapter 2 onwards it becomes less of a noir-ish heroic bloodshed simulator and more of a game about brute forcing every enemy encounter and quicksaving the second you’ve cleared a room of its enemies.
It’s a similar problem suffered by a lot of super-hard-but-fast-respawning-2D-platformers, eventually the game becomes so trigger happy with killing you that it becomes less about skill and more about how many times you can headbutt this particular brick wall before you pass out from the blunt-force trauma. It never feels insurmountable, in fact quite the opposite as each encounter is over so quickly they become a formality that the encounters in something like Dark Souls never devolve into. Ultimately actually playing Max Payne is a relatively inoffensive experience as long as one remembers to quick-save as often as possible, and its been made pretty much obsolete in this regard by the aforementioned Max Payne 2 (and honestly both of them are completely blown away by Max Payne 3 if we’re talking purely on a gameplay level).
But to experience Max Payne is another thing entirely. The game doesn’t quite reach the levels of delightful verisimilitude that later entries in the Remedy-verse would delight in, but this game oozes atmosphere with such intensity that it cannot be mistaken as anything other than the direct precursor to what would later arrive more fully formed in Alan Wake.
The world of Max Payne feels permanently stuck in the last hours of its own personal Ragnarök. A seemingly eternal tempest rages through the streets refusing to let up for even a second, the sky throbs with crimson veins as though signaling the end times, psychotic mob bosses practice black sacraments to beings beyond human comprehension, and one man stalks through this eternal life with nothing but his wits, his luck and a whole army’s worth of bullets. The game never goes into the realm of the overtly supernatural, but in many ways I prefer this approach to something more directly magical.
It has a similar approach to the paranormal as the first season of True Detective. It’s clear to the audience and the characters that SOMETHING is lurking just beyond the edges of our perception, but the figurative curtain is never quite pulled back far enough for us to be at least secure in the knowledge that all our fears and anxieties were true and justified. All we are left with are the effects of these fears, and it is this sense of apocalyptic dread that propels the story of Max Payne from a fairly bog-standard noir revenge story to a mythical saga of world-ending proportions. It really is what elevates this game into classic status, and thankfully gave a head start to the folks at Remedy who would only see improvements on both the gameplay and atmosphere of their subsequent works.
With anyone else at the helm I can imagine Max Payne getting very stale very quickly, but the (admittedly amateurish but nonetheless charming and evocative) writing of Sam Lake and the clear love the dev team had for the project (those graphic novel cutscenes rock btw) shines through to make for an unforgettable gaming experience that, as I unfortunately implied at the start of this review, I’ll mostly be content to fondly remember rather than play for the time being.
It’s a similar problem suffered by a lot of super-hard-but-fast-respawning-2D-platformers, eventually the game becomes so trigger happy with killing you that it becomes less about skill and more about how many times you can headbutt this particular brick wall before you pass out from the blunt-force trauma. It never feels insurmountable, in fact quite the opposite as each encounter is over so quickly they become a formality that the encounters in something like Dark Souls never devolve into. Ultimately actually playing Max Payne is a relatively inoffensive experience as long as one remembers to quick-save as often as possible, and its been made pretty much obsolete in this regard by the aforementioned Max Payne 2 (and honestly both of them are completely blown away by Max Payne 3 if we’re talking purely on a gameplay level).
But to experience Max Payne is another thing entirely. The game doesn’t quite reach the levels of delightful verisimilitude that later entries in the Remedy-verse would delight in, but this game oozes atmosphere with such intensity that it cannot be mistaken as anything other than the direct precursor to what would later arrive more fully formed in Alan Wake.
The world of Max Payne feels permanently stuck in the last hours of its own personal Ragnarök. A seemingly eternal tempest rages through the streets refusing to let up for even a second, the sky throbs with crimson veins as though signaling the end times, psychotic mob bosses practice black sacraments to beings beyond human comprehension, and one man stalks through this eternal life with nothing but his wits, his luck and a whole army’s worth of bullets. The game never goes into the realm of the overtly supernatural, but in many ways I prefer this approach to something more directly magical.
It has a similar approach to the paranormal as the first season of True Detective. It’s clear to the audience and the characters that SOMETHING is lurking just beyond the edges of our perception, but the figurative curtain is never quite pulled back far enough for us to be at least secure in the knowledge that all our fears and anxieties were true and justified. All we are left with are the effects of these fears, and it is this sense of apocalyptic dread that propels the story of Max Payne from a fairly bog-standard noir revenge story to a mythical saga of world-ending proportions. It really is what elevates this game into classic status, and thankfully gave a head start to the folks at Remedy who would only see improvements on both the gameplay and atmosphere of their subsequent works.
With anyone else at the helm I can imagine Max Payne getting very stale very quickly, but the (admittedly amateurish but nonetheless charming and evocative) writing of Sam Lake and the clear love the dev team had for the project (those graphic novel cutscenes rock btw) shines through to make for an unforgettable gaming experience that, as I unfortunately implied at the start of this review, I’ll mostly be content to fondly remember rather than play for the time being.