Was it Good? - Max Payne

[Music] [Applause] did you lose all units emergency office they were all dead the final gunshot was an exclamation mark to everything that had led to this point I released my finger from the trigger and then it was over a broken man with nothing to lose a strange new drug flooding the streets and a military cover-up reaching all the way to the top Max Payne is a film Noir graphic novel hard-boiled detective story with a side helping a video game it's highly rated and highly spoken of still with some great memories but are we remembering the quality of the story or the fun of the actual game let's find out welcome I'm Josh Drive Hayes join me as we go back to 2001 and replay the third person action shooter Max Payne I'll be finishing every level re-watching all the cutscenes and then analyzing the character's Story gameplay and overall experience we'll find out what still holds up what's aged badly and what was never really good to begin with I'll break down the many Norse mythology references and critique the storytelling on a more General and then hyper-focused scale and then answer the simple question Max Payne was it any good as usual a massive thank you to all the supporters on patreon YouTube and twitch who keep the channel alive you can find out how to support in the video description and more information at the end for now let's go undercover in a journey to avenge our family Max Payne was a third person shooter released for Windows PC in 2001 it was ported to PlayStation 2 and Xbox by Rockstar Games in the same year and then one year later it released on Mac there was also a Gameboy Advance version in 2003 and then a decade later in 2012 a mobile Port all versions with the exception of the Game Boy are essentially the same but the PC had larger open Connected areas than the PlayStation 2 was able to handle so the large PC levels are split up into smaller sections for the consoles the PC version also gave you the ability to quick save and quick load anywhere in the game while the consoles had save points between levels and checkpoints within the levels and this will become a massive issue toward the more difficult end game for this video I'll be playing the PC version which is still available on Steam however a word of warning for anyone feeling that nostalgic itch the steam version does not work very well you need to download a few sound patches to get all the voice acting and to prevent any audio glitches and then some stability patches to prove event random crashing you also need to manually add the window command if you want to play the game in windowed mode but I won't hold this against the game itself it's simply a symptom of older software running on Modern Hardware before we dive into the game Let's address one of the darker aspects of the Max Payne Legacy while the game did go on to spawn Max Payne 2 and 3 which are both well received games in 2008 they did release a film starring Mark Wahlberg which very Loosely follows the plot of the first game it's visually fine but there's a far worse job of telling the same story it also opens two terrible reviews so let's ignore this film for Now launch it up there's only one difficulty fugitive you have to complete the game to unlock the rest of the difficulty settings so let's dive in I released my finger from the trigger and then it was over to make any kind of sense of it I need to go back three years back to the night the pain started I was still in the force back then NYPD Manhattan midtown North Precinct Hell's Kitchen so when are you coming to work for me detective pain you'd make me work undercover in some hell hole sorry Alex showing the baby come first the story of Max Payne is told in three ways over the course of about three days by gameplay by in-game rendered cutscene and then by graphic novel style panels with a voice over these usually pop up between missions or whenever you interact with a TV or radio when you're on the graphic novel cut scenes on PC only you have an old DVD style menu to pause play Skip forward or back a panel or skip entirely giving the player the power to progress reading at their own pace or to go back and watch a panel again which is nice and doing it thematically through the buttons is a lovely touch it makes you feel like a detective spooling through old footage trying to piece together a crime and this fits because we started with the scene on the building roof and then a flashback so all this has already happened we are just catching up to where we are now the panels themselves have become iconic with the Max Payne brand and while they are a memorable visual choice they weren't intended that way they were used because it was simply cheaper than making a load of in-game cutscenes Max Payne was the second game from remedy entertainment and the budget was heavily limited the director also said that having a huge collection of graphic panels ready at any moment meant they could cut them around and change the story as they went which made revisions super easy the panels themselves also aren't artists drawings they are real photos of people run through a graphic novel style filter now when the game was made because the budget wasn't huge they couldn't hire that many actors so the lead writer and level designer Sam Lake posed as Max Payne himself both in the panels and in the texture for Max's face in the game in a nice Cameo Sam's mother would herself feature as the model for the game's antagonist Nicole horn Sam however didn't do the voice acting for that they got American actor James McAfee Sam and James would work together as writer and voice Talent later on the game Alan Wake the panels in max pay in a dark and often somber enhancing the film Noir style Vibe they do a great job of building an oppressive feeling which can unfortunately sometimes contrast sharply with the clunky feeling of the in-game rendered cutscenes before starting the game proper there is a tutorial section no connection to the actual story it's purely mechanical run jump shoot switch weapons interact with objects opening these van doors shows how the character model has weight and heft in the world as the doors cannot open through us we shoot this padlock off a door and then get shown the most memorable feature of the game the bullet time combat but before we talk about bullet time we need to talk about general movement the feeling of moment-to-moment gameplay is extremely basic the jump mechanic is used about three times in the whole game and this is only ever to get across trivial platforming obstacles like a broken walkway or climbing a very simple set of objects there's no climbing or pulling yourself up on two ledges there's also a strange glitch where you will stick to the wall even while running away from them but we'll see more of this later movement in Max Payne is very very basic but that's fine because it's mostly a story game so from moving we now go on to shooting gun plays simple and functional aim and shoot but what sets the game apart is the bullet time mechanic if you dive while moving you will perform a shoot Dodge a slow-mo dive roll and if you activate bullet time or standing still you'll just enter a general slo-mo mode the slo-mo effect lasts as long as the small hourglass timer here shows you refill this timer by killing enemies not in slow-mo mode while in slow-mo you can aim your shots better avoid incoming fire and if you do manage to kill an enemy with an impressive dive or headshot you'll get a cinematic kill cam now Max Payne released two years after the Matrix a film which really pushed bullet time's slow-mo action sequences into the public eye although short tangent The Matrix was not the first film to use this effect as the original blade had a slow-mo gunshot scene just one year earlier bullet time in Max Payne may slow things down but it also lets you see the physics of the guns the bullets fired are actual projectiles which are spawned in the barrels and traveled through the game world with actual travel time so shooting at a moving enemy means you need to lead your shots and it also means if you react fast enough you can dodge incoming bullets having the game track bullets as projectiles lends a feeling of weight to a gunfight you don't just hear The Gunshot you see the bullets whiz past you know how close to dying you were in fact bullet time lets you get a lovely view of exactly how many projectiles a shotgun or machine gun puts out and the bullet Trails let you easily track your shots through the air the bullet time is fun it makes lining up shots super easy but it's not without flaws as we'll see later it's also never specifically needed in the game there are no sections which cannot be finished at full speed so it's a fun addition but the game could exist without it further in the tutorial we see a button called enemy dispenser and while this is very overtly breaking the fourth wall it does fit Max Payne is a very self-aware game even the name Max Payne is a homonym it's very much channeling the energy of cheesy 1980s pulp detective novels and some of the more absurd situations especially the internal drugged sequences push it into the realm of dark comedy at the end of the tutorial we get a sniper rifle Zoom with e you zoom while holding and then reset set to a non-zoom with a second e-press it's a clunky and awkward way of working especially when you have a whole keyboard to work with a sniper is always a one-hit kill and a hit with a zoomed in Sniper always launches a bullet cam following the shot interestingly the sniper is the only gun which does not spawn a projectile in the game World this is a hit scan weapon when you click to fire it simply checks if there is an enemy on the Crosshair if there is the enemy will die this is also why the bullet cam of the sniper shot freezes all other enemy movement while the camera flies through the air unlike the regular bullet time which just slows everything down now as you take damage you'll lose health and you refill health by taking painkillers pills found in medicine cabinets around the world and sometimes very rarely dropped by enemies each use of a painkiller restores 25 of your life but it's not instant there's a few second delay of working time so you still need to find cover while you are popping some pills tutorial done let's go and meet Max see Alex we're still on for poker Thursday night right like taking candy from a baby notice how each panel had a baby reference even though the third was a joke strong narrative setup we open in your home Max has returned from work and something is wrong there is graffiti on the wall that at a V with a vertical needle through it so we check the cupboard and grab a gun and then the phone rings notice the awkward tilt of the camera in filmmaking this was known as a Dutch angle it's done to cause unease in the viewer because Max Payne is first and foremost about telling a story and making the player feel something the gameplay is just a vehicle for the emotional narrative you can't get into your bedroom through the bathroom so you try the baby's room improves NYPD drops no I know no no no God no please Michelle oh baby so a rather dark opening Max's wife and baby have been murdered by crazed drug addicts who broke into their home so Max starts focusing on drug related cases and goes undercover to infiltrate the mob find the top dealers and take revenge for his family the writing is filled with metaphor similes and more cliches then you can shake a stick at in fact it's so heavy-handed in its emulation of the 1980s detective genre it sometimes borders