Max Payne 3

Several years have passed since Max Payne's last adventure. He has left the NYPD and now spends his nights drinking in seedy bars. He is recruited by a former colleague to work security for the rich Branco family in São Paulo, Brazil, in what appears to be an easy job. When Max's charge, his employer's wife, is kidnapped by a gang, he finds himself drawn into a conspiracy which will lead him into some very dark places as he tries to redeem himself and find out what's going on in this city.

Max Payne 3 sees the return of the titular hero after a break of nine years. Remedy Entertainment, who made the first two games in the series, have moved on with their Alan Wake series of games, leaving Rockstar (best-known for the Grand Theft Auto series) to carry on their work. Whilst fans of the earlier games were dubious of this move, it was actually reasonably logical. Rockstar games often feature damaged protagonists trying to live better lives but being drawn back into a life of violence by circumstances, which is a perfect fit for Payne.

The game acts as a reboot of the series. References to the events of the first two games are minimal and, aside from a couple of flashback missions set in New York, the game is set in a different city in a different country with a very different culture (not to mention a different and un-translated language). The only constants are Max himself and, of course, his ability to slow down time to engage in combat.

Max Payne 3 is overwhelmingly impressive from a production values standpoint. The graphics are fantastic, with the game employing a vivid visual style. Keywords from conversations flash onto the screen and sometimes the action dissolves into line breaks and the colour desaturates, almost like you're watching the action on an old 1980s TV that is about to expire. The game's colour palette tends towards the bright and colourful, but there is a dark hue to everything. Sections set in crumbling warehouses or an abandoned hotel contrast the light and dark elements of the game's style. Animation is astonishing, with Max storing his weapons on his person and moving them around naturally to swap guns or take painkillers. The game feels like it's had a million dollars spent on every single minute of it (in sharp contrast to the low-budget feel of the first game, with its amateur cut scene actors).

The game's centerpiece is action and gunfights, and the title impresses in these areas. Combat is hard, fast and furious, with effective use of bullet time necessary to proceed. The game also employs a cover system, one of the more tiresome elements of modern action gaming, but the use of bullet time and headshots makes it mostly an optional feature with only a few moments where its use is necessary to proceed. More satisfyingly, the ludicrous modern gaming concept of 'regenerating health' has been thrown out of the window and replaced by Max's more familiar use of painkillers, adding a great deal of tension to the action sequences and requiring the player to plan attacks more intelligently than just charging in, knowing you can hide behind a box to get your health back. Unfortunately, bullet time has been gimped since the second game. There's only one level of bullet time (you don't get additional slowdowns when you shoot more people) and, ridiculously, it doesn't regenerate when you make kills. Given it is fairly slow to regenerate, a fair amount of combat has to take place without the use of the game's central mechanic and main selling-point, which seems strange.

The writing is okay, though Dan Houser's script is notably less funny, knowing or introspective than Sam Lake's work on the first two games. But it's reasonable and House deserves some props for moving Max on in his life, continuing his character arc and trajectory from the first two games. The other characters in the game are somewhat less successful, with no memorable equivalent to say Vladimir Lem or Mona Sax, but they do their job well enough. The change of setting is far more successful, with São Paulo (or, rather, the criminal underworld that is the main setting) presented as a dark, threatening city which is a perfect match for the semi-noir stylings of the series. This is backed up by the soundtrack (by American band Health), which is excellent.

So the game is well-made, with amazing production values, a decent story, some good characterisation and great action (if not quite as well-executed as the first two games). But there is a major problem. You see, the game doesn't actually like you playing it very much. For every minute you spend actually playing the game, it demands that you spend at least another watching it play itself, through intrusive use of lengthy, unskippable (as they hide loading sequences) and non-interactive cut scenes. Cut scenes are not just present at the start and end of each level with maybe a few reserved for major moments mid-level (the sort of structure the first two games employed), but they take place near-continuously. Frequently. opening a door will trigger a cut scene showing Max going through the door and taking cover before letting you resume control. This even happens if you've already flown through the door in shootdodge mode, resulting in frustrating (and continuity-breaking) moments where you could have wiped out a dozen bad guys in five seconds in bullet time but the game demands that you hide behind a counter instead and fire from cover. Cut scenes often kick in after you've dispatched the last bad guy in an area, taking you to a new area with no opportunity to loot the enemies for ammo (which is in fairly short supply throughout most of the game). There are also too many moments when the game has Max doing some really cool things (like diving between moving trains or jumping from an exploding rooftop onto a helicopter) when you don't have control.

