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.
Yeah, the gameplay! The gameplay is kinda the whole reason I wanted to revisit this game at all. I remember having a lot of fun with it back in the day and it definitely holds up! The Bullet Time effect is still super cool and makes you feel like an action movie star, busting down doors and leaping through in slow motion to swiftly dispath a group of thugs.
I played the PC version on a Steam Deck and I believe the game was made specifically for PC back in the day, so I can't speak to any sort of traditional gamepad experience. I used the Steam Deck's track pad to simulate mouse movement for aiming which felt really natural. Obviously moving around is a bit janky since it's meant to be controlled with keyboard arrow keys so you really gotta make sure you want to know what you're gonna do before you do it.
The guns are also a blast to collect and wield. This is a real classic case of progression that I miss in classic gun games where you start off with a little pea shooter pistol, and by the end of the game you're taking out people with rocket launchers. I think the standouts for me were the assault rifle and shotgun but when I first played this as a kid I loved wielding the dual uzis.
I do love this game but the graphics... Yeah, they're just kinda there. The game definitely shows its age by today's standards and the hyper-realistic face textures on the front flat of the face models just looks... off.
I will say, the game does a great job of rendering a film-noir New York. The interiors of the crack dens you raid are grimy and run down and the exteriors are adequately bleak and snowy. There were a few sections where more exciting locales are visited, like a shootout in a nightclub, but for the most part you're bumming around buildings and streetscapes shooting dudes up. And the comic book style cinematics between levels are actually pretty cool and fit in with the vibe really well.
So yeah, the graphics didn't really impress me, but you're not really here for the graphics, you're here to jump around in slo-mo shooting dudes in the face. The second game does up the visuals a bit, being it's for the next generation, and they added a ragdoll thing when enemies get killed which I wish was present here. Oh, and they changed Max Payne's face model which is a tragedy, imho.
The music is definitely of the time... And to be honest I don't really remember too much of it except the title screen music, which is cool and somber. Defintely captures the tone of a man who's got nothing to lose and everything to die for.
While I don't remember much of the music, the sound effects and voice acting were great! The guns all sound off with nice, explosive effects that get warped and morphed in cool ways with the bullet time. And you just gotta love the voice acting... It's perfectly cheesy and comic book which fits right into the box Max Payne is meant to sit in and James McCaffrey is perfect for the titular role.
Heck yeah, ten out of ten on the fun factor! When I loaded this game up after not having really played it since I was a brooding teen, I had fond memories of all the fun I had when I played it way back when... and it did not disappoint. I had just as much fun with it this time around as I did when it was fresh. The graphics are a bit dated and the gameplay is a bit snappier in future entries, but I really didn't care as I was just having the time of my life blasting dudes away.
