Something occurred to me recently: other than Sam Lake (mainly as a writer), none of the creative leads of Max Payne were in any leading creative positions on Remedy's following projects. Idk why I never bothered to look that up before. I just assumed "it's Remedy, it's the guys that made Max Payne." Well, not really. And on this project specifically, not even Lake was involved in its creation. Though listed as a Creative Director, he didn't do any writing or actual gameplay design, so I assume he was just guiding the general direction of the project.

It's weird though that with so few connections to Max Payne, this game heavily tries to evoke that Max Payne gameplay. Except it's simultaneously dissonant, probably in attempts to avoid direct comparisons. For example, you can hide behind cover, but it's done automatically by the protagonist just crouching instead of you pressing a button like it was in Max Payne 3. Bullets are now hit-scan, which removes an entire dimension of gameplay depth. And for some reason you can only shoot when aiming down sights, which seems almost entirely contrary to the first two Max Payne games, and kinda redundant in comparison to MP3, which allowed you to aim down sights, but didn't make it a necessity. It really seems like a desperate attempt to come off as different for difference sake.

Plus you have these time powers and most of them are just needlessly inconvenient versions of Max Payne's time powers. Like, sure, you can stop time, but only in small selected areas. You can't dive in slow-mo, but you can dash and activate the slow-mo afterwars, which produces almost the same effect. Then you also have something like a force grenade, which could've easily just been a regular grenade, and a force shield, which further adds to that dissonance I spoke of earlier. Like, why encourage the player to dash around with one time power and simultaneously force them to stand in one place with another? Instead of giving us a shield to prevent us from getting hurt, just give us painkillers so we could restore health when we feel like it. At least that wouldn't restrict our movement.

Bottom line is: mechanically this just feels like an inferior Max Payne. Which begs the question: who is this made for?

But really very quickly the concerns over the gameplay issues disappear as you realize that the game seems more interested in its mediocre story and scripted spectacles. So much so that it inserts entire episodes of its tie-in TV show into the game. When one of them came up, I first thought it was a cutscene. I watched it for like 30 seconds, then it froze and a message popped up saying that it couldn't stream because the connection was bad. "Stream?" I wondered. I moved my mouse and saw the playback controls like on YouTube, which revealed that this was a full episode of the show. It came on with absolutely no warning or explanation and apparently expected me to just sit there for an hour and watch it in the middle of the game. Did the devs play MGS4 and thought "wow, I like how the cutscenes are so long that your controller goes to sleep. We should do something like that, but let's take it to another level"?

I played the game for 2.5 hours, and I feel like most of that time was me watching unskippable cutscenes, scripted scenes, or being forced into walking sections while boring characters narrate exposition to me. On the few occasions when the game required me to partake in platforming, it was incredibly frustrating as there is simply no consistency in how far the player can reach in order to grab onto a ledge or climb onto a box, if at all. Some things he can climb on, others he just can't despite them being the same height. Some ledges are way above him and he can reach towards them and grab on them, others are in reachable distance, but he just won't do it. Sometimes you tell him to climb onto a box, but he will refuse until you try it from a slightly different angle 😤. If the game didn't tell you exactly where to go at all times, it would've been impossible to figure that out by yourself.

Honestly, if it just focused on combat, it could've been a decent shooter. But somebody was super passionate about his story idea and made the gameplay an afterthought. This would've probably worked if the story was great, but it just isn't. After 2 hours of playing it, I could barely even tell who these people are and what they're trying to do.