GAME REVIEW

Max Payne

RATINGS Quality Geekness

This world is filled with the sort of background noise that a New Yorker can never escape: the wail of sirens, the occasional squeak of a mouse, leather-soled shoes walking across wet cement.

Then over this murmur of life comes the sounds of Max Payne, the tinkle of bullet casings hopping across a tile floor, the empty echo of twin Barrettes, the low grunts of surprise and exclamations of pain--make that Payne.

Welcome to the world of Payne. Three years ago a young New York City cop arrives home to discover his family slaughtered by doped up thugs. Haunted by his dying child's screams and his pleading wife's calls for help, Max Payne joins the DEA, quickly losing himself in undercover assignments.

Cut to the present.

Assigned to topple the local Mafia drug lords, Payne works the seedy underside of the city from the bottom up. Deep in the mire, Payne finds the path back to his legitimate life cut off when his boss, best friend, and the only man who knows his true identity and assignment, is shot to death. Payne is double-crossed, implicated in a murder he didn't commit and revealed as a narc.

That's where the game finds you when it starts, caught between an unknowing New York Police Department and the all too well informed Mafia. You have to work your way through the Mob, killing the low-end street thugs to help move you closer to the Godfather of New York, all the while avoiding capture by the NYPD.

Max Payne is a third-person shooter, but so unlike its predecessors that it seemingly elevates the genre to a whole new level. Instead of a game where you play through simplistic adventures, gliding ghost-like through a pre-woven story line and often shoddy graphics, Payne drops you full into the thick of things. With the help of ultra-realistic graphics, unique camera angles, and some innovative new gameplay options, Payne makes you feel the game at a whole new level.

The most pioneering aspect of the game is a cool little effect called Bullet Time. Here's how it works: click your right button and everything slows to a crawl; everything, that is, but your ability to aim. As time slows, sounds melt together to form a background of dull roars and bass-heavy pops. Payne's heartbeat overshadows all else. Then, in an instant, Real Time returns. Of course, if you had unlimited Bullet Time the game would be a breeze, so you don't. Instead, you start with a predefined amount and each time you kill someone you get a bit more.

Another amazing feature of the game are the slo-mo cinematic shots that activate occasionally during combat. Camera angles glide along next to a man being blown off his feet in slow motion, or trace the path of a sniper bullet into your target's head. This is some incredible stuff. Granted, it's basically cut scenes, but the power of the graphics engine and the artistry of the angles is truly breathtaking.

Payne relies on Remedy Entertainment's Max-FX technology to pump out the immensely detailed world and graphics for the game. Nearly everything in Payne can be played with. You can turn on TVs, flush toilets, even jump through windows.

The effects of gun battles linger long after the last man has dropped: bullet casings litter the floor, walls are blackened and riddled with bullet holes, furniture is shot up. Leave the room, run around for half an hour and then come back, and it's all still there, just like you left it.

Although this feature doesn't directly affect gameplay or overwhelmingly change the look of the game, the subtle additions of these painstakingly rendered details help to make the game feel much more robust than your typical shooter. It makes you feel like you're in a real world, where your actions have repercussions.

Unfortunately, the game isn't perfect. Annoyingly odd clipping problems crop up a bit too occasionally throughout the game, and there are scenes where the background could be a little less chunky, a little more involved. For me, the biggest problem with Payne is the total lack of a multiplayer feature.

The game is loaded with 12 weapons, all of which exist in the real world. My favorite is the high-powered Desert Eagle, though the sniper rifle can be quite a load of laughs at times.

You also get to regain health throughout the game by chewing up aspirin.

The game's lengthy levels are held together by a series of cut scenes which rely on highly stylized illustrations, the type typically found in quality graphic novels, instead of the usually cheesy and often cartoonish scenes most games use. The illustrations, accompanied by well-acted voice-overs, lend themselves well to the overall dark and brooding look of Max Payne.

Compatibility
I ran Max Payne on a Pentium 4 1.3GHz system with 256 MB RAM, a 64 MB Radeon AGP video card, and SoundBlaster Live soundcard. Payne is very versatile in pre-play set-up, allowing you to choose from a number of options to fine tune the looks and sound of the game without having it take too much away from play.

I was able to run the game maxed out with little to no slow down, but I found varying the setting did nothing to fix the clipping problems I ran into. There don't appear to be any patches out as of press time, but I wouldn't be surprised to see one in the near future.

Conclusion
Finnish developer Remedy Entertainment will have a hard job outdoing itself with Payne on the market. The level of graphics are unlike anything I've ever scene and the details go far to help immerse you into this world of New York cops and robbers.

Part Matrix, part Dirty Harry, part John Woo, Max Payne is the future of gaming--and the future looks good.

Ratings Defense
I know what you're thinking: how could I rate a game so splendidly divine in design, so immensely beautiful in pure guttural graphics? Here's the thing: to me nothing can be perfect, and a 5 is perfect. If I gave Payne 5 Geekheads I'd be saying no game could ever beat it ... ever. All a game could hope to do is tie it. Having said that, if Payne were loaded with multi-player features and had no graphic glitches I would have been forced to give it a full-on perfect score. But that's not the case, so Max Payne gets 4.5 Geekheads for Quality.

At first blush Payne is the antithesis of Geekness: he's cool, he's cold, he kills people. The game, too, doesn't seem to offer a lot of neato Geekisms. There's no multiplayer and, truly, it's not a very complex game. But then you come to the very cool cinematic shots and Bullet Time, which just plain old rocks. Throw in the fully-interactive background and Max Payne truly earns 4.5 Geekheads for Geekness.

Payne's cool features, premise, and fun gameplay also earn it a Geek.com Pick.

Comment on Max Payne and this review in our Message Parlor

Search