Max Payne

"I'd be going all Matrix on your ass, if it weren't for this framerate lag..."

Max Payne is just one of those games you've got to give a perfect score to for concept. Ever since The Matrix, everyone's dreamed of having over-the-top, John Woo-style gun-fu in a videogame. Developer Remedy Entertainment tapped into that desire, combining it with a detective-noir story whose camp matches the excess of the on-screen action, to create Max Payne. Having experienced the title on PC at a friend's house, but not having quite a burly enough machine of my own to play it, I was eagerly anticipating the PlayStation 2 version of the game. Unfortunately, the port's poor graphical quality and awful load time make it borderline unplayable at times, not to mention the questionable utility of the Dual Shock 2.

First, to set the stage: Max Payne, bad-ass plainclothes cop, comes home to find his family slaughtered by hoods hopped up on a new type of narcotic called Valkyr. Distraught over the loss of his beloved wife and child, Max goes deep undercover to find out the real truth behind the spread of Valkyr. Only someone with a death wish would take such a mission, and Max soon gets what he asked for, finding himself trapped on the razor's edge as the only people who know of his assignment start winding up dead.

So, Max does what any bad-ass with superhuman powers would do: he goes vigilante. Taking the role of Max, it's your privilege to cut a bloody swath through the city, using Max's unique ability to go into ''bullet-time'' to take out vast numbers of criminal scum. The game plays out in third-person; Max is visible on the screen, and the camera is always directly behind him. A small cursor on the screen displays the point Max is currently aiming at; a variety of weapons including Beretta handguns, sawed-off shotguns, and Ingram submachineguns can be cannibalized from enemies, and they can even be dual-wielded Chow Yun Fat-style.

Bullet-time is what gives Max the advantage, even though he's outnumbered and out-gunned. A small hourglass-shaped meter shows how much of this power Max has left; each enemy killed fills a small amount, and it can be used in two different ways. Going into full-blown bullet-time causes Max to move, dodge, and shoot at double-speed. But, since everything is from Max's point of view, the on-screen effect is that the whole rest of the world slows down--and in surreal fashion. All your moves are available during bullet-time, but using it depletes the meter quickly. An often better option is to give Max just a little juice: hitting the ''shoot-dodge'' button causes Max to hurl himself in whatever direction was pressed in conjunction, and his guns can be trained and fired during the animation.

Seeing this stuff in action is something else. It was wise of Remedy to not make Max Payne a first-person shooter: Max looks like a total bad-ass as dives for cover, guns blazing and black trenchcoat streaming behind him, and he even turns to look at where he's firing in the midst of the already impressive shoot-dodge animation. The robust graphical engine piles on even more slow-motion splendor--bottles on bars shatter from stray fire, extinguishers spill their contents out when shot, and televisions, radios, and alarms can be blown away when their chatter becomes annoying.

Audio keeps up its part of the bargain too. While the musical score is sparse in the tradition of Half-Life, and the overuse of the main theme takes its edge off quickly, sound effects and sound scripting are some of the best to be found anywhere. You'll seamlessly hear thugs talking amongst themselves as you round a corner; stop and listen for the occasional Seinfeld-ish bit of humor. Once you're in a firefight, the phenomenal bullet-time effects come into play: the sounds of gunshots are slowed down to a distinct powder detonation and barrel-exit, and atmospheric sounds like wind fall away until it's all framed by the chilling sound of Max's own heartbeat. Exit bullet-time after you finish the job, and the scene is punctuated with a ''whoosh''--heard backwards--as time itself rushes to catch up.

Max Payne's gritty attitude and audio presentation can almost let you forget that, underneath the bullet-time mechanic, the gameplay is actually pretty simple: move from spot to spot through the city in a very linear fashion, pausing occasionally to search cabinets and lockers for health and ammo when things cool down. In addition, some very annoying platforming elements really had me (and will have you) wondering what Remedy was thinking in some spots. Deviating from the barrel-blazing action to traverse the rafters of a cathedral is a particularly unwelcome choice, and it doesn't stop there--too many of the game's most artful moments are nothing short of ruined by silly platform jumping that is very obviously out of place in a game so focused around violence and style.

What richness Max Payne has comes with a further price. Being the furthest thing from a PC in terms of system architecture makes the PS2 an awful machine to port a computer game to, and the result here is a terribly dodgy framerate. It's bad enough that it's not 60fps like most of the best PS2 titles so far; even worse is that the choppiness varies depending on what's going on. Even something as innocent as shooting one of the pieces of interactive scenery can cause a little lag; it gets nightmarishly varied when you're up against several moving, shooting, speaking enemies. If you're going to have a sub-par framerate, at least make it consistently sub-par--such variation in game speed in a genre that relies on constant, accurate visual feedback to the player is the first kiss of death for PS2 Max Payne.

That's not the end of the problems, either. It's not possible to save anywhere--the game auto-saves for you at certain points during the adventure, and if you get killed, you'll have to wait for the stage to load before you can try again. This is frustration on top of frustration--if the tough part of the stage is at the end, you have to wait through the load time (which is just long enough to be irritating) and fight through the rest of the stage just to attempt it again. The game's most action-packed and challenging moments are often washed out by their continual repetition in this way, and it's avoidable in other versions of the game.

Lastly is the problem of transferring the PC version's mouse-and-keyboard control to the Dual Shock 2. Going the path that most first-person shooters have gone with the controller, Max Payne uses the left stick for general movement, regardless of facing, and the right stick for turning and aiming. Shoulder buttons fire your guns and access moves like bullet-time, jumping, rolling, and the shoot-dodge dive. The d-pad selects weapons and the face buttons access functions like reloading and using health items, which are kept in inventory instead of being used when they're found. Unfortunately, despite options like auto-aiming and adjustable tracking speed and dead-spot on the right analog stick, it's impossible to shake the feeling that you're not playing the game the way it was designed. The quirkiness of using the right stick instead of a mouse is compounded by the drops in framerate I discussed earlier, and it adds a final, damning layer of soil to what could have been an otherwise exhilarating gaming experience.

So there it is: when the place seems to be dripping with Mafioso thugs, and you're cutting them down a battalion at a time like a Hong Kong bad-ass as their coked-up leader bellows about signs of the Apocalypse, Max Payne is as sublime a gaming experience as they come. But there's no contesting that all this is buried under inconsistent framerate, harsh load time, and questionable controls. The Xbox version of Max Payne has much steadier graphics, no load time, and lets you save anywhere; or if you have the capability, go original and get the PC version for all those advantages and mouse-and-keyboard control. Even if the superior Xbox and PC versions didn't exist, the technical flaws of the PS2 version are unacceptable; PS2 Max Payne is only recommended to those who'll have patience enough to suffer through the bitter taste of the PS2 port, and ridiculous deviations into platform-jumping land, to get to the creamy action goodness.

Overall: 5/10

Graphics: 4/10
Audio: 7/10
Control: 4/10
Gameplay: 6/10

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 01/01/02, Updated 07/01/02