Max Pain
Hey mum, look at me, I'm John Woo! *slomo dives through a window and shoots 3 guys*.
It's winter in New York and Max Payne has nothing left to lose and has decided Eff it, he's taking on the criminal underworld on his own, leading him through mansion's, railway station's, seedy hotel's, the streets, rooftops and secret science labs of New York and there's nothing that can stop him anymore. His black leather jacket swaying in the wind as he draws his guns and uses one the most enjoyable mechanics in any game ever: bullet time.
Needless to say, Max Payne is a treat, and it's slow motion, bullet time gameplay is an absolute blast from start to finish. Diving around corners and firing off the ingrams in a blaze of glory as nameless gangsters and goons fall to the floor, fully swiss-cheesed is timeless. It literally never gets boring. Pressing one of the buttons can either lead you into a heroic dive (based on which direction you're moving) or a slomo storm where you slow down time and dodge bullets whilst providing a hail of your own. The aresenal of weaponry is pretty impressive with dual pistols, shotguns, machine guns, dual sub machine guns and even grenade launchers, molotovs and a baseball bat, each of which is usually both totally over the top and totally hilarious (ever seen a slow motion beat down with a baseball bat?).
I always say that when the gameplay is this much fun then the story doesn't really matter, and for a lot of this game it's kind of true. Each new villain who stand's in Max's way is introduced in one of the cheesy, almost film noire, comic book style cutscenes and then 35 minutes later their riddled with bullets and rather dead. You blast through people so fast it's usually a bit of a struggle to keep up with prominent antagonists in the story... cos they just don't last. As I've gotten older, things like Ludonarrative Dissonance have become more and more prominent point in videogames, like you see Nathan Drake over there hugging his wife and daughter, looking out over the beautiful sunny beach-home he lives in? Yeah he's killed over a thousand people, but no, yeah, he's the good guy. Max Payne on the other hand, the cops want him in jail, the crime lords want him dead and he's constantly getting dragged on the news, he even bad-mouths himself in most of the cutscenes and whilst he's certainly not a good guy, he's not the bad guy either, more of an anti-hero that's taking out the trash, he's out for revenge.
What does put a dampener on the game is all the times they take your weapons away or even worse, put you into a dream sequence, and hoo boy do Remedy like dream sequences. The ones in Max Payne are probably up there with my least favourite dream sequences of all time next to The Fade in Dragon Age Origins, not because their poorly designed and too long, which they are, but because they stopped me from having fun with what I was doing. It's like stopping you in the middle of a rollercoaster ride and asking you to do a math test before they'll start the ride again. It doesn't help that it's frustrating too, forcing you to walk along some narrow blood lines on the floor, in pitch black darkness, with bottomless pits all around you. The most tragic part of all this is that there's no one to shoot, no bullet time needed! It's a travesty.
But other than about an hour of confusing and frustrating gameplay, Max Payne delivers, constantly.