tanta07's Full Review: Max Payne for PlayStation 2
Max Payne was a title that I didn’t pick up right away; it struck me as a Grand-Theft-Auto-meets -Onimusha type of game, and I didn’t give it much of a chance until it became a Greatest Hits title. All of the reviews for it were basically positive, so it seemed like it would be worth the 20 bucks. It features a fun mixture of first-person-shooter type action with puzzles and Resident Evil-type elements. The ingredients do mix together well into a fun gaming experience. While it’s certainly not the most greatest or most innovative game to come along, Max Payne is definitely a fun title that will keep you glued to your PS2 for a few nights.
You start out by taking on the role of Max Payne. Max is your stereotypical rough-around-the-edges cop. He’s got a five o’clock shadow, a leather jacket, and wisecrack for every situation. Through a very disturbing opening sequence, we learn that Max’s wife and child were brutally murdered a few years ago by “V-heads,” junkies who are all whacked out on a new drug called Valkyre. Ever since, Max has been hell-bent on bringing down the scum bags who are pushing the stuff, going straight to the top of the food chain. As you might imagine, the big fish in the big pond don’t take too kindly to Max sniffing around in their business, so things get a little interesting as the story progresses. Max’s missions will get crazier and crazier as he tries to bring down the kingpins that are flooding the streets with the deadly drug.
Graphics
Nothing all that splendid here, but certainly not the worst looking title the PS2 has to offer. The character models are all a little stiff and goofy-looking, and they move like mechanized mannequins. Everyone also seems a little oddly proportioned, like their arms are too long for their bodies, their legs too short, etc. The game also suffers from the old 2D picture of a face plastered to a 3D head” problem. Let me try to describe this phenomenon if I can: imagine a flat drawing of a face. Then imagine gluing that picture of a face onto the front of a block for a head. That is what everyone’s face looks like in the game, and it is more than a little distracting. The faces lack detail, expression, and whenever someone turns their head, things get ugly. The environments in the game, though, are all nicely done and are given a fair amount of detail considering the sheer size of some of the areas you will cover. The textures are nice, lighting effects seem pretty good, and the environments are also nicely interactive: shoot a window, the glass will shatter, kick a soda machine, a can will drop out, etc. Graphically speaking, this is a pretty good title, and while it doesn’t take full advantage of the PS2 hardware, it’s hardly disappointing.
Sound/Music
The music featured in the game is your standard minimalist fare that is usually associated with crime dramas and bad detective flicks, with Max Payne shamelessly styles itself after. You will not get much more than a few instrumental touches like pulsing strings to ratchet up the nerves a little bit. However, the music is used effectively, so I can’t really complain. The game does feature quite a bit of voice acting, which is usually heard during the segments in between chapters, with Max acting as the narrator (voiced by James McCaffrey). McCaffrey’s voice is okay, and his acting is not all that bad, but in my opinion, he goes a little too far with the cop-pushed-too-far huskiness in his voice. He sounds like Clint Eastwood after staying up all night gargling sand and smoking cigarettes. He sounds like a tough guy, alright, but almost hilariously so. The rest of the voices are done competently, but nothing is too outstanding. Most of them tend to over-emote and ham up their performances. This is not at all unusual with voice-overs in video games, but I was hoping that it was starting to become a thing of the past. The sound effects are all very nice, though. Glass shattering, bullets whizzing by, and strung-out junkies muttering jibberish all mesh nicely into the aural backdrop. This game does sound very nice in Surround Sound.
Gameplay
At its heart, Max Payne is a shoot ‘em up. While you will figure your way through puzzles and complete certain objectives in order to advance, the biggest part of the game is filling bad guys full of righteous lead. This is accomplished in a pretty cool manner, via a nifty little aspect of the game called “Bullet Time.” Anyone who has fawned over the intense actions scenes in The Matrix and a slew of other action films are already familiar with the concept: time slows down to a crawl as your character sprawls through the air, aiming and firing his guns at the same time. In essence, you get to slow time down and jump through the air, while aiming at your foes in real time. This gives you the distinct advantage of jumping out, aiming, firing, and rolling away before your enemies can even get a clean shot at you. Nifty, eh? Yes, it is, and the game does pull it off very smoothly. In practically no time at all, I was diving through hallways, popping off shot after deadly shot as the bad guys could only gawk and get pumped full of bullets. When you are typically going up against a roomful of gun-toting thugs, you have to take whatever advantage you can get, and Bullet Time does just the trick. Be careful, though; Max’s Bullet Time gauge is limited, so only pull out this trick when you have to.
While hurtling through the air and firing handguns sounds cool, actually performing this task in the game can be somewhat of a bear, because the controls are a challenge. While you play through Max Payne, you will use just about every single button on the PS2 controller for even the most mundane of tasks. Given that a big part of this game is reacting quickly and efficiently to deadly incoming fire, having a tricky and clumsy control scheme is not a huge plus for this game. Your two analog sticks are used, the left one for running your character around, and the right one for swiveling his point of view so that you can look up stairs, fire around corners, etc. “X” is for choosing options, “O” is for using healing items, while square is for reloading your weapon, and triangle is for choosing your most powerful gun at hand. To complicate things a little more, the buttons you will use most frequently are actually located on the shoulder buttons, as you will have to use the R1 button to fire your weapon, and L1 to activate Bullet Time. This control scheme takes a whole lot of time getting used to, and more often than not, I found myself fumbling with the controller when I was trapped in a tight spot that required immediate response. The layout of the buttons just doesn’t feel natural, and it gets to be a hindrance in certain spots. It’s also very easy to over-compensate with the touch analog controllers, and I found myself over-correcting while aiming at bad guys, and placing wild shots all over the great blue yonder while they sniped me to pieces. Thrown in a few missions that also require some carefully timed platform jumping, and you can see that an otherwise cool gaming experience gets undermined occasionally by poor controls.
Storyline/Characters
Eh, nothing all that interesting here, to be quite honest. There’s nothing in here that you haven’t already seen a thousand times before in every “B” cop movie ever made. There’s the world-weary cop with a grudge and a shattered past, the dirty town full of crime and filth that tries to drag him down, and the shady underworld of drug dealers and pimps who would want nothing better than to see Max Payne pushing up daisies. I threw in that last cliché on purpose, because this game is busting at the seems with them. Max’s dialogue segments in between chapters are almost hilarious in their pseudo-film noir language. Max seems to only be able to speak in trite cop movie cliches, and the bad guys are equally bad. Aside from waving a fist and uttering, “I’ll getcha, ya dirty coppa,” they are just as bad as Max as far as cribbing from cheesy crime movies. While the story does contain the interesting vengeance element, it is still far too two-dimensional to hold any interest besides laying out who you are going to kill next. Just as the latest fighting game doesn’t necessarily need a great story to push it along, Max Payne, does just fine as a fast-paced shooter, and isn’t hampered all that much by its flat characters and hackneyed story.
While it seems that I have spent this whole review just trashing Max Payne, it really is a pretty good game and I would recommend it to people who haven’t checked it out yet (all three of you). It’s got all the elements an action game needs: big environments, trigger-happy bad guys, and an indestructible hero who has supernatural “Matrix” powers. Throw in Max Payne, crank up some obnoxious rock music, and let the bullets fly.
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