I don't count how many times I've said this or that, but if I did, I'd have lost count of how often I said something like "it's a game that really sticks out, and I've wanted to play it, but never have". Slow-mo shooter Max Payne is part of that count.
Max is a New York cop, and New York is a frozen Hell hole full of criminals, and you're going to do something about it. I'm not sure what yet, but the funny faces and the comic strips and the film noir voiceovers will probably point it out in due course.
Fun Times
If you, like I, have never played Max Payne before, there's a chance you'll know a thing or two about it. The first thing to note is likely its 'bullet-time' mechanic, which you'll no doubt know as being popularised by The Matrix.
The second thing you'll probably know is that the story is delivered to you via graphic novel style panels, depicting the developers, their friends, families... whoever else was cheap enough to fill the role... as characters from this cold New York.
These cutscenes aren't even jarring to look at, because the in-game models for these folks are also textured with high-resolution textures of real people. Just a few days ago, I was admiring Return to Castle Wolfenstein's character models, but Max Payne blows them out of the water.
Uh... well... when I say that, I mean...
Look, Max looks a little weird, a little goofy, but he looks like a human. A cube headed human. Alright, it looks weird, but it's a style, and we're going with it.
Max returns to his strangely proportioned home one night to find signs of trouble. The walls are marked with graffiti, and sounds are coming from upstairs.
Things do not look good. Blood stains the bathroom walls, your wife screams next door, your baby cries, and two drugged up intruders make their presence known.
You were too late, and your life will never be the same again. Are we film noir-y enough for you get? Is this gritty graphic novel doing it for you? It looks like they set a high bar for themselves and desperately tried to reach it with what they had available to them, but give these developers their due, Max Payne has a look.
It's a look that'll need getting used to. Some of these figures do look out of place, and some voices sound like they come from an entirely different pair of lips to the one you see in the images, but if you can ignore the shortcomings, you'll see that the writers sure liked this one. I don't know how it ranks as a noir - I've not read enough to know - but as far as graphic novels go, it's simple and straight to the point, doing nothing new to stand out.
Then again, it's a video game and not a graphic novel, so let's get to that bit.
Now undercover, working our way up to the criminal ladder, we've got a meeting with our DEA contact Alex, who has news on one of the top dogs of the criminal underworld, Jack Lupino. We just have to go through this strangely deserted and locked up underground subway system first...
Yeah... I don't think he's meant to look like that. We'll probably be needing our gun soon. There are no obvious signs as to who did this, but a couple of shady looking fellas have just walked onto the platform. I think it's time we questioned them.
No, wait, we're undercover, aren't we? Time to just open fire then.
And that's what we know Max Payne for. Diving around in slow motion, shooting that which wants to shoot at you. It's an easy trick to pull off, usually with a click of the right mouse button as you run around with WASD. Max can jump and dive forwards, sideways, backwards, whatever you need for the situation.
While it lasts a fair amount of time, it's not some kind of superpower that allows you to lock onto enemies and mindlessly pull the trigger. You've got to work for your kills, and that includes diving the right way, aiming in the right place, pulling the trigger at the right time... I found it harder than it looks.
Killing the last enemy of the area will give you another dose of slow-motion, as you watch your foe fall to the ground, splattered in blood, giving you a visual clue that you're good to go. Health with slowly recover to a point, as will the amount of bullet time you've got, and both can be topped up with health pickups.
Frustrations
But you're going to need more than health pickups. Good Lord, you're going to need more than that. You're going to have to save your progress before every corner because enemies can pop out of anywhere, and shotguns to the face do not help your cause.
Enemies are lethal, and Max takes his damn time not only switching weapons but bringing them up to shoot in the first place. If you've launched into a bullet time dive and haven't got something useful in your hands, you've just wasted half of your now dilated time. Again, it's not a superpower, you can't leap, spam shots, and hope for the best. You're shooting the same amount of lead as you would typically be firing off, but you're hopefully putting it on target, with the increased amount of time you have to aim when everything is slowed down.
After a couple of attempts at getting through various bits of this subway station, I actually resorted to sticking God mode on, just so that I wouldn't dive headfirst into another death. If my health is very firmly in the red while I'm up and at 'em in the screenshots from here on out, you'll know why.
After saving an innocent guy from the locker room, I watch him get destroyed point-blank by a shotgun and proceed to get revenge on whoever is in the next place. It's a control room, and the dead body of the last thug bursts through the door to the train controls as he dies, which was somewhat humorous.
Using a train to crash through into the second level, we work our way through more tunnels and more thugs and eventually find out that they were robbing a bank of some kind.
It's a little nitpick, but it's always caught my eye when I've seen Max Payne footage: why are all the rooms far larger than life? I suppose it's to accommodate the bullet-time dives and the camera, but for all the realistic textures you can see everywhere, it still looks like I'm playing a video game.
Further Fun Times
God mode working wonders, I proceeded to mow down whoever stood in my way until I was able to find Alex, meeting him in an explosively dramatic fashion.
Sadly, I completely forgot what he was telling me because I was too focused on the cutscene wanting me to see that Alex was about to die.
Despite the plot being literally spelt out to me, literally laid out in front of me like a comic book, I'm still not terribly sure who is who and what I'm doing. I think it's something about a drug taking over the streets and you wanting to get the guys who made it because ultimately it was their drug that your home intruders were high on all those years ago. Or something? It's a film noir, so it'll be more sinister than that, I'm sure.
Final Word
And it was only here that I got before calling it a day, not because I didn't care, or didn't want to see where the story would go, but because I ran out of day. I'd spent a lot of it dying for diving the wrong way and missing my target.
God mode was a Godsend for me, but to complete Max Payne using it isn't exactly testing my skills as a player. I'm not fussed if that's the way I eventually get round to finishing it or not, caring about the stories of these titles like I do, but I could just watch a playthrough for that. Am I missing out on the full Max Payne experience by doing so?
The game is split into graphic novel cutscenes, short in-game cutscenes, and then the game of running and gunning, and diving and gunning, and getting shot and gunning. It's gameplay that demands precision, and forethought, and plenty of quick saves, but it is also gameplay that uses WASD, an interact key and some mouse buttons. There are more keys, of course, but will a crouch button get me to reconsider playing it over watching it? No. But God mode might.
For the fun of diving around the place in slow motion, yes, you should definitely play the Daddy of doing that in video games. If you stay for the graphic novel or the film noir, that's great. That's what I'm interested in, and somehow I'm going to see it all. I just don't know when or how.
Fun Facts
There is, somehow, a port of this game for the Game Boy Advance, complete with bullet time diving. I really need to check out some old GBA titles...
Max Payne, developed by Remedy Entertainment, first released in 2001.
Version played: PC, 2001.