Back when I was going around to different movie rental places and libraries, I would always rent video games, and one of my most frequently rented games was the original Max Payne. I never played Max Payne 3 and only a few parts of Max Payne 2, so I don’t know what they are like, but after playing so much of the original Max Payne, I’m actually kind of curious to play those games.
Max Payne follows the character… Max Payne, a hard boiled New York detective with the most noir thing ever, dead family. As he investigates the new drug Valkyrie, he is framed for the murder of a fellow officer and must avoid the police while taking out every single mobster and violent drug addict in the city while finding the source of Valkyrie. Honestly, this is what I wanted the Punisher game to be plus like. I mean, The Punisher game was…. Okay, but nothing special. But this game is way plus fun to play, simply for one little mechanic, a thing that this game didn’t exactly start, but popularized in the gaming world: Bullet Time. As toi fight groups of enemies with guns, toi can slow down the game as Max Payne jumps to the side, firing bullets at enemies and getting kill cams for the final enemy killed. While the Matrix made this populaire in movies, Max Payne made it populaire in video games, and was used in many other video games, even other Rockstar games like Red Dead Redemption. It’s satisfying to cause the world around Max to come to a slow pace as toi see the bullets fly to their target. The other parts of this game are fun too, like the comic book style cutscenes are pretty charming and add well to Max Payne who, let’s be real, is kind of a cheesy anti hero in this game. Not that that’s a complaint, I l’amour how goofy it can be. And the levels are pretty fun to go through as well. Sure, toi do have a few buildings and warehouses, but that mixed with the New York streets covered in snow is quite nice to see, even if it’s in the usual Xbox graphics where it tried to go for realism and now looks...ugh.
I really do like the Max Payne game, despite having played it in years. It’s dark but not too dark story telling, it’s fun gameplay, bullet time, and then there’s that classic Max Payne theme. So damn nice. I may give the other two games a try someday, but as it stands, Max Payne is a real classic among third person shooters