Written by: Rik
Date posted: August 8, 2007

At a couple of stages during the game, you come up against completely insurmountable odds and are captured. In gameplay terms, this is quite a good way of stripping you of all of your powerful weapons and cranking up the difficulty, and the tension, for a short while. But before you get back to the action, you have to battle your way through Max’s dream sequences, induced by an injection of the killer drug Valkyr.

The dream sequences have frequently been a target for critics (and indeed fans) of the game, partly because some of it is a bit gosh-darned silly, and partly because actually playing through them is pretty annoying. On the first point, I pretty much concur – certainly Max Payne‘s most cringe-inducing graphic novel sequences feature here, and when he starts seeing himself as the star of, first, a graphic novel and then a computer game, it does seem a little bit daft.

With regard to the gameplay itself, admittedly, both sequences contain a bit of mildly-irritating platform jumping. But, frankly, I find it difficult to believe anyone with a modicum of gaming knowhow could become impossibly stuck on either level – and I say that as a self-confessed gaming doofus and as a man with quite a short temper. Fair enough, these may not be Max Payne‘s best bits, but they should only hold you up for a few minutes before you move onto something else – honest.