Max Payne

I’ll admit I was skeptical about Max Payne because the game has been in development limbo for about four years. I’ve seen a lot of games go through years of development and then come out looking and playing three years old (cough – Daikatana – cough). Fortunately, Remedy was able to stay ahead of the curve and keep Max Payne on the cutting edge of graphic technology. They also made sure that the game was easy and, most importantly, fun to play.

Max Payne is a former NYPD detective, whose life was one day violently interrupted by the brutal murder of his wife and baby daughter by half-crazed drug addicts. The game opens with a short interactive segment where you get to experience this gruesome discovery and kill the gunmen still in the house after the deed. We then fast forward to an older Max, now affiliated with a narcotics unit as an undercover operative. On his way to meet a contact, things take a turn for the worse when Max inadvertently steps into the path of some heavily armed bank robbers, and the action never lets up from that point forward.

Max Payne’s brand of action is gritty, pulp noir set in modern day New York. Think John Woo’s Hong Kong action films minus Chow Yun Fat and you’ve got the idea. You’ll guide Max through near constant gun battles, and each of them feels like a set piece from a well-made Chinese action movie. This feeling is aided by the addition of "bullet-time," a slow-motion effect that you can trigger, which allows you to aim in normal speed, but slows everything else to a crawl. This effect is accompanied by some neat audio changes as well – voices become incomprehensible bass rumblings, gunshots are impossibly drawn out, etc. You can also see the trajectory of each bullet fired while the slo-mo effect is active, especially cool with shotguns and submachine guns.

Bullet-time adds a new layer of strategy to the game and helps to separate it from the other 3^rd person shooters on the market. An hourglass shaped meter limits your ability to slow things down and take advantage of Max’s heightened reflexes to clear out a roomful of thugs, so you’ll have to use it wisely. Killing enemies replenishes this meter, though, and that’s where the strategy comes in. You’re faced with a two enemies around a corner, for example, but there’s only about a quarter of your bullet-time meter filled. Do you rush around the corner and try to take them both down without the aid of slow motion, thereby filling your meter a bit more, or do you employ it and possibly be facing an even greater threat without anything left in your meter?

Remedy has done their homework with the visual aspect of Max Payne. I read an article about a year ago that said that some of the development team had flown to New York and taken pictures to use as references for the games gritty environments. Max Payne plays out like a tour through the seediest areas of the big city. You’ll visit rundown tenement buildings, a mob-affiliated hotel, the warehouse and wharf district, and finally, a high-tech skyscraper. Everything looks very nice, if your PC can handle the highest graphical settings, which isn’t easy. Max Payne positively requires a bleeding edge system to push the maximum number of polygonal goodness available in the game – and you’ll need a very top-end graphics card as well.

I do have a complaint about Max Payne, though. There are a few segments in the game that open or close new chapters, in which Max finds himself drugged or semi-conscious and you’re forced to play through some excruciating dream sequences, two involving doing a tightrope act on small strands of what appear to be bloody veins, over a bottomless pit. You’ll also have to negotiate a winding maze of stretching hallways in one dream sequence. These segments (which only make up about 3% of the game, thankfully) break up the action, but also add frustration.

Although the game is linear and there’s no multiplayer, the single player game is long and very engaging. The graphic novel storyboards that separate the chapters and propel the story are very well done, and the voice acting is really top-notch, perfectly suited to the type of atmosphere the game wants to maintain.

As long as your PC can handle it (the game still looks good on moderate systems), Max Payne gets my highest recommendation.