Summary
A brilliant action game with a lot of style
The Good
I fell in love with this game almost the very moment I saw it, and I would have purchased it much earlier if it were not for my prejudices against shooters. "Max Payne" is about two things: emotion and action. It is not suitable for thinking or exploring - it lets you play a great action movie and experience yourself all the cool stuff you watched other guys do on the cinema screen. But unlike so many action movies (and games), "Max Payne" has style and content, which, coupled with its straightforward, unsophisticated gameplay, delivers one hell of an experience.
The secret of "Max Payne" lies in its incredible emotional load, in the tension it creates through a simple, yet involving story. "Max Payne" is very personal. You have absolutely no problems in identifying yourself with the hero. The introduction to the game, that shows Max' family brutally murdered by gangsters, just makes the player shiver! Who wouldn't feel the urge to take a gun and to avenge the loss of your dearest ones? Who wouldn't feel Max' despair, who wouldn't understand and support him?
The whole game is actually built around the figure of Max Payne and his revenge. There is no exploring, no interacting with objects, no development of the character. Just shooting. "Max Payne" is concentrated and linear, because otherwise the feeling of "playing a movie" would have been lost, and the action become less intense. There's no time for wandering around, talking or taking things. You have to pursue your course and to persecute the villains who took from you what was the most precious to you, the cause of your happiness. The game is linear and has almost no secrets or hidden levels, it is all about experiencing a story, living a life of a man which evokes your feeling of solidarity, compassion and understanding. Playing "Max Payne" is like watching a heavy, thrilling action movie, rather than exploring a world of a game. And this is not a flaw, just on the contrary - this is what makes the game so special.
What disturbs me in most shooters is their lack of personal approach. Most of them are about missions. You are given a mission and have to complete it, in order to get the next one. But what does this mission mean to YOU? Usually it doesn't mean anything. You are playing a role of somebody - secret agent, soldier, policeman or somebody else. There is a clear distance between the game itself, and the goals it tries to achieve, and the real life of the main character. "Max Payne" is different. You get no missions: your mission is clear to you since the very beginning, and it is YOUR personal mission. This is what makes "Max Payne" so fascinating.
But not only this unusual emotional content makes the game great. Everything in this game is done with utmost attention to style. The story is told in still screens with comics pages on them, which is an original and interesting idea. The dialogues and, most of all, Max Payne's own comments, are cleverly written and convincingly spoken. The graphics of "Max Payne" are a sheer beauty, wonderfully designed, with highly detailed levels. The music is dark, atmospheric and could have been used in a movie. "Max Payne's" high technical quality creates an unforgetable, immersive atmosphere, which accompanies you from the beginning till the very end.
An interesting thing is the usage of humor in "Max Payne". At first sight, it seems there's nothing to laugh about here, but the more you progress into the game, the more you realize it has a double edge. Its stylistic references to classic action movies are obvious, even
too obvious - in fact, so obvious that through the veil of a serious, intense, and dark story pops a glimpse of parody. "Max Payne" deliberately exaggerates all the "cool" elements of setting and style, and at a certain point even throws in some unmasked laughs. Such humorous elements are necessary, because action movies clichés and countless ironic remarks by Max would have quickly become boring otherwise.
Probably the first thing that comes to mind when mentioning "Max Payne" is its famous bullet-time effect. This is indeed a cool feature, but even without it, the pure action gameplay is great enough to satisfy all our needs. The controls are smooth and intuitive, and the usage of 3rd person perspective is in my opinion a great addition. Max can perform moves which are impossible in FPSs, like for example rolling to sides. The difficulty level is perfect - neither too hard nor too easy. Casual encounters with thugs and ferocious boss battles, sniping enemies and shooting things to clear your way, a strictly realistic setting without any monsters, weapons like chainsaw and other silly stuff - the gameplay has as much style as story and premise. All levels are filled with interactive environments: you can turn on and off TV sets, flush toilets, and so on. And finally, there are those fantastic dream sequences, which prove once again "Max Payne" is a game with a double or even triple bottom - you get brainless action, involving story and atmosphere, and hints of a parody in one package.
The Bad
I don't mind at all the size of the game and its linear gameplay. I've said it in many reviews of mine and I'll say that again:
I don't mind games being short. I don't mind games being long. I mind games being uninteresting. As long as the game manages to tell its story appropriately, it is great. Great are the huge
Final Fantasy VII and the enormous
The Longest Journey, great are also the little
Heart of Darkness and the tiny
Loom. Think of this: what do we mean by accusing a game of being too short? Just one thing: it didn't manage to express its creative ideas in such a short time. What do we mean by calling a game too long? That it started repeating itself unnecessarily at a certain point. But can the former case apply to "Max Payne"? I don't think so. "Max Payne's" intense and furious action fill the whole game, and the story ends where it ends, so where is the reason to call it too short? I can't understand statements like "This is not worth the forty bucks because it's too short" or "Sixty bucks is too much for a game which has so many cutscenes and so little gameplay" (a statement I heard recently from a friend of mine about
Metal Gear Solid 2). Pardon me, but since when the value of a work of art depends on its length? If we employed such a scale of values, great short stories by Chekhov, Maupassant and Bradbury or the small pieces by Bach or Shostakovich would be considered a waste, and the greatest masterpiece of all times would be then Wagner's "Der Ring der Nibelungen"...
The Bottom Line
It has style, it is emotional, and its cool gameplay is sure to attract anyone who likes shooters. If you like being immersed by a story, truly identifying yourself with the hero, living the short period of his life and experiencing a beautifully designed game which is almost an action movie, "Max Payne" is for you.
