MAX PAYNE
I feel like this game was a staple of my adolescent development in the early 2000s. I was 11 - 13, coming into
discovering rock music for the first time and considered myself pretty "hardcore" so I definitely gravitatd towards a stylish
shooter with a variety of guns and a super cool dude in a trench coat. I would hop between playing this, watching Stickdeath
or the Madness series on Newgrounds, and playing a Korean MMO called Gunz: The Duel which had, predictably, a bunch of guns in it.
Revisiting this game in 2025 was definitely an experience. It's cool to see how far the studio that made it has come, even
beyond the other entries in the Max Payne series. I played the first Alan Wake for a bit, but never really got into it. My
partner however, got super into Control and Alan Wake 2 which were both super fun to watch and, as an aside, I loved seeing
Sam Lake play a character in Control with the same voice actor as Max Payne (James McAffrey). It was like seeing the original
Max Payne come back for one more starring role.
Right off the get go, the game goes hard on the bleak, noir cityscape trope, opening with a snowy evening amongst the
New York sprawl. Complete with a tragic back story and a grizzled voice over narrating everything that's happening, the
game is a perfect crime-noir revival set against the dark, horrifying New York gangster scene.
The premise is pretty straight-forward: Max Payne is a good cop turned bad. He was a model policeman until his wife and baby were
murdered by seemingly escaped mental patients in a drug-crazed frenzy. He descends into your typical fallen angel, bad cop retinue
and as he follows the breadcrumbs of his family's brutal murder he quickly realizes there's more going on beneath the surface.
As you work your way through the game, you tussle with nearly every sort of mobster there is, from Russian henchmen to Italian
mafia bosses. Each faction has their own slew of personalities who interact with Max during his quest for revenge, culminating in
a death match showdown at the top of a skyscraper.