on parody so we're undercover deep in the punchinello mob family and only two people know our real identity our colleague Alex and some guy called Bibi the drug connected to our family's death is known as valkyr it's been three long years but we finally have a break in the valkyr case BB has arranged for us to meet Alex at a subway station but when we arrive Alex is nowhere to be seen unfortunately for us we explore around and find a dead body and then some gangsters so we have to fight our way out first physics issue heading down ramps or steps doubles your speed and trying to move sideways while on any incline just sends you flying down this is actually an issue caused by having Hardware acceleration on as some of the in-game movement was tied to the in-game frame rate and if your frame rate is too high you mess up the engine we saved this policeman follow him to escape and as he runs through a door he then gets peppered with bullets this is a very nice way of teaching the player don't run through doors when you don't know what's on the other side because if you do you'll likely die the only issue with this is the game doesn't really have a mechanic to safely or cautiously open doors and peek in doors are physical objects they swing open as you walk into them so your only real option is to dive through slow-mo style all guns blazing and hope to kill whoever's behind there first before they kill you the trains aren't running so we have to power them back on we find a locked gate that narratively we should have found earlier and this highlights a dissonance between the story and the gameplay the strength of Max Payne is undoubtedly the story The gameplay is simply a vehicle to drive it forward if you remove the story The gameplay simply isn't that strong on its own especially as you're competing with Metal Gear Solid 2 and Devil May cry in the same year which themselves do a far better job of stealth and shooting or flashy action combat now I'm sure many of you watching this enjoyed playing Max Payne when you were younger you've got good memories so do I but it's after this full replay I think my fair opinion is while Max Payne is a great overall experience it's not necessarily a very good video game the non-mechanical parts of the story The Narrative the voice acting the graphic novel Transitions and the general Ambience within the level design both world and dialogue are top-notch but the gameplay mechanics the movement the jumping the interaction the Gunplay are mostly average with brief flashes of both awfulness and Brilliance the exit from the subway is locked so we drive this maintenance car into a boarded up tunnel and Escape through the rubble occasionally getting caught on the rails along the floor the impressive technical achievement of we modeled the rails in 3D is quickly negated by the fact that you'll get caught on any Edge at all that's even even slightly raised and having to jump over what should be a walkable surface feels awkward in fact there are small flourishes like this everywhere both good and bad from the awkward catching of the modeled rails to the rather nice falling particle effects if you shoot the tiled ceiling Max Payne has many small touches which make the world feel fleshed out on a moment-to-moment level like the toilets flushing or the showers turning on they are completely irrelevant to the story or the mechanics but they are relevant to the world itself and I'll expand on this later because it could have been used to much better effect we find the door surrounded by some bombs and realize we've accidentally stumbled onto a major bank robbery they are drilling into the Vault via the sewers so we shoot our way in and discover they've not stolen money but bonds of the Acer Corporation a business that will become much more relevant later in the game and while we are in the bank the phone rings and it's the police [Music] we come to you now live from the crime scene right back at you surrender immediately sure thing Jim me and the boys have been talking and everyone's real sorry they'll never do it again being placed at the scene of a bank robbery wouldn't have tipped the odds in my favor you'd think there'd be a secret code to explain to the chief of police that you're actually undercover in the punchinello family while tracking the supply of valkyr and you've been placed at this bank robbery by no fault of your own through your colleague BB setting up a meeting but no Max decides to go it alone and fight back out of the bank through more mob guys I do however love this moment when enemies push a bench across the top of some stairs and throw a grenade at you it's small touches like this which make the enemies feel like thinking beings and not just NPC bullet sponges unfortunately Dynamic environmental combat events like this only happen about two or three times in the entire game the vast majority of the combat is enemy runs around corner to preset position stands still and shoots at you and then you shoot back using the bomb Detonator we found in the bank we blow this door wide open and this super slow-mo cut scene was actually added in as a direct homage to The Matrix referencing the elevator door explosion scene we then finally meet our contact Alex hold it Max Jesus you almost gave me a heart attack I nearly shot you Alex am I glad to see you what the hell's going on they're more corpses here than at the city morgue it's an armed robbery a tunnel job straight to the Roscoe Bank ball through the old station wall is this white this is lupino's gig this is lupino's doing lupino's men really you sure know how to pick a place it's locked we gotta get out of here if it's Lupino it's there's nothing I could do he was dead I could tell by the empty accusing stare of his eyes the plot thickens with Alex killed only Bibi knows that we're undercover and it was Bibi who organized this meeting meaning Bibi is likely a bad guy the subway is swarmed with more enemies and I die and this is where I discover that the PC version does not have checkpoints even after cutscenes or important moments in fact you can only ever restart from your last quick save and I haven't saved at all so now I am quick saving constantly here's a nice touch when you are low on health you'll begin limping but only for a few seconds before you get used to the pain I get back to the door and then discover you cannot skip in-game cutscenes and this is a major issue on Console if you die on Console you return to a checkpoint but they are few and far between especially on the PlayStation 2 later levels and fighting your way to a mini boss or narrative bit means cut scene after cutscene and you'll get so intensely fed up with watching them again and again that the pacing dies a great story needs great pacing and this is why I say Max Payne is a good overall experience but but a less than Stellar gameplay experience while the cutscene itself may be good and push a decent narrative forward people forget how many times they had to watch it and how boring It ultimately becomes finally we escape the subway Alex it kept me relatively sane for the past three years now I didn't know how I felt somehow he had stumbled upon something big and ended up stepping on Jack lupino's toes I went for the hotel first it was a sad old thing with flickering lamps and faded colors cheap mobster punks and tired-eyed prostitutes I walked straight in playing at Bogart like I've done a hundred times before the place was run by a couple of murdering Mobsters with shark smiles and finito brothers ladies and gentlemen it's the pain in the butt painted a Max you're killing me you make that up yourselves you get some wine out downstairs to come up with it don't answer that a rhetorical question I got something for the boss Lupino around that kind of depends on who's asking friend or a junk Squad plan but don't answer worm how do you put it a rhetorical questions the people ain't here but he says bye so now the punchinello family knows that you're an undercover cop this gives us the first boss fight and thankfully the enemies aren't unrealistic bullet sponges a few well placed headshots and the finito brothers go down and we can search the room and find a note I've met lapino only once the gangster ran all his rackets through his right hand man vinegar needy gagne was a high strung whiner on the verge of breaking apart like an overamped Energizer Bunny he had the brains to run the business but he lacked the balls always falling short taking his frustration out on underage addicts and call girls with our police contact like the corrupt and our cover blown we are alone so we do the only thing we can think of climb the ladder of mobsters from the bottom until we reach the top and find out where the drug valkyr is coming from this leads us to a hotel owned by the punchinello family a lovely establishment with vibrating beds we know there's a room often used by Vinnie gogniti and Jack Lupino both well-connected Mobsters the level design is relatively simple areas represent their real-life counterparts well enough to pass but are also video game focused with placement of doors sight lines and objects to use as cover in a shootout the level design just like the movement and the shooting and most other mechanical things is there to drive the story along and not be anything stand out on its own eventually we find a radio and from now on the majority of exposition and outside information is given to us through news updates in his press conference today the mayor stated that valkyr represents a clear danger to New York and called for drastic actions to eliminate the problem on today's top story the valkyr crisis worsens with the murder of DEA special agent Alex balder special agent balder had been shot repeatedly from a point-blank range the gunman has been identified as Max Payne The Noose is sure to tighten around this fugitive criminal as more NYPD units joined the search to apprehend him I had just gotten my 15 minutes of fame the level layout while being widely recognizable as a hotel facsimile continues to only partly resemble a hotel and makes very little sense if you stop to actually think about it rooms come from and go to Nowhere stairs are oddly placed closets are randomly scattered around this doesn't actually represent any hotel that actually exists I do like this sight line though through the top of a bricktop corridor with a vending machine by it this will be a lovely navigation Beacon when we see through it from the other side later and then one of these stranger touches in the game sometimes you'll find a TV and it's playing a show which they went to the trouble of actually recording decent voice lines for like this entire episode of Lords and Ladies my lady my Lord my lady that is a matter of great importance I must bring to your attention my Lord there is indeed my lady there is indeed from the very first moment we met upon that distant Forest path that has been sunlight in the Autumn Leaves blazing like the colors of your hair oh my Lord you should not speak so but my lady I must I must my Lord no I've forbid you this cannot be this must not be but why am I love why my Lord it is too Dreadful do not force me to speak the words my lady I beg of you I must know I would rather die than not know yes my Lord we should both be dead for this shame is too great for the living my Lord I am my Lord I am your long-lost sister [Music] Max Payne 1 only contains that episode but in Max Payne 2 and 3 more episodes are added and they fully flesh out the Lords and Ladies Cinematic Universe in the bathroom you'll find