PRESS E TO EXAMINE THE CLUE
Max: "I needed to stop dawdling. People were dying, and I was just standing here."
Giovanna : "AHHHHHHHHHHHHH MAX NOO! THEY'RE SHOOTING AT ME MAX!!!"
Max: "Giovanna had a lot of courage. And she was smart. Very competent woman in a lot of respects. But right now, she needed me to shoot these guys before she ran out from behind cover in a hysterical panic."
Evil Brazilian military cop: "Stupid American! You don't even know our language! How could you hope to understand this?"
Max Payne: "Maybe I was a dumb, violent gringo subsisting on whisky and my own self-pity, but I still needed to do what needed to be done. Brazil was diseased to its core, the roads and rivers were a circulatory system filled with sewage and cocaine. I was a white blood cell sent to tear out the infection, one U.F.E and gangbanger at a time. But still... I had sympathy. These people had been raised to hate middle-income assholes with delusions of grandeur (GRANDEUR) like me, but that wasn't gonna stop me from saving the decent folks who just happened to live in this cesspool.... time slowed down. It was time to shoot the air conditioning unit to make it fall."
COLLECTED! GOLDEN SMG PARTS: 2/3!
Max: "I had let these scumbags go the first time. But now, they were about to have their way with a gorgeous female woman. Not on my watch."
ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: "YOWCH! Shoot 100 guys in the dick"
Me: The shootdodge is so fun :)c

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.

logging into a private Discord server that only I'm in to play Krunker by myself with all the lights out and noise-cancelling headphones on so I can divert 100% of my brain to the task at hand. all these fucking automata aren't even engaging with the game they're just treating it as secondary to whatever frivolous conversation they're having. I pick them off effortlessly with a sniper rifle I paid real-life money for while they spawn back in and brainlessly run around in the gaming equivalent of highway hypnosis. this is the place where I am the strongest. I am Chris Kyle. I am the Red Baron. I am a fucking killer and I'm glad you're just sentient enough to know you should be afraid of me. You and I are fundamentally different animals

my hobbies include:
-Being cruel and sadistic to everyone around me
-Leaning over and admiring my very sharp, deadly "Evilest Woman in Finance" award
-Going to my soundproofed room alone and ruminating on the incompetence of my employees
-Sipping the mysterious drinks that appear in my office
-Overlooking the patrons of my bank through the dangerously thin glass of my office window and monologuing about destroying the middle class for fun
-Keeping sensitive files out of the hands of Ruby Red, investigative reporter.

I understand if you don't appreciate what I enjoy doing with my time, but my self-care is my self-care.

When I was 6 my grandma wouldn't let me put Lego Island on her computer because she thought it "might have a virus" since I got my copy from the library and then burnt it (a process which, in her mind, invited potential digital dangers). Instead I had this to keep me occupied and it potentially saved me from running into the street and dying in an attempt to find SOME source of stimulation other than the bible or the three Nickelodeon shows I was allowed to watch. Good fun, nice sound effects, 3 stars.

first three missions: hmmmm seems lame :\
last mission: GO WHITE BOY GO

IOI cooked so hard with the final mission of this campaign it's actually crazy. The concept of an infectious target who can turn any civilian they're near into a target as well gives the player a crazy degree of narritive agency- I know a big part of the appeal of this mission is that it's the one where the game gives you express permission to Just Kill People, but the fact that you have the chance to totally prevent any spread of the disease is so fucking cool. Whether 100 people have to die here or only your targets is entirely in the player's hands, not in some "you can just shoot everyone for no reason" way, but in the sense that the choices and mistakes players make moment-to-moment can ripple outwards and potentially change how the story proceeds entirely, going where it wants whether the player likes how it ends or not. Every second you're dragging an unconscious gaurd into a closet is a second during which every NPC on the map is moving and coming into contact with others, potentially transmitting the disease. You're not just trying to kill a target- so long as Cage is still alive, you're actively working against him and trying to contain the Situation he's engineered. It's cool!

