60 Second Review of…

Max Payne

Tom's Review: With practiced bravado and a 'who farted?' squint, Max Payne rips up New York with spectacular gunplay and Unbelievably Bad storytelling. But you're not in it for the story, are you? Maybe Remedy doesn't know how to talk or write real good because they're Finnish (I'm sure they'd do a slam bang job with a story about vodka, reindeer, and being steamrollered by the Soviet Union), but but they know how to put cinematic action into a computer game. The bullet-time/slo-mo action, ripped straight from John Woo, 3DO's Requiem, and The Matrix, works beautifully and the graphics engine is simply splendid.

Mark's Review: When I was a kid I played little league football. They had a "light" and a "heavy" league. I was "light" but just barely. To make weigh-in my dad took me to Kerpan's Spa in the city, down off Kingshighway, so I could steam off a few pounds. Kerpan's was an old-time spa. It smelled of sweat, chlorine, after-shave, and cigars. Men walked around nude and you could get a rubdown, lift weights, and even toss a medicine ball around. The walls could have been built from some kind of testerone extract, that's how much of a man's place it was. For those of us sweating, they also had a very small pool filled with ice-cold water. The idea was that when you couldn't stand the heat any longer you'd jump into the pool — I'm not sure why, something about pores. Those extremes of hot and cold are Max Payne. It has some of the best, most cinematic action I've ever experienced in a game right alongside the very worst dialog and one of the most cliched stories I've ever played through. And like my stay at Kerpan's, it was also over very quickly.