A little rough around the edges but it’s aged better than most third person shooters from 20+ years ago!
I’ve said it before, but I grew up on Alan Wake and I’ve only recently started playing through the rest of Remedy’s catalog. I liked Quantum Break and Control just fine, but I’d never actually played the Max Payne series proper. Mainly I was afraid of running into game-breaking bugs/glitches on modern hardware, but Steam user darkje was kind enough to compile a bundle of fixes for known issues, which made the experience 100% smooth from start to finish.
(Side-tangent: companies should really be thankful fans put so much effort into ensuring their titles are compatible on modern hardware. The fact that so many legal entities interpret modification/emulation of software as some kind of infringement is ridiculous, especially when regular people do more for software preservation than most companies ever will.)
Max Payne is exactly what it says on the tin. It’s gritty and goofy. Yin and yang, somehow in perfect balance. It starts grim, a pitch black murder scene that leaves Max bereaved of his entire family in a New York minute; you also spend half of the game killing dudes doing the silliest Italian mafioso voices imaginable. It somehow works.
You’ll be forgiven for thinking Max Payne is being tongue-in-cheek about it all. It is being tongue-in-cheek about it all. It’s also NOT being tongue-in-cheek about it, at all. It’s all fun and games until you gotta lock in and slaughter a clown car’s worth of cutthroat mobsters with nothing but pistols akimbo, a bottle of pills, and the John Woo slo-mo button. It somehow works.
Max Payne has aged like a fine wine. You’ll hear this anywhere. It’s almost a universally agreed-upon sentiment: Max Payne f’in owns. Every sommelier parrots the same opinion, and I’m sure at some point you’ll probably think to yourself, “Tch, these people are delusional – no way it’s actually that good…” and then you take a sip, swish it around, savor it… you’ll find the flavor is rich, aromatic, complex; you’re not even really drinking the wine, you’re smelling it through your mouth, breathing the fumes; it hits you like a bullet, and it lingers like a kiss.
To call Max Payne a beautiful game would be an understatement. To appreciate Max Payne’s pre-9/11 rendition of “Noir York City” is to submerse oneself in the fallout of the millennium prior. Unmistakably comic booky, yet players are greeted frequently by the photorealistic visage of Sam Lake, the game’s writer, as the eponymous hero – the immediately iconic grimace rendered timeless yet ancient, the lossy compression of the countenance caked both in rust and patina. One must immerse themselves, not solely in the world of Max Payne, but in the cultural moment whence it was born.
A few of my friends have confided in me that they intend to “wait for the remakes,” and to that, I may have momentarily flown off the proverbial handlebars and into an animal frenzy. Let’s ignore the fact that the remakes are likely (at the very least) another three or four years out from now. DO NOT wait to play the Max Payne remakes, man. Get the originals on Steam, download the patches^, and PLAY. THE. GAMES. This is not a recommendation, this is a REQUIREMENT.
^Do not download the 4K AI-upres textures though, they’re bad.
You’re doing yourself a disservice, in fact, by blue-ballsing yourself into Max Payne abstinence. I am so deathly serious about this. I think you’re genuinely sick in the head if you’re waiting for the remakes.
Let me just cut to the heart of Max Payne right now, okay? YES, the bullet time mechanic is the game’s claim to fame, and YES, it is the best part of the game, and it’s a dopamine rush every time, and it never gets old. You might spend half of your first playthrough using shoot dodge for fun, even if it puts you at a disadvantage – I did the same thing! On my second playthrough, I even made a conscious effort to take my foot off the gas pedal, to save the shoot dodge for context-appropriate situations only. I spent half of that playthrough using shoot dodge anyways, because I realized it’s just that good!
Pro-tip: when you shoot dodge, the weapon in your hand is reloaded automatically; you also CAN’T DIE if you’re using the shoot dodge (you can still take damage, but you can’t drop below 1HP during the animation). This knowledge busts the whole game wide open. You’re never outright rewarded for being aggressive, but you ARE rewarded for being a scrappy lil’ troublemaker and cheating death at every turn. I think that’s basically the same thing?
