Each week in Late to the Party, someone posts about an older piece of media that they’ve just experienced for the first time. On bat, this week is Max Payne , a 2001 third person shooter game from the developer Remedy Entertainment.

I started Late to the Party mainly because I’ve been getting sick of the conflation of influence, innovation and hype with quality when it comes to pop culture, so I wanted people to start looking at them for the first time, years after said hype should have died down, to see if they live up to the rep. Some formats like literature and film tend to better, but some like video games tend to age badly due to poor controls and lacking the technology at the time to fully provide the experience the creative team aimed for. Max Payne is a great example of a game that aged poorly.

For those unfamiliar with Max Payne, the basic premise is a police officer who has everything he could possibly want in his life suddenly has it all taken away when his wife and daughter are murdered by drugs addicts high on a substance called Valkry and as he mourns, he makes the decision to transfer to the DEA. Two years later, a break in the case is made and Max is drawn into a conspiracy filled with odd ball characters, the New York underbelly and even the US armed forces. The presentation is the games strongest asset, even with a plot that’s predictable as can be. Dialogue is often stiff and weird to the point that it’s often funny though it’s rarely intentional. But when the game is trying to be intentionally funny, it often is. Like one scene has Max making his way through a building falling apart and he tries to open a door, but it’s locked. So just when it seems like another route has to be taken, the wall falls down, leaving only the door standing. There are some lazy jokes, like a Russian having a license plate that says VODKA, but hey what do you expect from a game released in 2001.

In a wise choice on the developer’s part, most of the cutscenes are presented like a comic book. The faces can look weird and not fit how the character is talking/feeling but it remains one of the few aspects of the game that feels fresh. The art style of the actual gameplay fits, painting a gritty New York City. On the technical side, even though it’s clear that the developers didn’t have the tech at the time to show off the full chaos of a shootout, there is still a surprising amount of interactivity with paints falling and fire extinguishers flipping out after being shot.

Now, you might think “Hound, it actually sounds like you enjoyed this game, so why did you hate on it at first”. Well now, we are at the gameplay part, the part that aged the worst. I’m not going to lie though, it was pretty fun at the beginning, just diving into a room headfirst, headshotting everyone before I hit the ground, but for the first act that seems to be all the game really does and that lasts about 2 hours. Then the second act comes about new ideas are introduced, like dream levels and traps. The dream levels, though are the most visually interesting levels in the game, are also the most frustrating, often requiring players to walk on a thin blood line to progress and should they walk off, they fall and have to start over. The third act introduces little new, but has a lot of difficulty spikes and starts to discourage players from doing the “dive head first into the room” style the majority of the first two acts encourages, with grenade launchers and snipers playing a bigger role. In addition, just moving Max feels off, even by early PS2 era standards. It seems pretty difficult to just get him to just go in a straight line for long.

Now I’m not going to deny Max Payne had a positive influence on the third person shooter genre, but like many trend setters in the medium, it’s incredibly rough. To the point its funny, in its own melodramatic way.