What is it?
Three years back a young NYPD cop, Max Payne, came home one night to find his family senselessly slaughtered by a gang of drug-crazed junkies, high on a previously unknown synthetic drug. Now that same drug, Valkyr, has spread through the whole New York City like a nightmare plague, and Max Payne’s on a crusade for revenge, out to get even. To Drug Enforcement Administration, DEA, this new drug was evil incarnate, to be stopped at any cost. Max's boss and best friend, the only one who knew his true identity, has been murdered, and Max's been framed for the slaying. Everything ripped apart in a New York minute… Max Payne is a man with nothing to lose in the violent, cold urban night. A fugitive undercover cop framed for murder, and now hunted by cops and the mob. Max is a man with his back against the wall, fighting a battle he cannot hope to win. Prepare for a new breed of deep action game. Prepare for pain…
For the past eight years or so, the majority of 3D games had been first-person shooters. The model was Doom. The concept was stay alive, and make it to the next level. There were variations. There were radically different games like Tomb Raider or Thief, but they usually stayed unique. The typical 3D action game was and remained a Doom clone. Even Half Life, which introduced more story elements through the liberal use of scripted events, was not all that different.
Max Payne went a step further. The game replaced the first-person view with a third-person view, so the main character could perform moves similar to the ones Lara Croft performed in the Tomb Raider games. But most important it added lots of stories and characters with distinct personalities as if this were a Japanese RPG.
Max Payne can be seen as the first instance of something I would like to call the generic 3D action-adventure, a genre at home as much on consoles as on the PC, a genre that would prove to be a gravitational center in the years to come. The generic 3D action adventure is versatile, it can be primarily action, primarily adventure, it can be an RPG (or at least something like it), it's like one engine to fit them all.
Is this good or bad? It's for you to decide, fact is that mainstream games have become more and more similar in the new millennium. Of course, at the same time, quite different flowers began to blossom on the fringes, on the various handheld and mobile platforms, on platforms usually deemed obsolete, or running in Windows on a standard desktop.
The secret of "Max Payne" lies in its incredible emotional load, in the tension it creates through a simple, yet involving story. "Max Payne" is very personal. You have absolutely no problems in identifying yourself with the hero. The introduction to the game, that shows Max' family brutally murdered by gangsters, just makes the player shiver! Who wouldn't feel the urge to take a gun and to avenge the loss of your dearest ones? Who wouldn't feel Max' despair, who wouldn't understand and support him?