I also love that the game never tells you that everyone can be saved- that you actually can get an "everybody lives!!" ending. I'm gonna be honest, while I like 47's characterization in Blood Money, where he is a much more explicitly sinister force, I kind of love the more optimistic tone of WoA and how much fun it seems to have with 47 being this calculating avatar of death whose rigid professionalism and respect for his handler also incidentally just kind of makes him a force for good. I think that kind of got me especially invested in the stakes here- I want to see that lovely bald man save the day, not out of some sense of inborn altruism, but because it would be a blow to his pride if he didn't succeed at containing the virus. My first playthrough of Patient Zero had a moment where I audibly said "oh fuck" as Diana started freaking out over one of the infected making it to the bar and the target counter shooting up to 40. The elevated danger here and the general feeling of urgency made solving the puzzle of how to take out Cage without letting anyone else get sick extremely gratifying. Also, very glad that the final mission got a sci-fi horror soundtrack. Love the spooky bitcrushed synths that come in as you're choking out some idiot who almost just came into contact with the world's most sickly old man.

Also just want to say it's very funny that the target who feels like they have the greatest degree of agency and is actively trying to fuck you over during the mission is the catatonic, perpetually groaning sick guy who will immediately drop dead if you hit him with the tummyache gun

IO Interactive do not know how to structure or pace a story across 3 games and I did not care about WoA's overarching narrative up until this point, but somehow the final missions of the trilogy actually managed to get me properly emotional over 47 and Diana's dynamic, and, by extension, the series's events as a whole. It's crazy how having these two extremely likable characters be the only real anchors throughout an otherwise pretty tame conspiracy thriller plot allows 3 to pull this trick and retroactively make me care about the story of Hitman (2016). The interactions between Diana and 47 were always my favorite bits of characterization in the previous games, and even in Blood Money I found their whole thing charming, but there's something about how tangible it feels here that got me. I think going through K-8 with a paraprofessional who was payed by the school district to make sure I didn't bite people just makes me predisposed to having their deal resonate with me- her helping a man who's Literally Neurodivergent distinguish between right and wrong and him being thankful enough for it to put his life at risk... such a fun concept and the execution of it in the last real mission put a smile on my face.
It's WoA so obviously the level design is fucking phenomenal and the core gameplay's still extremely engaging if you're into this kind of routing-based stealth. Camera's a weird addition and feels kind of clunky to use, and I wish the ICA facility in China had been... better? I liked the level itself but after all the goofy sci-fi shit I was dying for them to just let me infiltrate an underground supervillain facility; was very sad to find out it was one of the more underwhelming areas in the game. Anyway though- I love WoA! All games with this kind of budget should have the decency to be good

There should be more adventure games where you can fill the ventilation system of a building full of people with chloroform. If you have the "what if I attacked you" gene then I think WoA scratches that itch wonderfully. Turning off mission stories and some of the other hints transforms each map into an intricate puzzle to figure out in tandem with the spy thriller gameplay, encouraging numerous replays to find each map's Horrifying Murder Tricks. Compared to 1 I strongly prefer 2's levels (Ark Society, Golden Handshake, and Last Resort are just three back-to-back bangers), and their intricacy kept me invested enough to play the escalation missions to, something 1 really didn't draw me into my first time through. Mastering a map in WoA always feels stimulating and engaging on a fairly cognitive level, but it's also an action/stealth game where you sneak around and choke guards unconscious while cello music punctuated by synth stings plays- it's the kind of game that I'm bound to swoon for, so it's entirely possible I'm not being as critical of it as I might be if this wasn't exactly my shit, but I'm comfortable with that. It's just a joy to dress my precious little darling Agent 47 up in all his lovely unlockable suits, and I'll play every mission until I've seen him do his clever tricks to my fancy while wearing each.

