Been playing Max Payne 1, and I think I'm gonna have to drop it. I played this game way back in the day on PS2 and then on PC at some point (like 10 years ago). I remember liking it okay enough back then, but it's not holding up for me.
First of all, it is not whatsoever compatible with modern hardware. The amount of dlls and patches I had to download to get this game to run properly is ridiculous. Then there was some bullshit with the framerate needing to be capped and the game crashes often. Sorry, but I'm over it.
Technical issues aside, I don't really like the gameplay either. To be frank, I think it's a poorly designed game. Bullet time is the entire gimmick, but with the way the levels and enemy placement are laid out, it seems like the game discourages running and gunning and slow-motion diving. It's much more efficient to just pop in and out of cover and take things slow, which matters because this game is annoyingly difficult with enemies that are very lethal (shotgun guys that one tap you, or dual wield uzi guys that shred your health within a second).
You're also always taking a lot of damage, and running out of bullet time which just further encourages taking it slow. Bullet time only regenerates when you kill enemies, which means that if you go into an encounter with a drained bullet time bar from a previous fight you can't even make use of the central gimmick of the game. Bullet time regen should have been passive, or they should have given you double the pool.
Enemy variety sucks as well. There's basically one enemy type, with the only difference being the gun they have. The bosses are just regular enemies with tons of health. Guns suck as well. Certain guns are borderline useless, and others obviously superior to the point your always going to stick to the same ones, and there's not to many of them in the first place.
I also really hate all narrative interruptions. I know that this game is known for its noir style narration and dialogue, in the form of those comic book cutscenes, but I really don't care for it. If I wanted to read a comic book, I'd go do that instead. Don't interrupt the main draw of the game (running around shooting dudes) with stupid cutscenes every 2 minutes. I find this particularly annoying, because there's stuff in the environment that you can interact with to trigger these cutscenes, apart from just the normal story cutscenes in between missions. I guess you don't have to interact with
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