Also, this is one of those games where you need to be quicksaving all the time. Some people say you don’t need to quicksave, but those people are liars. Quicksave ALWAYS. Quicksave before you walk into a room. Quicksave after a firefight. Quicksave before a firefight. Quicksave if you haven’t quicksaved in the last sixty seconds.
It’s not as clear cut as, say, Hotline Miami – which wouldn’t enter the arena until over a decade later – in how its levels are segmented into distinct floors, each floor another checkpoint. Death is swift in Hotline Miami, players and enemies alike die from a single bullet, or a blunt/sharp object to the head, or what have you. The challenge remains in the choreography: the bloody tango from one floor to the next, each movement, each enemy, each bullet punctuated with austere intentionality. Simple and elegant. Max Payne, by contrast, has all the pieces of a Hotline Miami, but leaves players to assemble these pieces of their own volition.
I wouldn’t call Max Payne’s laissez-faire stance on quicksaving a good or bad thing. Almost every game back then was pretty lax when it came to letting players quicksave. Still, I can’t help but feel as though Max Payne could be released today, and still be regarded as a modern classic, if only there were more actual autosave checkpoints.
It’s because Max Payne’s bullet time + shoot dodge is such a wonderfully simple and gratifying mechanical combo that every other mechanic of the game feels noticeably less because of it. In fact, I’d argue the game pretty much coasts on bullet time + shoot dodge for most of its duration.
I feel like it’s probably unfair to criticize a 20yr+ old game because it wasn’t “forward-thinking” enough or whatever, so I’m gonna stop rambling about this now lmao. GTA3 was released months after Max Payne and the shooting in that game sucks dude. I played GTA3 for like five hours and thought, “Ew, did all third person shooters feel like this back then?” So you can imagine my surprise when I played Max Payne and realized, oh, okay, so they’d already figured out how to make third person shooters work, GTA3 is just Like That for some reason. My point is, Max Payne still feels good. It was good for its time, and it’s good now, and I think it’s okay to admit there was still definite room for improvement.
Ultimately, the best Max Payne review has already been written: Woodaba’s review nails the essentials, especially when it comes to the game’s story. Keep in mind, I’d played every other Remedy game (Death Rally and Alan Wake 2 notwithstanding) before Max Payne, and even I was surprised by how deep this game’s writing gets.
One thing I mentioned in my Alan Wake review is its “surprising amount of restraint” given that the story is literally dealing with fiction transforming reality, but I might have to eat my own words here, because after reading Woodaba’s review, I have to concede that Max Payne exhibits truly Spartan restraint and nuance in regards to its storytelling.
“A superhero with a baseball bat climbs out of a comic strip and into the head of a mob torturer who is a fan of the comic. The apocalyptic snowstorm that blankets the city of New York, and the pervasive Norse Mythology references that litter the game, crawl out of a book about Ragnarok being read by someone in the club Ragna Rock… On every level of its construction, Max Payne is a game about stories insinuating themselves, loudly and quietly, into the real, and it's surprising to find the DNA that runs through Alan Wake, Quantum Break, and Control already fully-formed [and] arguably more deftly and charismatically than any of those later works would manage. The strength of Max Payne is that… all of this is left to crawl around the periphery, only bubbling up very occasionally, allowing the player to put together the disparate images in their head, like a detective attempting to solve a mystery by staring at connected pins on a bulletin board.” Source (Woodaba's review again... dummy)
The last bit reads as almost prophetic now, as Saga’s mind place in Alan Wake 2 literally asks players to solve a mystery by staring at connected pins on a bulletin board.
And honestly? I understand why people would be turned off by Remedy’s sudden veer from Max Payne to Alan Wake. That’s not to say it wasn’t an interesting direction, but that game’s insistence on bald-faced horror tropes and random jumpscares definitely feels at odds with Max Payne’s understated dread and clandestine mysteries.
I once created a “Dynamic Collection” in my Steam library which separates games by genre, or features, or user-generated tags. For some reason, Max Payne ended up in “Horror”. After playing through it twice now, I think I understand why.