more V junkies they're not aggressive but they can randomly start attacking you so it's smart to kill them anyway I like this smoking cigarette in the ashtray another little example of a small Touch of set dressing really adding to the general atmosphere of a place without being mechanically relevant or how if you turn on this TV it explodes they're only small touches but this again highlights a major issue with the overall quality of the experience and again it refers to gameplay and to fully explain it I'll need to break down the levels of interaction consider storytelling or the experience of going through a story on three levels the highest level is the overarching plot the themes the more ephemeral nature of what you want the audience to feel overall for Max Payne that would be gritty film Noir private eye detective story set during a blizzard themes of lost tragedy and revenge this level of Storytelling can include the general overall Ambience the greatest setting the prominence of the snowstorm which is mentioned repeatedly they repeated allusion to Norse mythology all of these greater bits are in the highest level the kind of level that you would see with the bird's eye view let's call this level three the middle level or level two is the viewers in this case players process of interacting with the world the movement mechanics the gun play the cutscenes that we can watch and then the smallest level let's call this level one is the Micro Design Within the world which isn't mechanically relevant but serves to flesh out and help the players experience feel connected to an overall scale a TV set exploding when you turn it on shows that the hotel you're in is run down and matches the ambience they're going for a smoking cigarette in a badly placed ashtray a door falling off its hinges due to disrepair NPCs talking amongst themselves and you overhearing this is all the minute stuff which you could remove but it would make the game feel empty if you did so Max Payne is amazing at the highest levels the general overarching Ambience and emotion of the entire experience is fantastic and it's amazing at the small level moment to moment minutia of of making the world feel lived in its weakness however is the middle layer the process of your actual experience of it you playing the game if you were to just isolate the mechanical experience of this game it is undeniably average at best with very little mechanical difference or growth from the start to the end and the overall environment or the minutia is actually very rarely used to enhance or affect the mechanics of gameplay for example leaving this room onto the outside ledge you enter a snowstorm which has been referenced several times yet Max moves through it just the same the audio doesn't change the animation doesn't change the control scheme doesn't change you don't hold your hands up to keep the snow out of your eyes you don't push through I'll expand later on exactly how the overall storytelling and the minutia of the design could be linked to the gameplay imagine if you could shoot the cigarette out of the ashtray and set someone on fire imagine if you could interact with the vending machine which sprays cans all over the floor which enemies trip over when they run to attack you the set that building should also be involved in the gameplay but more on this later level 3 and level 1 the overall experience and the minutia which make it up exist around level two surrounding it but never interacting with it which means the gameplay and the overall design feel like they are running simultaneously but never intertwining finally we reach room 313 links to Vinnie cogniti and Jack Lupino opening this door triggers a rigged up shotgun and almost kills us the room is empty but there is a note our investigation had turned up nothing to link Angela punchinello the head of the punchinella family to valkyr all tracks had ended with Jack Lupino the letter muerte's room was signed by the Don himself was the first hint that the Kingpin knew what was brewing inside his Syndicate a w got into after The Chicago School a punchinello family bailed you out you have been waiting for a chance to pay us back one of our trusted boys as a monkey the size of King Kong on his back and we need your special skills for backup on a major deal collecting evidence had gotten old a few hundred bullets back I was already so far past the point of no return I couldn't even remember what it looked like when I had passed it the crime family network is becoming more and more Tangled with various underlings all vying for various power and this perfectly highlights the problems with the level three two and one of Storytelling the overall design of detective story is great and the small focused design of shotgun on chair when you enter the room is again great but the more player focused moment-to-moment of exactly who are you chasing right now and why begins to get a little bit modeled run into this bathroom and die to a shotgun blast and this is probably a good time to point out something which will become increasingly obvious Max Payne is really really hard the shotgun is a one-hit kill against you and in later levels you will die again and again and again two snipers super accurate machine Gunners on other rooftops unseen shotgunners and endless waves of grenades you simply cannot get away from fast enough now I have no problem with hard games but I do expect expect them to be fair and the designers need to have tied the difficulty and pacing together if you want to flood a room with enemies that's fine but the player needs time to see the flood starting find cover get ammo and fight back you want the player to remain on that knife edge of intensity not winning too easily but equally not killing them in an unavoidable unfair way because that kills pacing Max Payne is a story game and the gameplay serves to enhance the story but the gameplay eventually becomes so difficult that any pacing the story had built up through cutscenes or voice acting or novel pages is thrown out and replaced with frustration at the mechanics emotionally you want the player to be angry at the mob and focused on hunting down the in-game enemies you want the players righteous Fury focused on the narrative reasons to be angry because they are Max Payne and that's what he is angry at what you don't want to do which the game does all too often is pull the player out of this excellent narrative back into reality and have them be angry at the mechanics the grenade which bounced around the corner and killed them five times already you don't want to give the player a mechanical reason to be angry you want to give them a narrative reason to be angry and a mechanical reason to find catharsis inciting this anger being Max Payne progress through the hotel by shooting this broken boiler and collapsing it onto the weakened floor and then find this room which has a secret film Booth hidden inside the closet and a room full of tapes and a diary on the bed the diary belonged to a hooker named candy Dawn the Reed would have made a Vice Cop blush had talks with the mystery hag over the phone again sent to the latest one-eyed Alfred tape as long as the hag keeps paying for the tapes the old man could come every day for all I care she had a nice sideline making secret x-rated flicks of her clients and selling them to the highest bidder they would get her killed if her V fix for the day didn't do it first this discovery of both the diary and the room will matter later find the lift and head down to the laundry room another fun little set-piece fight and then more TV updates foreign storm warning is in effect in the whole tri-state area as both freezing rain and heavy snowfall continue many roadways are already closed and people are advised to stay indoors the severe blizzard has ravaged New York for three days now with no end in sight we've been snowed from the start in the Val care case the forecast said there was plenty more where that had come from but the snowbound city was on my side less chance of innocent bystanders getting caught in the crossfire the current city-wide snowstorm is mentioned often and mainly serves to create this overwhelming sense of isolation power and fury and Unstoppable force of nature ravaging the whole city dividing communities and blanketing every building and street with a layer of ice it's cold dangerous and uncaring and it's exactly the kind of feeling the game wants you to get from the story and from Max himself it also ties heavily into the Norse end of the world theme will begin to explore soon we fight into the hotel basement the furnace room and see a man tied to a chair with a bloody baseball bat beside them that is a lovely bit of foreshadowing for later and is a great example of how you can tie in the minutia and gameplay and then another lovely bit of World building through this overheard conversation through a door take vampire movies why are they always set in LA or Mexico they can't even get a tan if I was a bloodsucker I moved to the North Pole when there's one long night yeah what would she suck blood from penguins man Eskimos it's an absurd conversation which pushes Max Payne even further into the dark comedy realm the kitchen shootout is another nice area and we crash our first valkyr sail you can close the lids on the briefcases it's another nice touch but unfortunately has never used mechanically okay right let's do this if you're going to add in the fun little touch of you can close and open the briefcase then find a fun way to tie that to the overall feeling and in-game mechanics imagine the graphic novel starts talking about dirty deals going down with laundered money and everyone wants a piece then imagine if the briefcase started closed and if you did open the briefcase and then lead enemies into the room as they chase you they would get distracted and walk over to the briefcase beginning to examine it letting you jump out of cover and shoot them easily and if you do the slow motion kill cam happens and green bills fly up into the air from the case and maybe you get a nice little voice clip like red splashed on green with the storm outside you'd think it was Christmas suddenly you've given the player a mechanical advantage for interacting with the world on a narrative scale enhancing both the world and your connection to it currently all these small interactions do is just make you go huh that's neat and it feels lacking we fight through the bar and find Rico he's hanging out with candy the call girl who was making tapes with her clients through the hidden recording room this leads to a shootout against Rico and candy and some Thugs and also the first part where I die so many times I lose count candy is a bullet sponge Rico runs off and goons run at you pushing you back and what started as a fun shootout turns into an exercise in memorization and luck finally we kill Rico literally catching him with his pants down and then find an old phone switchboard in the hotel closet there was an old telephone switchboard in the back room in the reception area kinda made phone to having Child's Play ah she killed are you freaking kidding me kidding me Whack Him what's the freaking problem hello answer me hello the word was out a deadly virus released into the city's corrupt circulatory system Something Wicked This Way Comes Max Payne at Large with the word out Max Payne has no allies left and after shooting your way through even more Hotel you finally dropped through a glass roof and the music really kicks in now there are only three or four moments in the whole