O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.
I absolutely loved Max Payne when I first played it. It felt unlike any other action game out there and for years remained my golden standard for how an action game should be. It wasn’t without flaws, but it’s fantastic pace, exciting action and shockingly good storytelling far outweighed them in my eyes. Then there was also a sequel that I admired and respected for its even bigger focus on storytelling and some refinements to the gameplay mechanics. But I also didn’t enjoy the game as much. It has been a while, however, since I’ve played any of them and I wanted to see what my opinion on these classics would be today, especially with a remake announced.
The original Max Payne still has it. Even ignoring the fact that a lot of the ideas it had haven’t been done in games before, playing the game today is extremely fun. It looks good, despite being quite outdated, its mix of simple real-time cutscenes with elaborate comic-book style presentation is still fun, the music is as memorable as it used to be and the basics of gameplay still kick ass. Almost every weapon feels fun and has its use, running around and dodging bullets feels good and the sense of style this game has is incredible. Even levels have some interesting elements to them and quite a few times you may encounter situations where your actions may slightly change the path available through a room.
The story is told at perfect pace and elegantly mixes elements of “heroic bloodshed” action flicks, 80s and 90s US made action movies, Norse mythology and if you don’t care about it you can just ignore it. For how the game was often ridiculed (even by the devs themselves) for being so jam-packed with noir stereotypes and complicated metaphors, in my opinion it totally works in the favor of the game and feels great. And even if that bothers you, I doubt you can argue with how varied and fresh the game tries to keep itself with 3 story Acts, all of which with clearly distinct style and flavor. It never gets boring, it never focuses too much on one thing, always moving forward.
But it always had big flaws. A well remembered one are the occasional platforming sections that were extremely poorly designed even back then, especially since the most difficult ones are tied to labyrinths which, for how great in style they are, feel trash to play. The game also featured bosses in a more old school manner – dudes with lots of health, even when they’re wearing just a sweatshirt. Given that the game ends on a flawed, but really fun puzzle-based boss fight, it’s especially a shame. Entering bullet time without a dodge jump also feels mostly pointless as it doesn’t provide many benefits apart from giving you more time to react to something.
A far bigger issue is that you can just randomly die from full health if you get unlucky. Even in moments where you can do nothing but repeat the same thing over and over again, sometimes the game will straight up kill you, just because of how damage works. It annoyed me years ago but I almost felt like it was an even bigger problem in my current playthrough so maybe newer hardware is making the game even more broken in this regard. In either case – this title has always been about being ready to quicksave\quickload and just hope that you won’t die, which used to be totally normal for game design, but by modern standards this is quite bad.
If not for the chance of instant deaths and some rather rudely designed death traps (including one entire level that is both exciting and very frustrating), I’d easily recommend Max Payne for anyone. Oh and also if not for the fact that you will have to check some guides on how to launch the game, as it does have problems with modern hardware that, thankfully, can be fixed. But as is, while I loved replaying the game yet again, I can see people less used to the old “save scumming as game design” approach be occasionally frustrated when playing the game.
Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne could’ve been a straight up improvement to the original game. It looks even better than before, there’s more cool music to remember, the storytelling is even better in some aspects to that of the original game and essentially every mechanic of the game is just better. Every gun feels awesome, throwables are turned into a sub-weapon, bullet sponge bosses are almost fully gone as are completely random chances of instantly dying to a shot. Bullet time is now essentially a super power, where it doesn’t just slow down time, but also keeps Max’ speed higher than that of enemies and allows for almost instant reloading. And as you keep killing enemies it has a “combo” of sorts that makes you even faster while making enemies slower. It’s so efficient that it completely reverses the situation from the original game and now the jump dodges are very situational, while simple bullet time is extremely helpful.
This is also the game that basically established Remedy Entertainment’s “thing” – the tv shows that you can watch occasionally on TVs in levels. While the original game had a few moments like this and also tried to build its game world with many cool little details, it was Max Payne 2 that went really hard with this. It feels as if in this game every little joke and off-hand comment from the original title was turned into its own full fledged thing and it’s not a proper experience with Max Payne 2 and its story if you’re also not following the stories of the TV shows.
However, while the storytelling in this game feels at times more matured and the story itself is a bit more “grounded”, it also feels considerably more boring. It’s not the content of the story or the characters, as those are really well done, but rather the fact that this approach results in a game that not only sticks to rather uninteresting locations and backtracks to the same places a few times, but also doesn’t really have the same exciting and relentless pace of the original title. It does fit the story well and it is well told, but it’s just not as fun.
What is a much bigger issue, however, is that this game also had several horrendous protect/escort missions that weren’t fun in 2003 and are sure as hell not fun in 2023. I don’t know what it was with games back then, but the desire to put players in charge of protecting AI that goes out of its way to try and get killed was really odd. These are easily the main reason I personally disliked replaying the game and while they technically take only about 1/5 of the entire title, I find them to be a gigantic annoyance.
Nonetheless, Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne is still a really fun third person shooter, with more exciting ideas and elements than some of the more modern shooters. And while I still prefer the original game and would’ve rather seen that but with improved mechanics from 2, replaying the game was still very fun and if you are going to play the original, you might as well play the sequel as well.
So yeah, both titles still hold up in different ways. And I’m very curious to see how exactly the remake will handle transitioning these classic TPS titles to modern era. Because while I did enjoy Max Payne 3 (which was almost an on-rails shooter, honestly) and some of the later Remedy Entertainment titles, none of them felt as fun to play as these two games do. And for how pretty Control was and how fun its super powers and destruction are, it’s a bland and boring action game in comparison to Max Payne 1 or 2. Hopefully, the remake will handle the transition well. If not, hopefully the originals will get more future proofing support, if not from the publishers/developers than at least from the fans.