Max Payne 3 is, of course, a linear action game and railroading is to be expected. Certainly the first two games had a lot of cut scenes and moments where player choice was taken away, but generally it was in areas where it made sense. They were also infrequent compared to the amount of time the player had control. Max Payne 3 actually seems to resent you doing anything other than what it wants you to, and punishes you if you try. During a shoot-out near a plane taking off, any attempt to jump onto the plane will result in a cut scene where a bad guy kills Max with a grenade, with Max standing there and unable to do anything. During a battle on a river dock, falling in the water will result in Max's instantaneous death, despite him being able to swim in a cut scene a minute later. Despite Max's ability to slow down time in gameplay, in a cut scene he runs into a room where a friend is being held hostage and is powerless to stop them being executed, despite the fact that if you had control you could wipe out everyone there in moments. The game also employs a checkpoint system rather than allowing quicksaves, resulting in the player sometimes having to repeat 10-15-minute long sequences if they are killed, which is simply unacceptable.

When it actually lets you play it, Max Payne 3 (***) features some intense and engrossing action sequences. However, the game makes the classic mistake of placing itself and its story (which is decent but nothing special) ahead of the enjoyment of the player. As a visual experience, Max Payne 3 is impressive and intermittently even brilliant, but as a game it's a let-down compared to the first two titles in the series. It is available now in the UK (PC, X-Box 360, PlayStation 3) and in the USA (PC, X-Box 360, PlayStation 3).

Wertzone Classics: Max Payne 2 - The Fall of Max Payne

Two years have passed since Max Payne blew open the Valkyr case and avenged the death of his wife and daughter. However, this has brought Payne no peace. Living in a dingy apartment and relying on alcohol to get through the nights, he lives for his job alone. A new case brings him back into contact with unsavoury characters from his past, such as Russian gangster Vlad and assassin-for-hire Mona Sax, whom Max thought was dead. As the case develops, Max is forced to team up with Mona and is drawn deeper in a web of conspiracies, intrigue and betrayals.
 

Max Payne 2 was released in late 2003, following on from the immense success of the first game. Finnish developers Remedy remained in charge and much of the same creative team returned. However, the success of the first game meant that the sequel would have a lot more money behind it. The amateurish cut-scenes of the first game (relying on the developers and friends posing for pictures to be turned into comic book panels, as they had no money for professional actors) are gone, replaced by slickly-produced interludes featuring 'proper' actors. The graphics are a huge improvement, with vastly superior character models who can now change their expressions and speak. The bullet time of the first game has been refined and developed further, with different levels of slow-mo now available. The game even opens up a little by allowing the player to control Mona for several missions halfway through.

As with the first game, Max Payne 2 is basically about shooting a lot of people, sometimes in slow motion. That said, just as the first game also mused on themes of revenge, grief and psychological damage, the second has a more ambitious narrative than most shooters. Basically, it's a love story and one of the better-realised love stories in the entire history of gaming (not, it has to be said, that this is a busy field). It works on two levels, with Max and Mona's obvious chemistry forming much of the emotional core of the game whilst Max is also still dealing with the death of his wife. Max's descent into drink dependency (and possibly an addiction to painkillers and phone sex lines) is born of frustration: he killed the woman responsible for the murder of his family and destroyed the conspiracy that led to it, but this has given him no peace. He needs to move on and cannot. The game's title refers not to a literal fall for Max but to the fact that he starts the game at rock bottom, and must claw his way to redemption and self-forgiveness.