game where Combat music happens in one way the infrequent use of fight music keeps the event special but another I do feel it's very much underused it's quite fun to get the adrenaline pumping with the background action beats while you're rolling in slow-mo dodging it contrasts nicely with the vast majority of the game's soundtrack which is almost entirely in World Ambience the music of each level is just local work and life noises and then sometimes distant relevant sound effects combined with the storm and the idea of communications being down the audio of Max Payne is one of reserved stoic Ambience while the game does have a main theme it's a very simple downplayed Melody finally escaping the hotel we discover another player a competing mobster Vlad from the Russian mafia is bombing punchinello's businesses the enemy of my enemy is my friend and this will come into play later I also laugh at the car's license plate being vodka really leaning Into The Stereotype for all parties this level now has a more open feel you're outside in the street and need to find a way to the top floor apartment which will hopefully lead you to jack Lupino or more punchinello family members this means going into several open businesses until you find your way through I interrupt a Russian mob meeting and then finally find the critical path which involves running into one of the exploding buildings now in a nice touch your way back is blocked off by an explosion which links up to the bombs that Vlad was mentioning earlier and this Corridor is collapsing this is a great example of overall story elements tying into mechanics the building is being bombed and it's personally affected you now to open this door you need to shoot a gas cylinder which makes another cylinder blast toward it like a missile but I stand in the wrong place and blow myself up with the cylinder now I admire the Cinematic nature of Max Payne and I admire the freedom of allowing the player to be where they like but I feel these designs Clash a lot and you need to have checks and balances to make sure you're getting the Best of Both Worlds and not detracting from both if you have a cinema automatic moment you want the player to experience like a film such as blasting a gas cylinder into a door and the set piece cannot be moved or set up in any other way than the designers intended then making sure the player cannot be in the blast zone would make sense because this isn't a puzzle to be solved it's a spectacle to be experienced but if you were to have the cylinders just lying around the corner and the player needs to interact with them and move them into position effectively building their own makeshift bomb to blow the door open then allowing the player to be wherever they want would give them the freedom they need but this specific moment is the worst of both designs it's a set piece puzzle you cannot alter Beyond activating it but you've also got the freedom to be in the wrong place when you activate it and die to your own activation of a cinematic set piece which kills the well-paced film aspect and doesn't enhance the playable interactive video game aspect but finally we fight into the building and find a ringing phone a beating up phone in the entrance hall was ringing it could have been just a junkie in need of a fix but it turned out to be something more Sinister than that who wants to know my name is Alfred you must hurry Tell Me Something I Don't Know how and what's it to you I will contact you the cops arrived Sirens singing in the off-key harmony of the manic depressive choir I had a few minutes while the SWAT team would go through their usual routine by the time they busted in I needed to be long gone the plot thickens a man named Alfred woden knows who we are and seems to want to help and because this building is being bombed the SWOT are on their way what I love is Max's calm responds to knowing the SWAT team are turning up because he knows the procedure they'll negotiate this creates this lovely focused calm in you toward what the mob would consider to be very very bad you know the SWAT aren't your enemy but right now they are another problem the battle through the building is a strange experience small bursts of intense fighting normally ended by a rogue grenade or shotgun blast from a mobster leading to Quick loading and repeating the same section until you just about squeeze through but by that time the emotional weight of the section itself has been Stripped Away and replaced with just mechanical repetition finally we find a broken stairwell and the first time jumping has actually been needed finish our fight through the building the passage to the roof is blocked so we head down the stairwell back outside we need to find access to another building's roof and then jump on over but the only other building is Mob controlled and weak can't get in without a password to get to the roof I'd need to get to the elevator through the locked door up ahead pizza delivery never seen you before was off Joker so we settled to find a mobster who knows the password now do I feel bad grenading a bunch of addicts I suppose I should do narratively but mechanically they're exactly the same as the regular bad guys so there's no in-game reason to not kill them it would have been really cool to see guys on V doing random things or shooting back against gangsters or crying to really highlight the aggressive nature of the drug eventually we find a guy who knows the password to get in so we lead him back and this happens no don't shoot you know the clowns at the laundry me no you're no good to me then what no no no don't laundry yeah I know him yeah get me in there okay okay okay it's me open up let me in quick not so fast password John oh come on okay John whoa all right come right in sane the password Being John Wu is another self-aware joke John Wu is a film director known for his elaborate action sequences and slow-mo gun battles usually involving firing two guns while diving through the air John Wu is known in the West for films like hard-boiled Broken Arrow and Face-Off indeed one of the hardest levels in Max Payne is called hard-boiled and the Chinese release of Max Payne was retitled to a better tomorrow which is itself a John Woo film I know I've criticized the game heavily for not tying together relevant gameplay choices with the overall Ambience or minutia and detail enough but this is a lovely moment where everything just works the dark comedy the knowledge of what's about to happen the Absurd situation and the instant violence this was a moment where level three and level one of Storytelling both enhance and Inspire your actions in level 2 and it just feels right foreign just beautiful I never thought I'd praise shooting a guy coming out of a toilet so much but it just works so well for this game and then another TV update the city is in crisis tonight with reports of valkyr-related gang war in the streets of the Bronx apparently Max Payne wanted for questioning in connection with the slaying of a DEA special agent earlier tonight is waging a one-man war against his former partners in crime among the list of casualties so far are notorious mafia members Joey and virgilio finito as well as Rico Muerte himself a fugitive from the law and a suspect for several murders in the Chicago area we finally make it to the roof cross to the building we actually want to be in and now get our first taste of surreal horror this TV is playing a show about a flamingo and it's so absurd you're compelled to watch but you are not prepared I have not altered the sound of this it's the last place on me I'm hiding in the shadows watching it all unfold the flamingo speaks we can speak here it says that mirrors are more fun than television somehow I know this just don't ask me how [Laughter] not me but my double nods and smirks of this like it was the funniest thing in the world and then something goes wrong and suddenly they know I'm there hiding behind them and they both turn to look at me with cold eyes and the flamingo speaks again I have no idea and that's when I always wake up to my own screen in that bright Lily White hospital room strapped to my bed unlike any other TV show this show doesn't repeat the TV turns itself off when it's done and cannot be turned back on the strange speech is backwards it's saying the Flesh of Fallen Angels saying you've heard several times before from V junkies and then it says mirrors are more fun than television this disturbing interaction is a hint of things to come head around the corner and over here another fun conversation red blue or green it's always red or blue in the movies it's all green none after green and now for one of the greatest visual gags in gaming history this door is locked and when you try to open it [Applause] perfect example of absurd unexpected humor becoming involved in gaming mechanics finally we find a Cognito one of the higher ranking mob members then he got needy just the man I've been killing the sea pain we got squad on us you can't just come in here waving your peace like it meant something oh my God oh God you shot me ah you're dead paint what the hell are you waiting for your Apes kill him kill em with pleasure boss got me bad held I made like cherry on fat chowion fat is another real world reference he is an actor who appears in lots of John Woo films we survived the initial shootout and then find a letter discussing Jack Lupino crumbled letter Leon gagnonidi's desk the letter was addressed to Dan punchinella but Vinnie had never had the nerve to finish it flatten on the wall he's a freaking mad dog we're running out of men and business fast gagne had been living in Mortal fear of his boss Jack Lupino was a psycho gogniti runs off before we can kill him so we chase him down and Sam the writer and director gets even more chances to really cement himself as the master of quotable lines Vinnie gagnetti was running scared he could run but with a ball in his stomach like a broken bottle of Tabasco he was quickly running out of time he knew where his boss was and I wanted to square things up with Jack Lupino would be moving fast I don't know about angels but it's fear that gives men wings the Cognito Chase is pretty basic just going across the rooftops but I do like this low camera angle shot of the jump across the roof this is another homage to The Matrix which used the same angle eventually gogniti Dives onto a passing train so we wait for the next train and then try to do the same unfortunately I just leaped to my death right let's talk about jumping there are several points in the game where a cinematic dive into or over something is needed but if you do a regular jump you will fall short you need to do a slow motion dive roll there are of course other moments where jumping is tied to the frame rate and if you're running the game at a higher frame rate you physically cannot make the jump but we will get to that having the player die because they used the wrong jump in a cinematic moment which requires a jump is terrible pacing we follow the trail of blood from the injured Cognito and then get sniped by enemies with pistols on another rooftop now while enemy placement is consistent enemy accuracy isn't and a lucky headshot from a goon can instantly kill you we make it into another building and now a a pretty major glitch in fact the first one I've experienced the model of gogniti has just stopped on the stairs you can't hurt and at the bottom of the stairwell enemy NPCs are just standing around this is clearly a missed event trigger but when I head down the stairs the camera