Max Payne Preview

Max Payne fans who have been anticipating the game's release have been waiting for a very long time--nearly four years! To make matters worse, everyone involved in the game's development--Finnish developer Remedy Entertainment, the consulting designers at 3D Realms, the distributors at Take-Two, and the publishers at Gathering of Developers--have kept a watertight seal on details about the game for the last two years. Well, the good news is that the wait is over. As you read this, the game is entering the final stages of its development, and it should be on store shelves no later than the end of July. In anticipation of Max Payne's completion, 3D Realms recently invited us down to its Garland, Texas-based offices to spend a day with the imminent third-person action game.

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The game takes place three years after the brutal death of Max Payne's wife and child. This rather disturbing sequence is displayed during the game's opening scene, which uses a mixture of in-game engine cinematic and stylized storyboards that are drawn in a very dark and gritty manner. The entire game is actually narrated through the use of quality voice-overs and more than 200 of these storyboards, which, as 3D Realms' Scott Miller pointed out, took Remedy Entertainment longer to put together than prerendered animation would have. During the first few minutes of the game, these storyboards paint a picture of Max's descent from a happy robbery detective to a bitter and angry undercover narcotics detective, due to his family's incident, in the three years since. To make matters worse, Max soon finds himself framed for the death of Alex, his partner in the NYPD. It becomes clear that both Alex's and Max's family's deaths were drug-related mob hits meant to get Max into hot water. Max suspects that Punchinello, a mafia boss who traffics a new designer drug called Valkyr, is responsible for all his recent troubles. With both the mob and the cops after Max, he decides that he has nothing to lose and starts a rampage of violence to avenge the death of his family and his partner.

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After having the game demonstrated to us by Project Lead Petri Jarvilehto in May during E3, we were surprised to discover how simple it is to play Max Payne. Anyone who's familiar with Max Payne will know that it uses a healthy dosage of "bullet time," an effect much like the slow-motion scenes in The Matrix, throughout the game. This effect causes the entire game to slow down significantly in a dramatic effect that is designed to give Max a lethal advantage over his enemies. Jarvilehto was able to pull off these slow-motion moves with ease, but we automatically attributed this to his four years' worth of experience in designing the game. But after playing the game for only a few minutes, controlling Max and executing his bullet-time maneuvers to their fullest potential quickly became second nature to us. The mechanic behind this unique effect (unique to a computer game, anyway) is actually quite simple. The game has an action that you can map to any key, which, when depressed, will activate Max's bullet time. Initially, you'll start out the game without the ability to pull off any slow-mo moves, but once you kill your first enemy, you'll gain a small amount of bullet-time "credits." The more enemies you kill, the more credits you receive--your total amount is indicated by an hourglass-shaped bar in the lower left-hand corner of the screen. Clicking on your bullet-time key once will activate this slow-motion effect, and clicking on it again will deactivate it. You'll have only a few precious seconds to make use of your bullet time, because at its fullest, the hourglass meter will drop to empty in no time at all.