Max Payne

"Yes, with some duct tape and some glue, you can make your own pun!"

Let’s face it: with a name like Max Payne, there are only so many occupations that one can go into. It might have seemed like the whole world was wide open to a young Max Payne, constantly ridiculed by his classmates for having such a stupid name, but we all know the truth—a man named Max Payne has his vocational choices limited to professions where he punches or shoots at people.

Not so surprisingly, Max Payne becomes a cop, then a DEA agent, and finally, a vigilante. His first career change is brought about by the tragic death of his wife and child; this causes him to seek out the makers of the drug a few junkies were on when they killed his family. Things turn sour, and Max finds himself as an unfortunate victim of circumstance, a man with “nothing to lose.” Whenever I hear this phrase, I can’t help but think that these outlaws never saw HBO’s OZ, what with all the prison rape.

Unafraid (or perhaps unaware) of the threat of forced man-love, Max Payne sets out on his quest armed with nothing but a Beretta 9mm, a loud shirt, an armada of awful puns and forced metaphors, and of course his uncanny ability to slow down time itself. Max Payne is a third-person shooter in looks, but a first-person shooter at heart: Control is mostly strafing and shooting in various directions, the layout very similar to most every FPS on the PS2 with the aiming mapped to one analog stick and the lateral movement / strafing to another.

Sticks for Smash TV, mouse for FPS games.

Frankly, I avoid FPS games on consoles—the aiming on a PS2 controller is too cumbersome for a genre now dependent entirely on laser-precise targeting. Max Payne is able to get away with it because most foes approach you at close range as large targets, plus they tend to stay near the proverbial horizon line; because of this you don’t need to aim up or down, thereby eliminating half of the problem right there. In the cases where your enemy needs to be targeted as one would expect in a PC game: above or below you and a little off-center, prepare for a frustrating experience as you fiddle with the analog sticks in a futile effort not to get shot. Sure, you can strafe, but that’d set your aiming back to square one.

Fortunately, Max Payne’s signature gameplay staple lessens the frustration of this console FPS affliction by leaps and bounds: by stopping time, people shoot at you less, things move more slowly, and aiming is drastically easier. The effect is designed to simulate the special effects in the Matrix and slo-mo sequences in your favorite action flicks; the in-game rationale is that Max gains uncanny marksmanship. For me, the edge sets me back up to my usual FPS aiming proficiency had I been given a mouse, so it feels more like a crutch than something fun to do.

And make no mistake: “bullet time” is the largest crutch ever to grace video games. Truthfully, “bullet time” itself is a waste of your powers. Everything is slowed, even when nothing’s happening, so there’s a tendency to waste a lot of your finite time when you’re unaware of it. More often, you’ll be using the “shootdodge”, which lets you dodge and slow down time simultaneously for about three seconds, letting you take out whatever threat you need to at a relatively small sacrifice of your bullet time meter. In the unlikely event that you didn’t kill what you aimed at (or attempted to aim at given the lame control), you can get up and immediately shootdodge in the opposite direction. In firefights against more than one person, it’s one shootdodge after another until everyone in the room is dead. Attempt to take down people without this tool, and you’ll be shot from every direction by an opponent that can shoot at you better than you can shoot at him. Strafing helps some in avoiding bullets, but again, this comes at the sacrifice of being able to hit anything.

Ouch! That smarts!

The rest of the gameplay seems to take a backseat to the gimmick as well. Max Payne is a somewhat realistic game: in the same way that Max can’t take a lot of damage, his enemies take even less. In fact, your default pistol is capable of eliminating the enemies at the end of the game just as easily as in the beginning. The only difference is that by then, they’re higher in number and have better guns. No matter what you’re using, the strongest of non-boss enemies can be killed in a single shootdodge. Bosses, on the other hand, fight exactly like their henchmen with more life: these epic battles can be ended with two shootdodges.

And of course, to irritate gamers everywhere, Max Payne throws in the ubiquitous platform jumping elements that simply don’t work given the game’s controls. Attempt to navigate Max’s pointless mazes of “nightmare levels,” and you’ll be tempted to enter a level skip code to wake up from the bad dream without suffering more mental anguish than the protagonist. “Frustrating” doesn’t even begin to describe these sequences—you’d have more fun removing your fingernails with a claw hammer.

Fortunately, Max Payne has several redeeming qualities under its belt to offset the massive problems. For one thing, the story is long and involved. Though it could have benefited from better writing and more carefully thought-out plot twists (if they deserve to be called that), the graphic novel scenes of Max Payne are stylish and keep the party going in a genre pockmarked by story omission. Sure, it can be cheesy at times—lots of times given Max’s bottomless pit of bad metaphors—but it’s successful at cluing you in on the action and setting. Voice acting is believable, and Max himself becomes a pretty solid character after a while.

Of course, it is very cool.

Even given the fact that all the guns are unequivocally fatal, it’s surprising that each has a distinct personality. The Desert Eagle knocks people clean off their feet with a half-inch slug, whereas the Ingram (MAC-10) floods people with so many low caliber bullets that they crumple over exhausted and ventilated. Slow down time, and they’re even more fun, the MAC-10 sends scores of slow-moving bullets at a target stuck in limbo—you can see his imminent doom lurching towards him.

As for the other graphics, Max Payne becomes considerably more basic than most games on the PS2: blame flat environments and similar character-models for that. Fortunately, the texturing is very good and quite realistic in spite of how staggeringly low-poly things can be, so the effect seems almost minimalist rather than shoddy. Other problems are small but detract nonetheless, whether it’s Max’s constant smug expression or texture repetition—a parking lot with three identical levels immediately comes to mind.

Max Payne is a great idea: it’s one of the few games that actually takes a popular concept and translates it into gameplay. By doing so, it is able to lessen many of the hideous problems it has as both a stand-alone title and as part of an inferior-controlling genre compared to the PC—quite literally at the press of a button. Unfortunately, once Max comes out of bullet time, you’re left with a barely above-average looking and playing game on the PS2 that’s more repetitive than it needs to be. That’s when it’s time to hit the shootdodge button again, sending both Max and yourself back into cinematic euphoria for another few seconds.

Dodge this: 7 / 10
An average game made engaging by a deep story and a very crucial gimmick.

---------------------
*It frequently seems like I’m the only one who knows the difference between a MAC-10 and an Uzi.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 06/25/02, Updated 06/25/02