switches to this overhead view meaning likely a cutscene camera view but I can't see myself and gameplay has resumed and I'm still in control of Max even though I can't see him and I get killed by all the other enemies that I also can't see this glitch is actually pretty bad the only way I survived was throwing a grenade down before the enemies become active trigger the event and memorize the route to run back upstairs while the camera is frozen Dodge the enemies through sheer luck and then when the camera finally snaps back win the shootout the chase continues outside through some alleys up some lifts and around this construction project nice bit of visual storytelling here showing a policeman in a box like a coughing I thought maybe this is setting up a greater darker subplot but no it's just done once because it looks cool fight long more rooftops and eventually passed some Billboards advertising the Acer Corporation slogan a bit closer to heaven and then another billboard about the voice of the angels and then a final advert referring to an American Avenger all of these sound quite biblical quite religious and they will all tie together pretty soon push on break into another apartment and another TV update Max Payne has nowhere left to go we are very right now I've got better things to do ma'am that was deputy chief Jim Rivera from the NYPD with no further comment at this time apart from his suspicious food habits I figured brother to be one of the good guys fate had just dropped us on different sides in this but when it came to capturing me he was way out of his League I had already ditched the cops a couple of rooftops back for now more Gunplay more grenades Max Payne is effectively a corridor shooter with none of the more nuanced mechanics which enhance Corridor Shooters like cover mechanics peeking around corners or leading enemies into traps outside we finally corner gogniti but he's surrounded by goons I also learned this quite intense fall damage and if you slow-mo dive down some stairs you'll take a large chunk off your own health another issue here is the audio balancing is off quite substantially and sometimes sound effects are far louder and far cleaner than they should be like they've been recorded inside a studio isolated from the context or environment they're meant to be happening in oh God damn it pain I'll kill you you lousy eventually after diving left to right several times and emptying several full clips into cogniti he goes down Cognito ran out of steam in a dead end alley with steam boiling out of the sewer grates like all the fires of hell were burning High beneath us it was shaked downtime where's Lupino screw you let's start Vinnie police brutality I rate pretty high on that yeah you can't just hurt me In Cold Blood just keep telling yourself that listen good candy man I'm not gonna be anybody's Fall Guy I want to know where your boss is hiding there was no glory in this I hadn't asked for this crap trouble had come to me in big dark swarms the good and the just were like gold dust in the city I had no Illusions I was not one of them I was no hero just me and the gun and the crook my options had decreased to a singular course just don't hurt me [Applause] your rights will be right at your funeral so we're closing in on Jack Lupino who can lead us to the punchinello bigwigs connected to the supply of valkyr and help us find who shot Alex in the Subway and get revenge for our own family lupino's Club is called Ragnarok the Norse end of days it fits the apocalyptic blizzard Vibe quite nicely there's even graffiti inside talking about the big bad Fenris War connecting to Jack lupino's name Lupino being Lupine and Lupine being Latin for wolf in a rather annoying touch even if the levels have a short gap of narrative travel between them you can serve health and painkillers and ammo between levels so I'm starting the club section on low Health as I got torn up by gogniti's bodyguard fight the club itself is empty of customers but full of enemies and the enemies now have Molotov cocktails which leads to this lovely slow-mo dive into a cocktail resulting in my own burning death the club is large and it's covered in occult symbols from varying beliefs but it's very surface level reference it's purely for visual Flair and doesn't actually affect gameplay the club itself has a very liminal feel to it a transition space between a space we usually know was being full cool and active now empty and the pounding music is replaced with the angry insistence of gunshots and grenades eventually we break into the back rooms and find what Lupino likes to spend his time doing books on the occult had been piled on the table the room was stacked with light reading such as Necronomicon Witchcraft and Paradise Lost all exotic titles like valius malfakar and day and brown reigning noven Portis books with pentagrams on their covers all dealing with the occult and the infernal lying between stacks of horror videos and a couple of Ouija boards the only thing I could take seriously was the thought of Lupino taking it seriously he had been spending a lot of time getting intimate with the guy downstairs I like the fact Max doesn't take this seriously but he knows that Lupino does and that fanatical Devotion to the idea of becoming powerful through the occult in a rather insane way makes him powerful the club now takes on more religious overtones the church-like walls and windows the Gothic architecture the club music replaced with chanting and now a really disappointing moment again the level loops around except we are one floor higher and we're back in the dance hall from earlier except now we have access to the Pyro control deck which causes small explosions on the main stage and I'm thinking okay maybe this will be relevant for later for taking down a big boss using the environment or burning some scenery away for some platforming but no all this does is make sparks happen this is the in-game equivalent of a Child's Play toy making noise it's a fleeting design choice of oh cool and then instantly irrelevant I'm not annoyed that you can do it I'm annoyed and disappointed that there's no reason to do it no advantage to be gained from doing it at the right time shoot out in this wine room and for some reason the camera switches to a rising Angle now in filmmaking this would be to highlight the importance of the table or to make the audience feel insignificant in this room compared to the event happening in the room itself but no there's no reason to do this just a room run throw into the stairwell trigger a hidden trapdoor and fall to my death why seriously why what's the point you never see any enemies die this way so you have no warning you can't use it as a trap and you can't react to it and avoid death if you trigger it by accident it's just a straight up if you stand here you die design but nothing warns you of this and if it was used in a narrative sense by Lupino as a sacrificed pit at least it would relate to the story but again it doesn't by now you're also having to play at 100 Health at all times because even if you're only slightly injured enemy shotgun blasts will kill you in a very strange level design touch we now fight across these roof beams to another door and then out into the blizzard across the roof into another section of the club and while I know I have my complaints and heavy critiques of this game and sometimes the Cinematic kill cam May mess up every now and again it captures a beautiful moment of cinematic Glory like this oh my God back into the club and I've started being pedantic so I'll finish we are on the stage and if you run over the guitar on the floor it plays a note and if you stand by the drums and interact you'll blast out a quick drum solo now just consider this wouldn't it have been cool if doing this interacting with the drums attracted enemies to the stage looking for you and then you could run back through the level and activate the pyros to kill them stacking mechanics and interaction I'm just spitballing some ideas here then there's a Sliding Puzzle using levers to move these backstage background drops and open up a way through then we finally reach lupino's room and things start to get weird we find a letter discussing an elite bodyguard group called the trio who work for punchinello and then we see three guys bound around an altar now I assume that these guys were the trio because they've just been referenced but that is wrong the trio arrived later we just see three guys bound it's just an unfortunate numerical match to the narrative we make our way to the final Chapel in this occult church and here Lupino himself going a little bit mad [Music] to you all this boss fight is a combination of early wave defense and then a single Elite enemy lupino's goons drop from the rafters and he appears throwing Molotov cocktails he's quite insane but thankfully a few bullets quickly cure Insanity with Lupino down we meet Mona sacks finally went down I wanted to make real sure each day that way he was a bad monster turned them into friggin zombie demons from outer space I I think he's dead already huh and that's when it happened but dead or not you've got the wrong guy instead this knockout Femme Fatale holding a gun to my face I returned the favor Lisa punchinello Lisa punchinello was the Don's wife Mona sacks Lisa's evil twin your safety's off evil twin you might hurt someone with that gun of yours Lee says the Damsel in Distress I'm the professional I'd blow you away without batting an eye sure and you can check out my credentials splattered all over this joint Jack couldn't have framed you not the state he was in we're after the same slime bag Angelo quincinello's the one who murdered your friend framed you with it you know this for a fact I've got my sources I don't have a clue these days I just shoot them as they come who put a contract on the arch fiend this one's mine I hate the guts of that sadistic wife beater why not pool our bullets for this one I thought you'd never ask my finger was starting to Twitch how do you like your whiskey so I'm easy as long as you don't try to slip me a mickey you're a real angel Max good stuff tasted sweet as honey going down nothing personal can't risk you going berserking the nightmare was always the same violent shapes moving in darkness old and ugly the Killer's mad laughter was a riddle filled with Wicked innuendo somewhere the baby was crying and now for the nightmare level after being drugged by whoevermona sex is we wake up in a liminal Twisted version of the memory of the Fateful night we lost our wife and baby now this is one of the two things Max Payne is strongly remembered for ask anyone and they'll say oh the bullet time fighting and the nightmare levels and it's Testament to the design of this level that it is such a memorable aspect but again it's the unique way the gameplay is presented and not necessarily the gameplay mechanics themselves watch as this Corridor stretches out into eternity and then becomes a maze and we must solve the maze by following the sound of our sobbing wife and this sounds cool but it quickly devolves into frustration horror is at its best when the audience is focused on the horrifying thing the unknown but Amaze with no enemies means you're relying on the atmosphere to be scary and once the player has become accustomed to the atmosphere it's not scary anymore and they will become accustomed to it because you'll be stuck in the maze for a while during the nightmare you move slowly and jumping has this all floaty quality and then every now and again you'll get