Max Payne Review

Overall Rating

Question: What are the good points about Max Payne? Answer: EVERYTHING!!! When you start the game, the first thing you learn to understand is this: Max Payne does indeed live up to it's hype. I guess we should go through this step by step: Graphics: beautiful, detailed and uh ... beautiful. Great textures, great design, the whole nine. Variety in levels everything. The levels take you through everyday gritty cities and alley ways, through underground subway stations complete with running subway trains, through criminal warehouses and through corporate offices. Each level is filled with little details that make the game that much more realistic. From sheets of paper on office desks to wrinkles in the characters clothes. From bullet holes in the walls to rust on run down metal walls. NOBODY can complain about the graphics in Max Payne. The Sound: you can hide around the corner ready to ambush the enemies and overhear the enemies talking about thier favourite movies. 'nuff said. The gameplay: Bullet time. Bullet time, bullet time, bullet time. Bullet time. Let me tell you how bullet time works. With the push of a button, the game goes into slow motion for a minute and during this time, you can aim for the enemies head, dodge bullets, and pick your nose. It's an origional concept in video games most noticeably compared to the scene in the movie Matrix where everything goes into slow motion and Neo dodges the bullets of the Gatekeepers. That's exactly what it is, and that's exactly what makes Max Payne, Max Payne. Nothing beats putting the game into slow motion, and dodging the enemies gun fire while aim for thier head and pulling the trigger, and watching the enemy fall to the ground in slow motion. Beautiful. Lastly the storyline: the story line is realistic. Although at first it might seems as if it's just your regular wife gets killed love story, upon playing the game you realise that it's much more than that. I don't wanna give away the story, but I will say this, the story breathes realism. Everything in the story is realistic and could happen to anybody.

The only bad point in this game (and it's not really a bad point since it's done well), is the use of a graphic novel to tell the cinematic scenes between levels. Instead of the usual CG rendered movie scenes used in most game to advance the story, Max Payne tells the story with comic book stories. Although a good idea and pulled off well, my personal opinion (and keep in mind that it's only my 2 cents), I'm a sucka for cinematic scenes and would have prefered CD rendered scenes over a comic book page style of story telling.

BUY IT! LOVE IT! AND TELL YOUR FRIENDS ABOUT IT!

Members' Comments oninnocentboy.'s Review

• MONKMAN on 25th Feb 2004

  Good, professional, not 2 long but it gets in everything I wanted to know, respect.