Max Payne

2025-03-30
"He could run, but with a bullet in his stomach like a broken bottle of Tabasco, he was quickly running out of time."

Christ, you gotta love the writing in Max Payne. It vacillates between actual poetry and then Tabasco-ass lines like the one above that trip all over themselves with their comical similes. And of course what elevates it is that it's all delivered perfectly straight by the legend, James McCaffrey. A moment of silence if you will because god damn his voice elevates this game SO much from what it could have been otherwise. The good lines are made amazing and the bad lines are somehow still great. And that's important because I see Max Payne as a game of two halves. One half is the studio developing and flexing its cinematic chops and Sam Lake's writing channeled through McCaffrey fits squarely in this camp. And the other half is the John Woo, slow-mo, bullet-time, two-shots-and-you're-dead minute-to-minute gameplay.

I jumped on the Max Payne Train in 2003 with Max Payne 2. I must have played that demo hundreds of times before I finally bought it. I was instantly enamored with everything about it. And it's fascinating to come back 20 years later and finally play Max Payne and see the blueprint for everything in 2 is laid down in 1. The aforementioned writing, the melodramatic, noir tone, the weird in-universe soap operas on the TV, dream sequences and drug addictions, and cool, cool cutscenes. And yes, every single one of these things is refined or perfected in 2, whereas here they can be pretty rough. And yet, it's still great. It was great then when no one was doing anything with this much cinema or storytelling except maybe Valve. And in 2025, stacked up against the utter avalanche of story-focused games that have come since, Max Payne still has its own unique tone with its baby murders, government conspiracies, wise-cracking mafiosos, and of course self-hating, gravelly-voiced Max himself that absolutely still hold up.

But the Payne Train but also must take you through John Woo station. It's amazing coming back to these games 20 years later because you realize it's a game utterly designed around quick-saves. In a vacuum, Max Payne is a brutally hard game where any schmuck with a gun can take you out in a couple of shots with a Beretta, nevermind an Uzi (which will roast you nigh-instantly). Add insult to injury there are numerous sections where they script enemies popping up from behind or a grenade being lobbed at you that you absolutely will die to unless you already know they're coming. But that's the joy: you will know they're coming...eventually. You run in, die to the guy in the corner. Run in a different way, shoot corner-guy, die to guy-behind-box. Run in a third way, shoot box-boy, THEN corner-guy. Then die anyway. Run it back, over and over, each time learning exactly where everyone is and how the encounter will play out. Each encounter then is almost like a puzzle where the goal is to use your full arsenal of pistols, shotguns, rifles, grenades, and --of course-- slow-mo dives to get through a room, taking as little damage as possible in the process. The quick-save/load is so fast on modern computers it turns into almost a game of Warioware with its frenetic, fast-paced, start-stop-start-stop gameplay. It's fantastic. Sure, there are some dumb and frustrating encounters. And, yeah, about half the environments in the game are dirty, dingy, repetitive Finnish-renditions of NYC corridors. But played in quick bursts of 30 minutes or an hour at a time and I was loving it.

Sure I could take potshots at the amateur quality of the models in the comic-panel cutscenes, or the fucking godawful platforming in the dream sequences, listening to that baby wail over and over and over as I miss jumping on the wire-thin next platform for the 100th time--OK, I guess I just fully did take that potshot but FUCK that section--my POINT is, though, that Max Payne rules, warts and all. I mean I'm a Max Payne 3 apologist after all, how could I hate a Max Payne that still has Remedy's weird charm? I couldn't. I don't. I love it. It's great. Above all else I'm excited to finally go back and replay Max Payne 2. Mona, my sweet, I'm coming home like a broken bottle of Tobasco sauce.