This thematic and emotional theme is related through the medium of lunatic ultraviolence. In each level Max has to reach an objective and is usually opposed by a significant number of enemies, in this case members of an enigmatic gang who pose as a cleaning firm. To deal with them he still has the ability to slip into bullet time, where time slows down to a crawl and you can see each individual bullet shooting through the air. This has now been refined, with each enemy killed in bullet time further slowing the action down. A busy gunfight can result in time almost standing still as you take out enemy after enemy. With criticisms that the first game was perhaps a little on the easy side, the developers have added many more tactically challenging encounters to the game, with maximum use of the different types of bullet time being essential to progress.

The weapons load-out is similar to the first game, with the addition of a few new weapons and refinements to the control system (grenades and molotovs can now be thrown with a 'secondary attack' button rather than cumbersomely having to switch manually to them mid-battle), as well as a slightly more involved melee combat option. However, the most notable difference to the first game is the addition of a fully-fledged physics system, one of the very first developed for games. Obviously they're standard in almost all titles now, but at the time it was massive quantum leap forward for the pursuit of realistic character and object movement in games. Remedy go a bit OTT with the use of physics events through the game, but it's pretty impressive stuff. Unfortunately, it's mostly for cosmetic use; there's no physics puzzles of the kind that Half-Life 2 popularised a year later. As mentioned earlier, the graphics are also vastly superior. Playing the first game now requires some forgiveness of the clunky character models, but no such stretching is required for the second game, which still looks great.

Max Payne 2 also has a notable shift away from the first game in the style of its writing. It's still the same guy writing the story - Sam Lake (who was also the model for Max Payne in the first game) - but he's toned down the ripe and cheesy dialogue and taken the game in a much more serious direction. This could have been disastrous, given that the first game's black humour and thoroughly amusing metacommentary on gaming were a large part of its charm, but it just about works. There are still a few wince-inducing lines, but for the most part it's an improvement. The humour has also been toned down but there are still a few moments that raise some laughs. A moment when a policeman named 'Broussard' - the name of the project lead on the infamously delayed Duke Nuke'Em Forever - is told off for taking far too long to deliver a project and he replies that it will be done when it's done is satisfyingly amusing, however, though of course far more ironic now we know how long that game took to be delivered: from before the original Max Payne started development to eight years after the sequel came out. It's also worth checking out the TV shows that are playing in different levels, as they intriguingly riff off Max's own backstory.

Character-wise, the game is also more successful than its predecessor. Payne's character development, continued from the first game, is impressive but, more importantly, the secondary cast is much fore fleshed-out. Mona Sax makes for a great sparring partner with Payne, and is also intriguingly defined. For Max, Mona is something of a fantasy figure, and the reality is somewhat different to his expectations. Their relationship is intriguing because it is open to interpretation, most notably about whether Max genuinely loves Mona herself or his ideal of her. It's something intriguing to chew on while reloading weaponry between gunfights. Other characters are also better-defined than before, such as Jim Bravura, Max's personal Javert (who hunted him relentlessly in the first game, to no avail) turned mentor, who is revealed as having a drinking problem himself and is trying to help Max overcome his issues with little success. One slight misstep is Vladamir Lem, one of Max's few allies, whose characterisation and motives in the second game feel a bit contrived.

But ultimately, for all the well-realised characters and the emotional storyline at the heart of the game, it's still a game about shooting people. It does that very well indeed, moreso than almost any other game in existence, and coupled with good writing and at least an attempt at artistic ambition, it should make for a slam-dunk, perfec game. Unfortunately, Max Payne 2 is hamstrung by a major problem: its extremely short length. At just over 5 hours, Max Payne 2 is about half the length of the first game. Those 5 hours are consistently brilliant, but on release the game - a full-price release - was severely criticised for its lack of content. Coupled with a lack of multiplayer (acceptable for the PC-centric first game, almost unthinkable for its console-centric successor), this led to the game bombing in sales. Remedy's plans for a third game were cancelled and they moved onto the long-gestating Alan Wake. Rockstar would ultimately save the franchise (Max Payne 3 has just been released at this time of writing), but notably only after they'd figured out a way of making bullet time work in multiplayer. The fact that the game is now available very cheaply means that the value-for-money issue is much less problematic than on release.

Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne (*****) is, in terms of writing, gameplay and graphics, a greater success than the first game. Its brevity is regrettable, but it remains one of the finest shooters ever made. It is available now on Steam for the PC. I suspect a PlayStation Network version will soon be on the way as well. Whether the second game will appear on iOS devices like the first one is unclear (the second game's much more complex graphics and physics may preclude it).

Here's a video of some of the people at Remedy discussing the making of the first two games in the series, and their thoughts on Rockstar's Max Payne 3:

Wertzone Classics: Max Payne

New York cop Max Payne is devastated to lose his wife and baby daughter in an attempted burglary. The attackers were high on a new designer drug, called Valkyr. Payne transfers to the DEA and dedicates himself to exposing the origins of the drug, going undercover in the Punchinello crime family to learn more. After three years he is called to an emergency meeting with his handler, Alex, who is promptly murdered in front of him. Max's cover is blown, he's been framed for the murder of his partner and both the police and most of the city's underworld is gunning for him. But with nothing to lose he also has an opportunity to uncover the secret his family died for, and find those responsible.

In 2001 an obscure Finnish developer, Remedy, released one of the most defining action games of all time. Max Payne had been in development for four years, an unheard-of amount of time for the period, as Remedy attempted to get the game's tricky mix of film noir storyline, John Woo-inspired action and a new gameplay mechanic called 'bullet time' (in which time slows down to a point where individual bullets can be seen in motion) to gel together. Other events outpaced the game's gestation: development was effected by the release of The Matrix in 1999, which popularised bullet time on a huge scale and led to the introduction of several homages to the film in the game. The game's lengthy development was likened to that of Daikatana (the most colossal disappointment in the history of gaming), which did not bode well, especially as Max Payne's development was actually longer. Fortunately, upon release Max Payne was critically-acclaimed and commercially hugely successful.


Max Payne's success can be put down to a 'perfect storm' of factors. Most important, and something that is not immediately apparent until you've gotten further into the game, is its knowing sense of black humour and self-referential metacommentary. The game knows it's a somewhat daft shooter and has a lot of fun with the concept. At one point, in a drug-induced hallucination, Payne convinces himself he is in a computer game and is horrified at the idea that his life has been reduced to the repetitive action of shooting whilst flying through the air in slow motion. At another point, two bad guys engage in a debate over the merits of bullet time as a cinematic device (which is usually - fully ironically - followed up by you killing them in bullet time). The game even channels Austin Powers in a sequence where a goon muses to his friend how he hates being dismissed as a faceless minion when he has two children and a loving wife and has been reduced to taking money in return for performing violence acts as a result of an uncaring society (Payne's reaction is to blow him away regardless, naturally).

However, the game then has to walk the tightrope of tonal dissonance. Whilst maintaining its black sense of humour and self-awareness, it also has a very dark and serious storyline at its heart. The game opens with a flashback to the murder of Max's wife and child, in a sobering and depressing level. Then we flash forwards to the present day, but Max's mind remains locked in that house and in that time. On one occasion Max is captured and beaten, and he returns to that house in a dark nightmare sequence. Far worse is a drug-induced fever later on, when the walls stretch out to infinity and he has to find his way through an endless dark chasm, following trails of blood and the screams of his wife and child. It's one of the more disturbing things I've seen in a game (still) but it works by showing us that the game's central protagonist is seriously psychologically damaged and obsessed by an event that he urgently requires closure on. Hence the increasingly insane lengths Payne goes to as the game progresses as he seeks an explanation and then revenge. There's also Payne's rejection of the notion that he is a hero and that he is acting from altruistic motives: at one point he destroys evidence that could have helped clear his name, simply because he has no interest in anything outside of his desire for revenge. Thus the game's storyline and characterisation (often tacked-on excuses for violence) are key in propelling the whole thing forwards and involving the player in the action.