There’s this pervasive mood and unease behind each encounter. When you’re left to your own devices, just navigating from one end of a level to another, this odd disquiet fills the space between. This unearthly ambience creeps in. Ghostly wails and retches in earshot echo from nowhere in particular, their origin left ambiguous. The criminal underworld of Max Payne isn’t just the seedy underbelly of a comic book New York wasteland, but a haunted concrete graveyard, the fog rolling in slowly as the living dead shuffle into line with guns and grenades, ready to die again.
The comic book influence leaks into Max Payne through Valkyr, a green mystery substance that remains the center of the game’s conspiratorial narrative. You’ll find numerous references to it around New York, through graffiti, through backroom drug deals waiting to happen and, eventually, through the main plot.
“The flesh of fallen angels,” is a common recurring phrase throughout Max Payne, heard in TV shows, in non-sequitur enemy dialogue, and in hallucinations; players will specifically hear Max Payne’s doppelganger repeat the phrase in the second nightmare. These words are intrinsically linked with Valkyr, and “fallen angels” likely refers to demons, in a mythological sense. I almost wonder if the line is meant to refer to the game’s original concept of Valkyr turning people into mutants, or “freaking zombie demons from outer space”.
The story makes sweeping allusions to these bizarre ideas: you might believe Jack Lupino’s lunacy during your first excursion to RagnaRock; or you could believe that Max Payne’s nightmares express some repressed trauma, and maybe he actually was the one who killed his wife and child in the first place; or maybe, this entire thing really is a computer game?
There’s ultimately no apotheosis here, no mind-blowing plot twist or fourth wall break that completely recontextualizes the metanarrative (well, there is that one, but it’s more of a gag than a revelation) but that’s the beauty of it, yeah? Max Payne doesn’t need to be a game with some earth-shattering eldritch truth at its center; I mean, yeah, there’s more than a few moments where Sam Lake leans over and whispers into the player’s ear, “Okay, but wouldn’t it be messed up if it was…?” but it doesn’t lead to anything, and it doesn’t need to lead to anything. It remains firmly situated in its crime noir revenge plot and is arguably all the better for it.
Max Payne earned its legendary status for a reason. You don’t get this kind of cult following on a bluff.
DO NOT WAIT FOR THE REMAKES!!!!!! PLAY THE ORIGINALS!!!!!!
I’ve said it before, but I grew up on Alan Wake and I’ve only recently started playing through the rest of Remedy’s catalog. I liked Quantum Break and Control just fine, but I’d never actually played the Max Payne series proper. Mainly I was afraid of running into game-breaking bugs/glitches on modern hardware, but Steam user darkje was kind enough to compile a bundle of fixes for known issues, which made the experience 100% smooth from start to finish.
(Side-tangent: companies should really be thankful fans put so much effort into ensuring their titles are compatible on modern hardware. The fact that so many legal entities interpret modification/emulation of software as some kind of infringement is ridiculous, especially when regular people do more for software preservation than most companies ever will.)
Max Payne is exactly what it says on the tin. It’s gritty and goofy. Yin and yang, somehow in perfect balance. It starts grim, a pitch black murder scene that leaves Max bereaved of his entire family in a New York minute; you also spend half of the game killing dudes doing the silliest Italian mafioso voices imaginable. It somehow works.
You’ll be forgiven for thinking Max Payne is being tongue-in-cheek about it all. It is being tongue-in-cheek about it all. It’s also NOT being tongue-in-cheek about it, at all. It’s all fun and games until you gotta lock in and slaughter a clown car’s worth of cutthroat mobsters with nothing but pistols akimbo, a bottle of pills, and the John Woo slo-mo button. It somehow works.
Max Payne has aged like a fine wine. You’ll hear this anywhere. It’s almost a universally agreed-upon sentiment: Max Payne f’in owns. Every sommelier parrots the same opinion, and I’m sure at some point you’ll probably think to yourself, “Tch, these people are delusional – no way it’s actually that good…” and then you take a sip, swish it around, savor it… you’ll find the flavor is rich, aromatic, complex; you’re not even really drinking the wine, you’re smelling it through your mouth, breathing the fumes; it hits you like a bullet, and it lingers like a kiss.