flashes of Consciousness where we seem to be tied to a chair heading into the bathroom following your original memory sees it barricade itself and then we go and find the baby in this rather Macabre section following a trail of blood out into nothingness and during this bit the layering of reality and Nightmare is a lovely unnerving touch and this section does a great job of being just subtle enough to be scary but then watch this the letter blocks in the baby's room float around and spell D3 a d that's a bit on the nose that's not quite symbolism as just saying exactly what the thing is that's High School drama levels of set dressing now the dream is just a memory but we finally discover something Max knows that we the player do not know Max remembers what he read in his wife's diary Michelle was working part-time in the district attorney's office her diary was open on today's entry her handwriting all pretty curves an army dossier found its way to my desk yesterday Valhalla isn't that a Norse myth something about Vikings I tried to tell Max about it but he was busy that cute frown on his brow guess it's nothing just a mix up at The Courier Service from now on I would always find time for her it was a hollow Promise Too Little Too Late finally we wait from the valkyrian Jewish nightmare we are tied to a chair in a basement to the same chair we saw earlier nice callback we are being beaten by Frankie the bat Niagara using the same bat we saw earlier and when he leaves we break free and take the bat and now Begins the god awful stealth section Max Payne has no Mechanics for stealth enemies don't seem to have a facing and will just be aware of you all the time within a certain radius there's no noise system no thrown objects to distract what you're meant to do here is creep around take the guys out one at a time take guns and then get back to fighting but when you try and do that they always spot you so what I end up doing is just grabbing all the aggro recklessly running in with a bat and hoping for the best fight through the meat packing plant and arrive back at the hotel from earlier we over here on the phone that Mona sax has also been captured and is being tortured apparently her goals align with our own of taking punchinello down we then have another almost identical bar fight in the exact same bar from earlier reusing locations is fine if there is a noticeable difference but reusing the same battles in the same locations seems a bit lazy then Vlad the Russian gangster shows up and asks us to help him I'd seen the car before that time it had heralded impressive explosions Vladimir was back Bang You're Dead Max Payne I might have laughed if I remembered how supposed to be cops and robbers look you want something with me get in line peace man relax you know you are a real news item armed and dangerous I am going to make you an offer you can't refuse to say that it's a bum wrap I've been framed well that's a moot point whatever you did or did not do I'm sure you had good reason for doing it want to hear me out I'm listening Quantum yellow messing with v is bad for business all around well that's not all there is this guy Boris Stein used to pull jobs for me he's the captain of the cargo ship Charon now the bastard turn court has gone over to the other side punchinellos the ships loaded with high-res Hardware guns my business if punching yellow gets hold of that cargo he's won and I have lost and you'll have your work cut out for you if you want to get to punching yellow you'll need heavy duty persuaders I am just the man to get them for you change the ship pack under my flag maybe pop 2 in the traitor dime's head while you're at it you'll get enough guns to start the Apocalypse you in or out let's get this show on the road Vladimir was one of those old-time bad guys with honor and morals which made him almost one of the good guys none of us was a saint so Vlad wants us to go and sabotage a cargo ship full of guns preventing them getting to punchinello and instead giving them to him honestly this whole section feels like a b plot which instead of being slowly woven through the adventure is just entirely crammed into the middle we've been whisked away from the city and we fight through the docks we're taken away from the area we know and plonked in an area we don't know and told to do something for someone that we don't know much about and it's this moment finding some painkillers on an out of the way palette that I climbed up I suddenly think oh this is a video game level now up until now you've been playing a film Noir Adventure in the form of a video game yes you use pills to heal but the placement of the pills has made sense in cabinets in bathrooms in drawers in hotel rooms guns are powerful but you've found them in ammo crates or armories or gangsters bedrooms and even the strange occult worshipings of Lupino made sense within his own Twisted mind but this moment finding a healing item on top of a stack of pallets you had no reason to go up a place no one would intentionally leave pills is not done to enhance a narrative or tell a story or to make sense within the world it's purely done as a video game mechanic imagine taking all the previous events as a story they'd read well Max broke into a bathroom stole the pills from the cabinet and then downed them because he was in pain Max kicked down the door Max jumped from the crumbling Hotel balcony to safety all the events track as an actual Adventure a cop might have to go on in one of these detected novels but then getting to Max climbed up a stack of pallets for no reason and found some pills on top of the highest pallet that is pure video game logic the container yard is more of an open space shooter we even run up and along this crane to move further into the docks now whenever you move a shipping container goons run through the Gap and start shooting at you why they don't know what's going on the enemies in the city were sitting around playing cards or doing deals or chatting crap to each other and then when they saw us they would attack because they knew who we were the logic of large group of enemies Waits behind container on the off chance some random hero chooses to to move it doesn't work on the same consistent logic as the last few hours up to here Max Payne has been a story told through a video game but from now it morphs into a video game with a story nice bit of World building here though subtle and easy to miss there's a container with a sniper and a note saying Target the mayor this is because the mayor wants to clean up valkyr from the city and Nicole horn the lady behind all of this wants it to stay and because you take the sniper and then defeat the boss at the end of this level who was meant to be the Hitman the planned assassination never happens this automated container mover almost runs us over and then we reach this lovely set piece and I genuinely really like this because it not only makes sense but flows beautifully every piece of this puzzle Works enhancing the next we need to release a bridge but we can't there is a fence blocking us from getting to it there is an unhitched trailer on the other side of the fence and a sign next to us saying use wheel blocks and all of these things make sense to be in a dark so we use the sign as a hint shoot the wheel block out from under the trailer and watch the trailer roll down the ramp it's on and crash into the bridge beautiful set piece fight into the warehouse on probably the best vertical firefight so far sight lines obstacles cover grenades this is a fantastic bit to fight through mechanically this really works and then we get to the sniper bit and this whole dock section feels very much like they made the main game in the city and then sat back and thought hmm the game Run time is about two hours too short and we've not really used the sniper yet let's just shoehorn in a random section involving the docks and put a sniper bit in you drive this crane platform over the tracks but you need to take out the guard towers as they Loom into view before they take you out it's fun but it also feels quite gimmicky another issue with the controls sniper Zoom is e but activate is also e so if you're standing at the crane controls and go to zoom you will instead activate the crane and drive it down potentially the wrong path I also discover a strange bug with the sniper while other weapons are physical projectiles with travel time the sniper is hit scan so you can one hit kill anything now you cannot do a bullet time Dodge roll or a shoot roll with the sniper moving and dodging with the sniper equipped just as a regular full speed roll but you can enter bullet time manually if you stand still and press the bullet time button and then while in bullet time you can run gun dive and aim with the sniper this makes the sniper the absolute best weapon in every scenario if you're in slow-mo you are guaranteed to one hit kill anything you can see eventually we fight onto the smuggling ship and intercept a phone call from punchinella Angie tell me how much the dime cost you I bet it was more than his name right the first time you sure you're not confusing me with Boris here but you are right of course pretty soon we should get together and have a talk pissing punchinello off was a dangerous game but when people get mad they make mistakes I should know that's where I wanted punchinello mad enough to trip over his own feet preferably into a grave this leads to another unfair boss fight with a room full of tough goons unfortunately every single time you trigger the boss fight the boss will say his line this goddamn line that is burned into my brain sent you I lose count of how many times I die here but a couple of grenades and then three sniper shots to the face drop this guy we reach the gun room and then meet Vlad back outside did you get everything you need check I owe you anything you need this is my solo when I'm through punching hella won't be anybody's problem anymore even with all this Firepower I figured I couldn't get to punchinello at his manner I could only hope that he wouldn't pass a chance to hear me beg to see he's one this is Max Payne I want to cut a deal that's what everybody keeps telling me I got your ship and her cargo I want to meet no pain no gain capiche yeah I know it wow and janello's restaurant had seen better days so we're playing up to punchinello's Ego as we agree to meet him at his restaurant for a one-on-one confrontation but when we arrived the entire Place explodes and we need to run this is a time to escape Mission no mistakes allowed and annoyingly it takes what could be a brilliantly paced and adrenaline Pack set piece and again squanders it because if you make a single error in direction or hesitate for a moment you will die and there are multiple wrong paths you can take and you need to restart the holder means this is a test in memory and trial and error more with an intuitive Escape Design we escape the restaurants just in time and make it into the sewer and meet up with Vlad again having survived the Trap we decided to just take the fight all the way to punchinello Mana this means taking on the trail of bodyguards we read about earlier Vlad it seen my smoke signals the Mercedes was revving a girl almost drowning out the Banshee well of the sirens you coming we'll drop you off at the punching yellow Mana sounds good to me when this is over look me up I could use a professional like you I'll keep that in mind the night groaned with cold the garden lights flickered nervously in their light the falling snow was dead white before the