Review

Save load! Save save load save load. Load, load save load load load load. Load save load. Save save, load load load save! Load. Load load. Save load save load, load load save load save. Load load save save load save. Load Load Load!!!

That's about the only blatant flaw I experienced in Max Payne. You can't maintain enough bullet-time surplus to be able to use it when you legitimately anticipate the enemies, or are just being prudent. Combine this with the fact that after the first few missions, the enemies are accurate enough and well-armed enough that they'll kill you efficiently if you don't react in just the right way, bullet-time or no bullet-time. The result is a game that basically forces you to get killed so that you know how the next encounter is going to occur, then you load the quicksave you made just moments before (you did quicksave moments before right?) and then proceed to actually survive the encounter because you now possess prescient knowledge of what's going to happen and you can use your bullet-time accordingly. Now quicksave again. Wash, rinse, repeat. I refer to this as Learning-By-Death. It's been used from the dawning days of computer gaming. The first examples I can personally remember are from the early Sierra adventure games, King's Quest and Space Quest. These adventure games became notorious for their use of Learning-By-Death, heavily employing it until gamers realized it sucks. In adventure games, this design mechanic punished exploration, essentially taking the adventure out of the adventure game. In an action game like Payne, Learning-By-Death eliminates much of the satisfaction that results from successfully talking softly and carrying a big stick. At one point late in the game, you overhear a boss reprimand his minions for proclaiming that "Max Payne is unstoppable!" Upon hearing this, my first thought was, "what the hell do you mean unstoppable? I was killed a dozen times just getting in the building."

One of the best pieces of evidence I have that the guys at Remedy were both fully aware of and endorsed Learning-By-Death is the fourth chapter in the second act, "Put Out My Flames With Gasoline". This level was obnoxiously irritating, so much so that I almost quit playing, just on principle. Basically, you start out in the entrance of a restaurant, and the place promptly starts blowing up, via a sequence of scripted events. You have to navigate through the restaurant without getting burned or blown up. The problem is that it's basically impossible without first getting burned and blown up so that you know where to go and how fast to go there. Honest to God! I got blown up 8 or 10 times right off the bat before I learned that I had to jump over one of the tables just so. This wasn't just a case of me being obtuse. As best as I can tell, it was the explicit intent of the level designer to kill you repeatedly each step of the way until you'd gotten through each of the scripted hazards. Sure, if you're one of the QA testers, once you've done the level 40 times you can probably get through it top to bottom without dying, but that guy at the circus can balance a dozen spinning plates on sticks while riding a unicycle, too. There's no way you can take someone and sit them down to play that level, not having played it before, and expect anything less than repeated death. I don't care how cool bullet-time is, this level really chaffed my hide, and left me grumpy for the rest of the game.

I think the game could have benefited greatly from better use of positional audio cues, allowing you as the player to more naturally predict the encounters. I was also really irritated that the AI basically has a 360° field of view. You can't sneak up on them, and that's just one more thing that pushes you down the path of frequent and expected death. And it is most certainly a path, a one way path. This is a very linear game, the most linear shooter that I've ever played. I would have welcomed the opportunity to dictate my own course of attack through some of the game's environments. I think the premise of many of the levels would have nicely accommodated a more off-road approach. Think of the way that the Thief games inform you of your objectives and then drop you in the pot, free to stake out the joint and proceed as you see fit. If I could've done this in Payne, I think that I would have ended up with a much more satisfying experience, and probably a much higher opinion of the AI to boot. Or not, I don't know. This might be a chicken-and-egg situation. Maybe Remedy had to lead the player around by a nose ring because their scripting and AI didn't hold up well under less structured circumstances. On the other hand, maybe the AI feels like it's overly rigid because the player is being led around on a leash.

Something I'll expect every single game to have from now on are at least two (2 - yes, TWO) quicksave slots. It saved my butt on several occasions. Basically, each successive quicksave replaces the oldest of the two, and each quickload loads the most recent quicksave. I can easily imagine a 4 or 5 slot queue being practical, but two is good. And they were also nice enough to use keys that weren't right next to each other for quicksave and quickload. It's a little thing and it makes a huge difference. As for the rest of the interface, it all works quite well. You start with a standard FSP rig, and throw in some keys to control bullet-time. No frills. None needed. If you use the "jump" key while moving sideways or backwards, Max performs an evasive roll, as opposed to jumping in that direction. It works for me. The one thing I kept wanting desperately to do and couldn't was lean, ala Thief/System Shock 2/Infiltration. I think leaning should be a requisite UI feature for any game that uses hitscan weapons.

Everybody groaned and made fun of the cornball writing in Max Payne, but it didn't bother me a bit. Was it hard-boiled? Of course. Was it appropriate? As appropriate as anything. The game never betrayed itself and I respect that. I enjoyed the dark comic presentation, and washed it down with coke and popcorn.

I expected to have real performance problems with the game, since it was such a benchmark whore for graphics cards, but I was happily surprised. The framerate chopped only occasionally on scene transitions, and was able to maintain a decent clip most of the time. Admittedly, I didn't find the graphics as jaw-dropping as the press seemed to. Sure, the textures are great, but the game is decidedly frugal with its polygon budget. And the skyboxes are just downright ugly. Still, the explosions are great, the lighting is well done, and the decaling is the best I've seen. (note: I played at 1024x768x32Bit with most settings pegged on a PIII-933 with a ATI Radeon VIVO 64MB DDR)

Was Max Payne fun? As always, that depends on you. For me, playing Max Payne was fun, but it was fun that was watered down by the constant process of quicksaving and quickloading. Now maybe I just suck. Or I didn't make proper use of Max's ability to dodge, roll, etc.. All I know is that I tried to be tactical and got killed a lot. Things got a little smoother when I accepted the fact that my every effort should be focused on making head shots. Sure, you can use your double-fisted Ingram automatic machine guns and go for the lead-riddled body shots, but you're just making things hard for yourself. Head shots, head shots, head shots. Ultimately, though, Max Payne delivers its own brand of violence with enough style that its hard not to like. I can't say I was necessarily inclined to give it another go after finishing, but if you're the kind of person who really sinks their teeth into a shoot-em-up, you'll be hard-pressed to find a tighter package than Max Payne.

Oh - I almost forgot: Kudos to Remedy for making a shooter that ends with a bang instead of a tedious, annoying, jumping-puzzle riddled, uber-boss showdown. Max Payne is just about right in length, and builds to a nice climax without abandoning its core gameplay. (I'm looking at you, Valve.)

Marketing Lies

• "Everything is destructible, and comes apart realistically."

Uh.. if by "everything" they mean "everything that's destructible". You'll find that more things react to your bullets than in most games, but there are more things that don't than do.