To call Max Payne a beautiful game would be an understatement. To appreciate Max Payne’s pre-9/11 rendition of “Noir York City” is to submerse oneself in the fallout of the millennium prior. Unmistakably comic booky, yet players are greeted frequently by the photorealistic visage of Sam Lake, the game’s writer, as the eponymous hero – the immediately iconic grimace rendered timeless yet ancient, the lossy compression of the countenance caked both in rust and patina. One must immerse themselves, not solely in the world of Max Payne, but in the cultural moment whence it was born.
A few of my friends have confided in me that they intend to “wait for the remakes,” and to that, I may have momentarily flown off the proverbial handlebars and into an animal frenzy. Let’s ignore the fact that the remakes are likely (at the very least) another three or four years out from now. DO NOT wait to play the Max Payne remakes, man. Get the originals on Steam, download the patches^, and PLAY. THE. GAMES. This is not a recommendation, this is a REQUIREMENT.
^Do not download the 4K AI-upres textures though, they’re bad.
You’re doing yourself a disservice, in fact, by blue-ballsing yourself into Max Payne abstinence. I am so deathly serious about this. I think you’re genuinely sick in the head if you’re waiting for the remakes.
Let me just cut to the heart of Max Payne right now, okay? YES, the bullet time mechanic is the game’s claim to fame, and YES, it is the best part of the game, and it’s a dopamine rush every time, and it never gets old. You might spend half of your first playthrough using shoot dodge for fun, even if it puts you at a disadvantage – I did the same thing! On my second playthrough, I even made a conscious effort to take my foot off the gas pedal, to save the shoot dodge for context-appropriate situations only. I spent half of that playthrough using shoot dodge anyways, because I realized it’s just that good!
Pro-tip: when you shoot dodge, the weapon in your hand is reloaded automatically; you also CAN’T DIE if you’re using the shoot dodge (you can still take damage, but you can’t drop below 1HP during the animation). This knowledge busts the whole game wide open. You’re never outright rewarded for being aggressive, but you ARE rewarded for being a scrappy lil’ troublemaker and cheating death at every turn. I think that’s basically the same thing?
Also, this is one of those games where you need to be quicksaving all the time. Some people say you don’t need to quicksave, but those people are liars. Quicksave ALWAYS. Quicksave before you walk into a room. Quicksave after a firefight. Quicksave before a firefight. Quicksave if you haven’t quicksaved in the last sixty seconds.
It’s not as clear cut as, say, Hotline Miami – which wouldn’t enter the arena until over a decade later – in how its levels are segmented into distinct floors, each floor another checkpoint. Death is swift in Hotline Miami, players and enemies alike die from a single bullet, or a blunt/sharp object to the head, or what have you. The challenge remains in the choreography: the bloody tango from one floor to the next, each movement, each enemy, each bullet punctuated with austere intentionality. Simple and elegant. Max Payne, by contrast, has all the pieces of a Hotline Miami, but leaves players to assemble these pieces of their own volition.
I wouldn’t call Max Payne’s laissez-faire stance on quicksaving a good or bad thing. Almost every game back then was pretty lax when it came to letting players quicksave. Still, I can’t help but feel as though Max Payne could be released today, and still be regarded as a modern classic, if only there were more actual autosave checkpoints.
It’s because Max Payne’s bullet time + shoot dodge is such a wonderfully simple and gratifying mechanical combo that every other mechanic of the game feels noticeably less because of it. In fact, I’d argue the game pretty much coasts on bullet time + shoot dodge for most of its duration.
I feel like it’s probably unfair to criticize a 20yr+ old game because it wasn’t “forward-thinking” enough or whatever, so I’m gonna stop rambling about this now lmao. GTA3 was released months after Max Payne and the shooting in that game sucks dude. I played GTA3 for like five hours and thought, “Ew, did all third person shooters feel like this back then?” So you can imagine my surprise when I played Max Payne and realized, oh, okay, so they’d already figured out how to make third person shooters work, GTA3 is just Like That for some reason. My point is, Max Payne still feels good. It was good for its time, and it’s good now, and I think it’s okay to admit there was still definite room for improvement.
Ultimately, the best Max Payne review has already been written: Woodaba’s review nails the essentials, especially when it comes to the game’s story. Keep in mind, I’d played every other Remedy game (Death Rally and Alan Wake 2 notwithstanding) before Max Payne, and even I was surprised by how deep this game’s writing gets.
