Max Payne is a fantastic action game.
User Rating: 9.3 | Max Payne XBOX
Max Payne is a superb game that features excellent gameplay, graphics, sound, and story. The game is set in a film noir world, much like Hong Kong action movies (of which you'll hear references to during the game) such as A Better Tomorrow. You play as the titular character, you've been framed for your friend's murder and your wife and baby daughter have been killed, and now you're up against the corrupt mob underworld. The most noticeable aspect of Max Payne is the bullet-time gameplay. In short, bullet-time looks flat-out awesome. The right trigger shoots and the left trigger activates bullet-time. Though bullet-time can be activated while standing still, most of the time when you use it you will be flying through the air, this is called the shootdodge technique. When triggered, the action slows to a crawl, the thing is you can still aim in real time so you've got an advantage over your foes. Running into a bad-guy-filled-room in slow motion with guns blazing is an awesome sight to behold. You've got a good amount of weapons too, there are handguns, uzis, machine guns, shot guns, grenades, and a sniper rifle. The handgun and uzis can be duel-wielded, which looks really cool. And when you pull off a shot with the sniper rifle you'll see the bullet fly through the air until it hits it's target. You'll pretty much be using the shootdodge move through the whole game, but it's really fun and cool looking so it doesn't get boring. The game also has a pretty balanced challenge as well. Max can only take so many hits before he dies, but he has painkillers that can restore his health. You can also save your game at anytime, this is really good, because in some cases you'll be in a nightmare inside Max's head and you'll have to make some carefull jumps, a miscalculated jump means death, it'd be really cumbersome to have to start fromt the begining of the level, but fortunately you've got the quick save feature. You could argue that having the quick save option makes it easier, and it does a little, but not having it would caused some frustration and hurt the game's momentum. Graphically the game looks great. The characters and environments are all nicely detailed and, as stated above, flying through the air in slow motion, seeing the bullets fly by your head, just looks awesome. Aside from the bullet-time, what stands out the most is how the game progresses the story, through a graphic novel, like an old detective comic. This really makes the game unique and differentiates it from other shooters on the market. Max Payne also sounds great. While in bullet-time you'll hear Max's heart beat admist the bullets ripping by in slow motion. The music also suits the game really well, as does the voice acting, which really fits both the characters and the graphic novel style. It takes the standard action game time to get through the first time, somewhere around 10 hours. Upon completing the game you'll unlock harder difficulty and a timed mode where you have to get through quicker. But the story and gameplay will be the main reason to come back to the game, it definitely has a very movie like feel to it. In the end, Max Payne is an exciting and original action game that should definitely be checked out. Not many other games will match it in terms of story and gameplay.