I think this is sincerely one of the most infectious games I've played in a long time, and it's incredibly well-suited for the Playdate. Went over to watch The Game Awards with some friends; as I stared at Geoff Keighley stand surrounded by alien geometry and speak about how games are different from other mediums because they have the power to change people my eyes began to glaze over and I started thinking about patterns in Pick Pack Pup. It's a super simple puzzle game, so that probably sounds bizarre- I might be stupid, but as far as I can tell this doesn't have the same technique ceiling as something like Tetris or Puyo Puyo. Still, the fact that your progress and score is constantly being literally fed into a mulcher means that you need to assemble packages in a mad dash- if you're not paying attention, it's easy to panic and pack dismally low-value packages of 3. It requires some discipline and practice in order not to throw points away from being in a rush. Thinking about it while I was falling asleep or experiencing Game Awards Fugue gave me a chance to figure out dead-simple little heuristics for moving packages about safely into high-value positions, something I don't think I could have done easily if it had more complex rules. Pick Pack Pup, largely due to it's very accessible and simple mechanics, has become the first puzzle game of this type that I've genuinely gotten engrossed in/kept feeling drawn back to. It's easy to figure out if you sit with it for a moment, but consistently tricky to actually play given the pressure of the timer. Also the pup is cute! The game is definitely "wholesome" but in a way that feels more reminiscent of charming E10+ Comic Mischief/ Cartoon Violence DS games than like, Donut County. Mean that as a compliment (to Pick Pack Pup). Didn't expect to give this one such a high rating but it deserves it. Good boy!

Returning to this years after the fact and I think it's kind of a crime that I sometimes see this game labelled as early 2010's YouTuber bait when it feels, rough around the edges as it may be, like a complete labor of love. There aren't a lot of games nowadays that can manage to genuinely frighten me- this remains one of them.

Setting it in this endless series of samey, dark corridors works well, in my opinion- maybe this is just me, but the fact that I know the map layout and monster spawns are random makes moving forward feel consistently risky. In most horror games I usually at least can count on the fact that a human built this level I'm walking through. Seeing someone else's design sensibilities on display means that I know specific rooms will be put together to be experienced a certain way, or that some thought went into how to best unnerve me. I do feel a palpable dread when I'm playing something like Silent Hill, but as tense as those games are I at least feel like the people who made this to scare me are keeping me company. I know there'll be a rhyme and reason to when a Creature appears. Even in Pathologic, I know that The Powers That Be put this all together, because the game seems to actively be playing cruel jokes at the player's expense. In Containment Breach, individual rooms may be bespoke or have a specific event linked to them, but for the most part I feel completely alone and cut off even from the people who made this. A totally indifferent algorithm is determining what's behind the next door. There doesn't feel like there's any intent behind the architecture of the building; I can't get the sense it was put together by a person, in the fiction of the game or out of it. There's a solid fog of darkness in front of me constantly. If something's waiting up ahead to trap or kill me, I don't know, and somehow, neither does anyone else. Whatever is out there, it certainly isn't human. Somehow the stock music and barren visuals kind of add to this for me- it feels cheap and uncanny in a way that somehow heightens the experience for me. This is a game that has a ton of soul, but a lot of it went into making the player feel alienated and alone in an environment that feels like it wasn't created with the intent to be occupied. Procedural generation is cool even if it usually isn't

I think if I played this when I was a kid I would have joined the military

edit: okay so I've replayed this a few times and even though I will admit that some of these missions are kind of rough around the edges (Battery is bad and there's specifically 1 room in bathhouse that can go to hell) I'm kind of blown away by how genuinely phenomenal this feels to play. Fisher controls like butter, and using the scroll wheel to control your walk speed works beautifully. You have such a tight control over your speed and movement, and every other interaction (taking out your gun, switching attachments, tapping phones, picking locks) feels as if it happens fast enough that the player can maintain a high tempo through each level, but takes just long enough that when the enemy is searching for you things become incredibly tense. This is complemented by the fucking phenomenal score. This is what makes the game to me- I'm pretty sure Penthouse is my favorite level entirely because of the song that plays in it. Chaos Theory's soundtrack conveys a ton of tension and momentum, and does an incredible job of encouraging you to do quick thinking to evade guards and de-escalate even as things get louder and more frantic. I get that stealth games as a whole tend to usually have some form of reactive music, but the composition and tone conveyed by Amon Tobin's work here is just so perfectly in tune with how the game looks, feels and plays. Wish there were more good crazy-budget stealth games