One thing I mentioned in my Alan Wake review is its “surprising amount of restraint” given that the story is literally dealing with fiction transforming reality, but I might have to eat my own words here, because after reading Woodaba’s review, I have to concede that Max Payne exhibits truly Spartan restraint and nuance in regards to its storytelling.
“A superhero with a baseball bat climbs out of a comic strip and into the head of a mob torturer who is a fan of the comic. The apocalyptic snowstorm that blankets the city of New York, and the pervasive Norse Mythology references that litter the game, crawl out of a book about Ragnarok being read by someone in the club Ragna Rock… On every level of its construction, Max Payne is a game about stories insinuating themselves, loudly and quietly, into the real, and it's surprising to find the DNA that runs through Alan Wake, Quantum Break, and Control already fully-formed [and] arguably more deftly and charismatically than any of those later works would manage. The strength of Max Payne is that… all of this is left to crawl around the periphery, only bubbling up very occasionally, allowing the player to put together the disparate images in their head, like a detective attempting to solve a mystery by staring at connected pins on a bulletin board.” Source (Woodaba's review again... dummy)
The last bit reads as almost prophetic now, as Saga’s mind place in Alan Wake 2 literally asks players to solve a mystery by staring at connected pins on a bulletin board.
And honestly? I understand why people would be turned off by Remedy’s sudden veer from Max Payne to Alan Wake. That’s not to say it wasn’t an interesting direction, but that game’s insistence on bald-faced horror tropes and random jumpscares definitely feels at odds with Max Payne’s understated dread and clandestine mysteries.
I once created a “Dynamic Collection” in my Steam library which separates games by genre, or features, or user-generated tags. For some reason, Max Payne ended up in “Horror”. After playing through it twice now, I think I understand why.
There’s this pervasive mood and unease behind each encounter. When you’re left to your own devices, just navigating from one end of a level to another, this odd disquiet fills the space between. This unearthly ambience creeps in. Ghostly wails and retches in earshot echo from nowhere in particular, their origin left ambiguous. The criminal underworld of Max Payne isn’t just the seedy underbelly of a comic book New York wasteland, but a haunted concrete graveyard, the fog rolling in slowly as the living dead shuffle into line with guns and grenades, ready to die again.
The comic book influence leaks into Max Payne through Valkyr, a green mystery substance that remains the center of the game’s conspiratorial narrative. You’ll find numerous references to it around New York, through graffiti, through backroom drug deals waiting to happen and, eventually, through the main plot.
“The flesh of fallen angels,” is a common recurring phrase throughout Max Payne, heard in TV shows, in non-sequitur enemy dialogue, and in hallucinations; players will specifically hear Max Payne’s doppelganger repeat the phrase in the second nightmare. These words are intrinsically linked with Valkyr, and “fallen angels” likely refers to demons, in a mythological sense. I almost wonder if the line is meant to refer to the game’s original concept of Valkyr turning people into mutants, or “freaking zombie demons from outer space”.
The story makes sweeping allusions to these bizarre ideas: you might believe Jack Lupino’s lunacy during your first excursion to RagnaRock; or you could believe that Max Payne’s nightmares express some repressed trauma, and maybe he actually was the one who killed his wife and child in the first place; or maybe, this entire thing really is a computer game?
There’s ultimately no apotheosis here, no mind-blowing plot twist or fourth wall break that completely recontextualizes the metanarrative (well, there is that one, but it’s more of a gag than a revelation) but that’s the beauty of it, yeah? Max Payne doesn’t need to be a game with some earth-shattering eldritch truth at its center; I mean, yeah, there’s more than a few moments where Sam Lake leans over and whispers into the player’s ear, “Okay, but wouldn’t it be messed up if it was…?” but it doesn’t lead to anything, and it doesn’t need to lead to anything. It remains firmly situated in its crime noir revenge plot and is arguably all the better for it.
Max Payne earned its legendary status for a reason. You don’t get this kind of cult following on a bluff.
DO NOT WAIT FOR THE REMAKES!!!!!! PLAY THE ORIGINALS!!!!!!