darkness ate it up I'd heard the stories the trio were mad dogs that have hung the heads of their enemies over the manor Gates of the Capo had only let them when Janella wanted pain he'd see the pain the trick in my situation was that there was no trick no matter what the movies tell you no rules no secret Mantra no road map it wasn't about how smart or how good you were it was chaos and luck you know anyone who thought different was a fool all you could do was to hang on madly as long and as hard as you could someone had graciously left the back door open for me and killed the guards my money was on Mona I knew the trio would be standing between me and punchinello I had read their rap sheets thick as phone books no one would be walking out of here alive The Manor is a rather short section but with much nicer level design kitchen counters and bookshelves providing decent cover smaller rooms meaning diving around corners makes more sense and pillows and pianos side rooms and stairwells it's a densely packed space with lots of movement choices and the shootout does feel very much like a John Wu film I'm not even mad when this dude one hit kills me with a grenade launcher because that death was entirely my fault I should have paid more attention to the fact the door is blown off its hinges by a grenade probably indicating someone behind it has a grenade launcher foreign eventually we find Lisa punchinello on the bed she has been beaten so punchinello is an abuser and Mona sacks the strange woman we met earlier is Lisa's twin so Mona is after punchinello as revenge for her poor sister another ringing phone and again the strange Alfred woden Max talk to me Alfred wooden we've got company ended on the manor grounds the more the merrier I could hear punchinello on the phone begging for help you should have been saying his goodbyes when Janella was a pushover the moment I stepped into the room he folded like a deuce before a royal flush oh wait couldn't refuse she's someone high up government maybe I don't know he was trying to buy more sand for his hourglass I wasn't selling any [Applause] the Ambush mechanic directly after a cutscene is annoying because I'm low on health and not prepared I am always going to die unless I know which way to dive unfortunately the Mansion is now flooded with government goons and some strange business lady injects us with even more valkyr IE game over Max Payne I could tell when I was outgunned it was time to take another beating the mystery witch was a real Barracuda trouble and Dagger heals a smoking assault rifle in her hand and an army of killer suits behind her how sweet I get to kill two birds with one stone or later it was going to catch up with you Mr Payne it's time to show you the benefits of my Brew be a good boy now you'd find that lady luck was really a hooker you were fresh out of cash gentlemen we're done here take me to Cold Steel you just give me an OD of valkyr I could feel green fire eating my brains they turned to steam they did a fade on me I'd never had a chance the witch had got me just as sure as if she put a gun to my head and pulled the trigger now this is where things begin to get meta inside the bad trip we wake up in the mansion room we head to adore and find ourselves back in our old house except all the inside architecture is wrong we run through a familiar but Twisted memory and then Loop background to the mansion again except this time it's on fire and there's a note on the desk and the note is terrifyingly self-aware there was something disturbingly familiar about the letter before me the handwriting was all pretty curves you're in a graphic novel the truth split my skull open a glare and green light washing the lies away all of my past was just fragmented still shots words hanging in the air like balloons I was in a graphic novel funny as hell it was the most horrible thing I could think of [Music] too close to the constellations on their Chiefs skulls someone spouting him saying Babble I couldn't make sense of it but I had an overwhelming sense of deja vu the caller's voice sounded oddly familiar the weird piece of paper looked dangerous or something disturbingly familiar about the letter before me the handwriting was all pretty curves you're in a computer game Max the truth was a burning green crack through my brain weapon statistics hanging in the air glimpsed out of the corner of my eye endless repetition of the act of shooting time slowing down to show off my moves the paranoid feel of someone controlling my every step I was in a computer game funny as hell it was the most horrible thing I could think of it was a bad line in a prank call someone spouting and saying Babble I couldn't make sense of it but I had an overwhelming sense of deja vu and the caller's voice sounded oddly familiar I love how the comic strip now references the game's UI itself the guns and the menus very meta after the Revelation that Max thinks he's in a video game we are taken back to our house the night of the murder again and another bloodline puzzle but this one has jumping there's only one problem with the jumping part of the game it doesn't work jumping in the nightmare alone is tied to your frame rate you stay in the air for a certain number of frames and if you're playing on a modern PC with Hardware acceleration your frame rate will be way too high and you'll spend less time in the air making the jumps literally impossible to make to solve this you need to quit restart and make sure Hardware acceleration is turned off and running entirely off software this does show another immersive film nor touch the quit message is in character saying you can't go on anymore along with the awkward jumping controls the audio of the crying baby Loops every four seconds and you are forced to navigate a low view distance maze listening to this while unable to jump just see how long for you this would go from horrifying to incredibly irritating [Music] thank you [Music] eventually you make it back to the nightmare bedroom and fight your past self then you wake up in the burning building your only lead now is the high-class businesswoman and her Army of suited goons your only clue she said take me to Cold Steel so you head on over to the factory Cold Steel and find more goons and more gunfights the steel factory is basically the same mechanically as everywhere else but expands the color palette quite nicely with bright Bloom effects and molten Metals spilling onto the usual cold Grays the firefights are getting more intense and I unfortunately find an uncomfortable truth about bullet time it's often easier without it diving means you lose the ability to fire during the recovery frames that's standing up from the dive but you can still get shot at and this is often the cause of your death meaning if you can't guarantee to kill the enemies during the dive just running and gunning is more effective when you have made one of your most unique and interesting combat mechanics a disadvantage you are not creating fun gameplay new mechanic turn this valve to turn off a jet of flame so we can pass will this mechanic be used again now it's been introduced will we get to turn a Jetta flame on and burn an enemy will there be a flame-based puzzle using Valves and climbing and jumping and shooting no you'll turn off exactly two Jets of flame in the whole game both of them are just here's the valve there's the flame good keep going it's here you realize you've very much gone from street cop taking on the mob to Rambo taking on the paramilitary private Army of a multi-billion corporation I die a lot on this section and I'm also seeing some health and safety violations I don't work in a factory anymore but I don't think this massive room of fire is up to Safety Code here's a dumb touch some of the jumps you need to make are over lava and they're quite tight and the longest jump you have is actually your sideways leap roll so you'll end up doing that this is another example of video game mechanics taking priority over the narrative flow yes you have successfully solved the mechanical puzzle of the level but you have undermined the serious tone of your story by encouraging the player to do it in a rather stupid looking way eventually we find a lift and descend deeper into the factory to a secret underground bit I had taken on the role of the Mythic detective Bogart as Marlo or Sam Spade going after the malt Falcon to unravel all the Mysteries following a path of Clues to that final Revelation even if it would take me down to the cold cavernous depths of a grave underneath Cold Steel is a drug production facility and the marking on the floor is a large V with a knife vertically through it for Valhalla or valkyr that's of a green compound show they are making valkyr here but why this is way beyond our original investigation we explore the labs and find an imprisoned doctor to help us operate a two-man airlock system we battle through a trapped out lab room and then shoot our way through a web of laser mines before finally learning the truth about valkyr one of the lab terminals had the Project logo on the screen top secret project Valhalla U.S army igrazil Network Valhalla the otherworldly place in Norse mythology where the bravest heroes spent their afterlife feasting and fighting forever their wounds miraculously healed night after night valkyr the maidens who chose the most courageous Viking warriors and carried them to Valhalla 1991 the research objectives to create a chemical substance to enhance the stamina and morale of infantry troops 1995 results unsatisfactory project canceled someone had decided to continue the sick experiment unauthorized [Music] project compromised data leak fix the damage by any means necessary security clearance red authorized by the Project Lead field test double the dosage for all the remaining test subjects observe and record the subject's behavior in an urban setting the drop-off point was my old address in New Jersey the file dated three years ago so this whole situation was just an unfortunate accident V was created by the military to enhance soldiers it instead turned them incredibly violent and was rebranded to valkyr and sold as a drug Max's wife in her day job accidentally stumbled upon some research notes and had to be killed as a result to keep the whole project Secret After learning the truth we escape and here is a lovely moment you're trapped in the airlock no way out no one to open the door for you like earlier but you can just about line up a shot with a laser mine which blows open the door and lets you escape just in time and after escaping the lab we get a call from Bibi one of our original police friends and the only person who knew we were undercover also likely the guy who set up the Roscoe Street Station to turn in to a bank bust piece together a jigsaw and the final picture is you finishing that same puzzle a mad green-eyed killer standing behind you an urban legend come true the project Valhalla test subjects had been the Mad junkies who had murdered my loved ones the rest was simple body count math it all pointed to her Ms valkyr I was in an all-night Diner down in cup after cup of coffee that tasted like engine oil when a new message from Bibi got me back on the killer track what the hell happened at Roscoe Street Maxie I'm going out on a limb here we need to talk this through come up with a plan 2 30 a.m the choir Communications garage the more I thought about Alex's murder in the frame up the more it felt like an inside job I should have seen it coming BB had sold me out and now we wanted to finish what