Perhaps the most memorable thing about it will be the narrative and bullet-time, and in truth they are the best aspects.
The story itself is also great, perhaps one of the best I've encountered in a game. Now, while it carries a heavy Noir accent and desribes itself a s aNoir Thriller, it's more or less your basic revenge plot with a large and colorful cast of characters, with a lot of Noir settings and styles and tones. If anything, it's about as Noir as Sin City, but without the black and white. Regardless, it's wonderfully told and enough plot turns to keep it interesting and engaging. So even if the story isn't new, it's upbeat in its depression, colorful and varied in it's cast, and as said it offers enough to keep you engaged. The comic book style of presentation is great too. It's artistic, creative, and hell it's something to watch just by itself.
While I'm never one to talk about graphics much, as I'm fine with anything as long as it isn't actually hard to look at, even by today the texture work is great, and back then it looked great. Explosions are big and fires look great, puffs of blood are everywhere and the gun bursts look great, and the guns sound great too on the side. Photorealistic textures work great in the game, and flesh it out well, especially when you can recognize the actors used for the models and comics, like the writer Sam Lake portraying Max Payne himself, and even Scott Miller from good ol' Apogee making an appearance too. I always loved Photorealistic textures, I remember staring a couch in the game once because the lighting in the room made all the ruffles stick out and made the model look more detailed than it really was.
Gunplay is somewhat hit and miss, only under the fact that it can be blood-drainingly hard to combat without the use of bullet-time. Bullet time if you don't know (And haven't read any other reviews by now) is more or less what the Matrix did, slowing down time to show off your moves. While time slows and max is now running slowly or performing a slow mo shoot dodge, everything as implied slows down, except your aim. You can aim as normal, and thus while time slows down you can aim at whatever you want as quick as you want, being able to quickly dispatch numerous enemies at once. It's extremely useful, and pretty cool. However it can sometimes work against you. If you don't kill that badguy in your shoot dodge, they'll probably kill you as you get off the ground as soon as the move is over. Enemies can deal lots of damage in only a little time. A lot of the time you'll find yourself just using the normal bullet time "walk", though the problem is here is that the two buttons to control bullet time, shift and right click by default, both activate either kind of bullet time. If you are moving just a little when performing a bullet time attempt, you'll perform a shoot dodge when you might not want it too. It can be a little frustrating, and it'll get you killed. Speaking, of, you'll probably find yourself getting killed a lot. The game is very trial and error, though sometimes rather than being frustrated, going back to look at your strategy and trying new things to complete the encounter can actually feel rather rewarding. (Also, shoot dodging, while doing it, you're technically invincible. You'll lose health if shot, but you can't die, a very nice exploitation for when dealing with explosives or slow firing weapons like the sniper rifle. You can't die in the middle of a shoot dodge, thus allowing you time to perform multiple shoot dodges and getting hit too eventually allow you the chance to shoot back).
Max Payne claims to have several game modes, but all three of them are really just different difficulty levels. Too unlock a new level of difficulty, you have to beat the one before it. SO I guess the full beating of the game is playing it three times in a row. Too bad, as a survival mode seems like something that would've been useful, seeing that the tutorial can almost be treated as one, though not at all difficult. At least Max Payne 2 included this. Additionally, Max Payne is single player only, lacking any sort of multiplayer. I suppose Remedy didn't know how to approach the code, or how Multiplayer would work with Bullet time. I don't know, maybe they didn't want to detract form the singleplayer, seeing that around 2001 Multiplayer was more or less being treated as a big hing while singleplayer was more or less being thrown more to the side. Either the way, once you beat all three difficulties, there isn't a tone of replay value, except for maybe beating the last level again to unlock those cutscenes, and then be able to watch them all over again and again.
But in the end, multi or not, I would highly recommend this game. SOme might be put off at the trial and error gameplay, and yes, this can be a difficult game. But it's fun as all hell, and the challenge is something to step up too. Pain to the Max, Max Payne. Perhaps one of my all time favorite games, and one of the best I've played.