The game's approach to action is almost sublime. Many games require you shoot people, but few do it was much elan as Max Payne. Bullet time allows you to place your shots with more precision than any game before (and almost any since, bar its own sequels), whilst the selection of weapons available is impressive. The game has no truck with stealth or cover systems. If you don't enter a new room by flying forwards in slow motion through the door with two machine pistols extended in front of you read to fire at all times, you're doing it wrong. You need to be on your toes as enemy AI is strong (they're pretty good shots), although a fair few of their combat actions (such as throwing grenades) are scripted, and thus can be avoided easily if you reload a failed mission. There's a variety of enemies, including several 'bosses' (although they are only mildly tougher than standard enemies), but in a mildly genre-subverting move, the end-game boss is a fifty-year-old woman who has no particular special skills or abilities (though you do have to be smart in how you bring her down).

Graphically, the game is a mix of two halves. Environmental graphics remain very solid and there's some great moments as bullets crash into masonry and chunks of it are blown out in clouds of white powder. Muzzle flares and explosions are vivid and the fact that you can see individual bullets (or clouds of bullets from shotguns) flying through the air in bullet time remains impressive. However, the character models are blocky and look mildly ridiculous close-up. Animation is also stodgy, with the lack of moving mouths on talking characters (something already pretty common by 2001) being surprising. Overall, the game looks perfectly acceptable for such an old title and remains fully playable today.

In terms of writing and dialogue the game is almost beyond description. Payne has a constantly-running monologue about what's going on in comic book-like cut scenes which interrupt the action at frequent (sometimes too frequent) intervals. The problem is that Payne has clearly severely overdosed on Bogart movies and Chandler novels and his narration is extremely cheesy:

"The sun went down with practiced bravado. Twilight crawled across the sky, laden with foreboding. I didn't like the way the show started, but they had given me the best seat in the house, front row center."

Sometimes it's just plain clunky:

"Collecting evidence had gotten old a few hundred bullets back. I was already so far past the point-of-no-return I couldn't remember what it had looked like when I had passed it."

And sometimes, gloriously, the writing goes on an extended trip around Planet Strange and explodes through cheese and corn into something that defies rational explanation:

"The Brooklyn riverfront was a maze of rusty containers, sharp-boned cranes looking up from the snowstorm. On a night like this you couldn't help but think of the dark army of dead men, sleeping with the fishes, cement shoes in line. No minotaur lurked in this labyrinth, but somewhere out there, on the clanking deck of his cargo freighter, the skipper of the Charon was waiting, like the ferryman of the river Styx."

However, even the worst dialogue in the game seems to work through the delivery of voice actor James McCaffrey, whose beyond-world-weary, cynical tones perfectly fit the character and help sell his attitude to the player. Slighly less successful are the character models for the cut scenes, which (due to a budget tightening towards the end of development) are basically the developers and their friends and families rather than professional actors. Max Payne himself is based on the game's writer. Oddly, the amateurishness of these scenes is more endearing than disastrous, and adds to the totally barmy nature of the game.


Ultimately, Max Payne works because it's a perfectly-executed action game with a thoroughly-developed central character and a knowing black humour about its own nature (without ever disappearing up its own posterior). Where the game falters is towards its end, when the thematic and character arcs are not brought to as satisfying a resolution as the revenge plot. Payne achieves some of his objectives, but is still left as a battered, traumatised person. It falls to Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne to provide the resolution for Payne's character that is required.

Max Payne (*****) remains, eleven years on, an engrossing and impressive game, mixing together a variety of ideas and different tones into an entertaining whole. The game can be purchased from Steam for PC now, and is also available on PlayStation 3 (USA) and on iOS devices. Max Payne 2 is also available now. Max Payne 3 will be released imminently on PC, X-Box 360 and PlayStation 3.