Max Payne

[jamie1992]

http://www.rockstargames.com/maxpayne/

Awesome game brought me hours of enjoyment and the comic style intros etc are ace to say the least.

[MeanderingBeing]

Hell














Yes

[audioave10]

Even though I don't normally like 3rd person games...this was done so
well I enjoyed it. The camera placement should be a lesson to all developers! Great weapons too.

[Balious]

I enjoy Max Payne quite abit. Normally watched my brother play it.

This game confuses me a little though especially the dream part.

Also couldn't max payne 2 and this one actually be together?

[NatVac]

This Max Payne review of mine was sent late December 2001 to friends via email. Warning: Contains spoiled plot points, in more ways than one. Also: It's a personal opinion -- YOWV (your opinion WILL vary).

¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
I have very mixed feelings about this game.

Excellent graphics. Pretty good animations and good use of
dynamic lighting. Decent physics. I like the fact that ducking
improves the aim on the sniper rifle. It's cool in lots of
ways: Shoot the projector, and the projected image disappears.
Throw a grenade in a room and the pictures come off the walls.
A lot of items work, like setting off the metal detectors with
your heavy weaponry.

You can actually jump onto/over medium-sized boxes and small
fences. (Yay!) But you can't climb or crawl through the
climbable or crawl-throughable. (Boo! Hiss!)

Some good writing in the main story and in the vignettes. Move
slowly and you'll hear some great humor -- on one stairwell I
laughed so loudly that if the game had audio feedback those
baddies would have known I was there. And there's some
self-referential humor that made me laugh twice in the same
place.

But the game's a dumbed-down version of Half-Life. There are
crates. There are breakable crates, some of which have health
and ammo. Sometimes you'll even find health and ammo on top of
stacks of crates, in places where no one but a game programmer
would put them.

There's even the obligatory
get-captured-midway-through-the-game-and-start-over cliche.
Oops, my mistake; there are TWO such cliches! And you have to
live through two drug trips (this permits them to reuse the same
level over and over and over). And you'll know that when the
corridors start stretching out to infinity that the game authors
are (pardon the pun) simply stretching the game out.

The AI is so bad that you can strafe right into a wall in the
corridor, and the grenade thrower will turn and throw the
grenade into the wall next to him -- and then stand there until
his body goes flying. But maybe that's intentional; make the
player an easy target for the next guy by doubling him over with
laughter.

It's a stupid third-person bloodfest. I can't sneak; ducking
and attempting to move forward results in standing and CLOMPING
forward. Man, Max is noisy! But that doesn't matter to the
enemy -- they're deaf until you trigger the trip-point.

They are more than deaf. They are stooopid killing machines. I
can surprise one, but it (not he) turns instantly and hits me
with both barrels. I quickly grew tired of putting 6 to 8 Colt
Commando bullets in the guy's head without killing him, but one
shotgun shot or CC bullet from him and I was having that
accursed out-of-body experience again. Oh, but use a sniper
rifle and shoot him in the hand. He'll die instantly.
Riiiiiight.

And what is it with these "realistic" games, anyway? If you're
going to make the weapons and environment realistic, make the
damage realistic. None of this
he's-a-big-boss-baddie-so-he's-worth-9000-hit-points crap. Not
if he's human, anyway. Give them bullet-proof vests, maybe --
but even then, let them get knocked around. I miss Deus Ex,
where the baddies also got tougher as the game progressed -- but
for a good reason.

There is an annoyance of stupid jumping puzzles (ONE is too many
-- didn't anyone learn from Half-Life?), simply to make the game
longer. I had enough trouble playing the game in third person,
and the special effects really made me sick.

Real puzzles were few and wimpy.

The game only crashed when I clicked the return-to-game symbol
after re-viewing a graphic-novel cutscene. But it did almost
every time, so I took Henny Youngman's doctor's advice and
stopped doing that.

Bad level design issues:

On my way to the cargo ship: the load carrier started moving
toward me, so I ran backwards around the corner. The load
carrier stalled with the engine running because of this, and I
couldn't proceed with the game. I had to reload a previous
version. I felt penalized for being clever.

I'd go through a lot of effort to jump onto a ledge where the
windows were broken from a gun battle I had with a bad guy
inside. Then I couldn't get in! I'm small enough if I duck,
but moving forward results in my standing up. Grrr!

I want the ability to set the difficulty level. Make
auto-adjust a choice, just like it is with Unreal Tournament.
Why? Because I despise third-person shooters with a focus on
senseless* violence. (If I wanted to see John Woo movies I'd
make an appointment with a psychiatrist.)

*Senseless = lots of bullets that don't do much damage. What
did you think I meant?

And what's with the white dot? So many times I had no clue
where I was shooting due to background color conflict. Other
times the white dot was clearly on the target, but I was merely
putting lead into the balcony railing.

I desperately wished to disable the mouse scroll wheel, since I
use the wheel button to move backward. Frequently I'd die
because the game would think I wanted to change weapons, so I'd
find myself waving a baseball bat at the enemy fifty yards away.
They didn't think it was funny. Sigh -- neither did I.

The weapon order is screwed up. The up was down, and vice
versa. Then the weapons in a specific category were the reverse
of that! Instead of moving directly from shotgun to Desert
Eagle, I got the wimpy Baretta. But wait! There's more! What
moron decided that the Jack Hammer was a better weapon than the
Colt Commando or the dual Ingrams? That's only true if the
enemy is in your face -- and trust me: if that's the case, your
carcass has been steaming in the snow a while.

Personal rant: I'm tired of pentagram and incantation stuff
meant to "frighten" me. It was old with the Doom series, and
Carmack knew it; that's why Quake/Quake II didn't use it. And
it _really got old_ when I had to hear it over and over -- I
couldn't skip the in-game cutscenes when I was fighting Jack
Lupino and I kept dying a lot. A lot! A HELL OF A LOT! (Pard
the pun again.)

Wow, this is way too long. I guess the game's rubbing off on
me. "Nothing is a cliche when it's happening to you." Unless
you're playing Max Payne. Maybe I'll finish it some day.

¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
I did eventually finish it. For completeness, here's my closing "I'm glad it's over" commentary:

¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
Boy, did they telegraph the solution to the end-game puzzle!
Serious Sam was much better simply because you had to figure it
out. Max Payne gave you two of the four restraining ropes, so
I busted the other two, then put an M79 round into the radio
tower. Bingo.

Unlike Max, I don't want revenge, I want justice -- and that's
the difference between a novel/movie and an interactive game.
In the novel/movie, I'm finding out about someone else. In the
game, I'm living it. I hate the game making choices for me that
I would never make.

And what's the deal with that Horne witch not dying with two
sniper shots to the head at the top of the long stairs? Oh,
she's got to live so you can experience the end game. Oh.

Cute reference to "that other monopoly".

[audioave10]

A masterfull review right down to the nitty-gritty. It's so honest that
there is no doubt you got NO money from a developer for it. The
actual reasons I never completed it. I did think it looked great at the time but I'm a graphics ho.