he'd started the garage was dead Bibi showed up in his tailor-made suit gold watch and cufflinks to match all Way Beyond the cop's pay Maxi who's in swap charm he was guilty as hell but it was exactly like this with Alex up close and personal you can't win this one Max no but I can make damn sure none of you do either we meet Bibi in a multi-floor car park and a shootout begins because we know he is the traitor and this whole section is terrific again there's space to move around cars and pillows to hide behind you are chasing the escaping van of Bibi while fighting through waves of goons and the van is taking increasing damage and exploding as it goes along I even managed to slow down time and kill three guys in a row with a sniper which just feels awesome and after catching up and taking out Bibi a payphone rings and a game it's the mysterious woden the Payphone started to ring yeah whatever does it for you woden was waiting for me on the steps of the old building Mr Payne let's go inside the others are anxious to begin the others was the pain I would like to introduce you to my colleagues in what we call the Inner Circle you've been watching too much X-Files you have seen the files on Project Valhalla we can fill the gaps provide you with the information missing from those files we were all involved in the early stages of the project during the Gulf War what's the catch we would very much like to blow this thing wide open but our hands are tied her name is Nicole horn she was the key figure in Project Valhalla when the funding was discontinued she simply refused to quit she knew exactly what she had in her hands Nicole horn is the president of Acer Corporation she has more than half the city in her pocket this must be kept Under Wraps if you try to go public with this we will deny any knowledge we need you to take her out afterwards we can protect you make all the charges go away that was the cue for the killer suits to kick in the doors and swarm inside there's an impressive floor show but I decided to leave early anyway it was only a one-story fall lucky me I know that Norse mythology reference woden is close to Odin and when we finally see woden he has one eye darker shown via Shadow on his glasses that is the eye patch of Odin after meeting him and being told about the Inner Circle a highly secretive group of powerful Elites who control World matters Nicole horn and her Army of goons storm the building we die from a window and escape this means fighting through another work building leading to some nice Corridor shootouts and cubicle cat and mouse chasing games it seems Nicole was part of the Inner Circle at one point and has since decided to wipe them all out and now completely controls the world's supply of valkyr while there are still radio updates available there aren't anything substantial anymore just news on the Storm thematically matching The increased intensity of our path of Destruction to find Nicole as she is clearly responsible for the production of v and the murder of our wife and child in a lovely throwback we actually find a videotape on Alfred woden's desk it's a recording of him and The Prostitute candy from earlier the room with the hit hidden video booth in the hotel Nicole having blackmail on woden humanizes him and narratively helps connect the early seedy underbelly we started in and the elite secret society we are now part of it also explains why he wasn't more overt in helping us in woden's room we find a map of the Acer building Nicole's company woden has clearly prepared this for us all we need to do now is escape this building and go to Acer Plaza there's nothing special about the Escape battle except this lovely room which has you knock over the server racks and then climb the ramp they make to the higher levels as the stairs are broken the shootout in the library is wonderful and when we finally leave we can head over to Acer Plaza to Nicole horn who again is portrayed in a Comics by the writer and director's mom I took my time cruising around the city in the snow there was no hurry I knew what I had to do now I took my time thinking about it building up the rage when I was ready I parked the stolen wheels at the front entrance of the Acer Corporation Headquarters got out got in got cracking I had a bullet with Nicole Horn's name on it I had 10 000 bullets with the hag's name on them she had Ultra high-tech security systems enough mercenaries and weaponry to start World War III there was no fear while health and ammo is usually conserved between levels this is different you start this final section the Acer plaza building with all guns Max health max ammo and full painkillers this is it the final push you find Nicole horn and take revenge for your wife and child as with everything else the word Acer is also Norse referring to the five gods of the Acer Pantheon Odin frigg Thor and Boulder this final section loses any real Nuance of Storytelling and it's just a war path through the ultra high-tech Acer building you've got long range sight lines to various floors lifts stairs Corners offices ambushes it's a greatest hits of the few combat mechanics the game does well the window even shows us the symbolic end of the world storm is fully raging outside and eventually we take a lift and bump into Mona again [Music] Mona looking good Max we gotta stop meeting like this [Music] sucks do your job relax Max you're a nice guy I don't kill nice guys you're not bad yourself it was different when horn wanted punchinella Dead to cut her ties to the mafia he deserved to Die the same goes with her she's the bad guy here her sister was whispering to her in my favor I knew the appetites of ghosts intimately they hungered for Revenge foreign she was a nice girl not really a stone cold killer and now she was Stone Cold dead that religious Fanatics are loyal Samurai horns private Army was coming at me shot during an ambush we take care of the shootout but then when we return to the lift her body is gone and as you know in any good detective story if there's no body they're not actually dead so we hop into this lift and go up the lift shaft is full of laser mines you need to snipe them before the lift passes through them now I like the use of stacked mechanics movement lasers explosive damage and lift but while the PC has quick saves anywhere the console versions have checkpoints and this last level is a nightmare because you will lose a hell of a lot of progress if you die and if you don't know to look up you're pretty much guaranteed to die here we keep heading up the building a higher and higher eventually taking the outside lifts and then an attack helicopter starts spraying us with bullets so we leap to the other lift and keep moving eventually we make it to Horn's office and access her personal computer so the printer was a neat stack of expensive paper hacking through Horn's computer would have Unearthed files of criminal plans strategies for world domination spy helicopter reports illegal wiretap recordings internet porno all of the above take your pick I really didn't care anymore I had seen too much of it already look I can forgive some cliche tropes because writing is difficult but shooting the monitor doesn't destroy data I thought we knew that even back in 2001 we head up this secret staircase to the rooftop and finally confront Nicole horn now we are low on HP with waves of enemies flooding this room and an attack helicopter spraying us with bullets and when we finally make it all the way to the top the final boss isn't really a boss but a puzzle Nicole is boarding the helicopter we saw earlier and we need to fight around the building's Edge over the rooftop and then watch this cutscene which highlights the central metal Mast structure the extreme winds blowing it around and the guide wires holding it up now that's a lovely setup highlight the important bits without just solving the puzzle for you so we need to fight the goons off snipe the four guide wires holding the metal Mast up and then when they are all broken launch a grenade at the central tower knocking it down and allowing us to sit back and watch the final cutscene 15 seconds [Music] foreign the final gunshot was an exclamation mark to everything that had led to this point I released my finger from the trigger and then it was all over the storms seem to lose its frenzy the Ragged clouds gave way to the stars above it closer to heaven you gave us one hell of a ride take them down to Central Booking you heard the man woden was there in the crowd standing by the sidelines it wouldn't be over till the man with the patch would say so he'd say the right words I knew he would he'd better woden grin smugly it was the grin of a winner that made two of us this Loops us back to the start and while Max is indeed taken into custody by the police we see Alfred woden is Alive and Well watching us from the crowd and you know that he'll likely have us out of jail in no time because he is genuinely one of the good guys finishing the game like this unlocks hard mode so now we've finished Max Payne we can ask was it any good at the risk of angering the enfranchised fan base I need to be honest Max Payne is an excellent experience delivered through a mediocre game The Narrative is excellent and the gameplay existing as a vehicle to experience the narrative through is fantastic following Max's Journey from Rock Bottom to essentially Valhalla and following his Redemption are is great but the gameplay itself can leave you wanting for more with very simple controls somewhat repetitive Gunplay and a large amount of uninspired environments when the gameplay exists solely as a support structure to drive the narrative it's fantastic it's why the early game detective aspects are so fondly remembered it's why the nightmare bit sticks out but when the gameplay tries to stand on its own merits without a compelling narrative behind it it falls down the docs section is the best example of this when the gameplay tries to put itself first and the plot needs to contort itself to fit it feels Hollow as a visual novel that you play through as an experience on the whole it's Top Notch the story is gripping the writing is brilliant the voice acting is memorable and endlessly quotable it's dripping with atmosphere and the graphic novel transitions combined with the nightmare fourth wall breaking are super meta but as a standalone video game the environment's mechanics and pacing need a lot of work the pill healing system is functional but combined with the checkpoint respawn system on consoles makes playing the game at the later levels eight sure it is a cliched chipped Diamond of a game but remember after Y2K the end of the world to become a cliche but it was I to talk a brooding Underdog Avenger alone against an Empire of evil how to write a grave Injustice everything was subjective their only personal apocalypse is nothing is a cliche when it's happening to you cheers for watching another massive thank you to all the supporters on patreon Twitch and YouTube who keep the channel alive you can support the patreon from only one pound a month check the video description for links to the patreon twitch Twitter and our Discord and as always remember I released my finger from the trigger and then it was over

Channel: Josh Strife Plays

Views: 1,294,971

Keywords: classic gaming, retro games, older games, retro review, gaming reviews, nostalgic gaming, nostalgia games, playstation 1, playstation 2, n64, dreamcast, classic rpg

Id: G_ArkuYh6Yc

Length: 95min 23sec (5723 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 07 2023