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Maximum FUN!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 8 / 17
Date: November 28, 2001
Author: Amazon User

While the game is definetly violent and raunchy, the gameplay is awesome and addictive. Picture Tomb Raider with more action, tons of enemys and incredible graphics. Combine that with the "bullet time" mode which slows down time and gives Max incredible reflexs and is also extremely pleasing to the eye, and you've got a great game. The control, a combination of mouse and keyboard, is awkward at first, but becomes second nature after the first half hour. I also suggest taking the auto aim feature off so you will have to actually aim to hit an enemy. The bullet time mode is so much fun and adds so much to the game, it makes you feel like you are in the matrix. However, like the matrix, the story is a little lacking. While it is interesting and intelligent at first, it gets predictable after a while. But again like the matrix, the action is so incredible, it doesn't matter so much if the story doesn't hold up after seeing it 5 times. This game is definetly worth buying but be warned; you WILL become addicted. It's nearly impossible not to.

Boring

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 9
Date: January 06, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This game had so much potential to be great. The whole "bullet-time" idea is really cool, but when used in the game it gets very tedious and annoying. When I rented May Payne I expected the Matrix in video game form. Thats not what you get. The story is decent but the style in which its told is extremely poor: its like a comic book. I just couldnt take it. Also the controls are terrible. To move you need to use the two control sticks on the Dual Shock. One is used for Max's movement while the other is used to look around. The combination of the two resulted in some not so good controls. The control pad should have been used to move Max: it would have made the game much more enjoyable. In addition Max is way to vunerable. One shot could finish him off. Some agrue that this makes the game more realistic. Realism is something I'm not expecting in a game where you can slow down time. Lastly the game requires no aiming at times. I found that I was just shooting and hitting an enemy. It takes no skill. So, all in all, stay away from this game. Especially if you've played GTA3 or Metal Gear Solid 2 which blow Max Payne away.

A LAME GAME

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: October 01, 2002
Author: Amazon User

First and foremost, I'd like to say that the script for this game is terrible! As I watched every cutscene and listened to Max Payne's poetic description of his encounters, I wanted to stab myself in the ears! The writers of this game went a little overboard.

The game starts off great. I especially liked the slow motion option, which allows you to take out several enemies at a time without receiving too much damage. The weapons and their sound effects are great as well. And it basically stops there!

The storyline is ridiculous and confusing. Max's wife and baby are murdered in cold blood, so "he's got nothing to lose". We start off by hunting down an Italian mob leader who may be responsible for the murders. Turns out he worships the devil? Somewhere down the line, the blame is put on some woman who is president of a corporation that is secretly developing drugs.

By the fourth chapter of the game, I realized that I was playing one of the worst games ever created by man! I immediately ejected the DVD from my PS2 and threw it back into its case. I ended up selling it on ebay! HEED MY WARNINGS, DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY ON THIS GAME!

"One of the greatest games ever made"

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: October 14, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Max Payne, from Rockstar and Remedy Entertainment, isn't just a great game. It's a compassionate and suspenseful drama with plently of killing to satisfy any action fan. Payne, a lonely-do-nothing kind of man is surprised to find out the gangsters who murdered his wife and child in cold blood three years ago are smuggling a very addictive drug into the country. Armed with such weapons as Dual Ingrams, Desert Eagles and Pump Action Shotguns, Payne starts his own one man war against these gangsters with several people helping him. The game is a fast roller coaster ride and keeps you glued to the screen. Bullet Time, which is perhaps the greatest part of the game,allows to kill the gangsters in slow motion and watch as their blood sprays all over the wall. With Bullet Time, every minute you feel like you're in the Matrix. The game features a wide variety of weapons and a lot of levels and gangsters. The game offers hours and hours of gameplay and is incredible. However, there are several cons I'd like to address.

1. The game is way too easy and could be beaten in half a month. There's no extremely hard puzzles and it's a basic shoot-em-up game. For example, out of five doors only one opens and all you have to do is climb staircases to other floors and shoot the bad guys there.

2. The voice-acting is horrible.

3. There is a cutscene in the beginning of every Chapter. If you die and start over, you have to watch this cutscene over and over again and you can't skip it.

4. The blood doesn't look as realistic as it does in other shoot-em-up games.

5. When you shoot at bad guys, they all lose blood the same way. After they're dead, you can still shoot em and get new blood but the old blood will disappear.

6. Graphics are OK, not horrible but not great.

7. Though this is a dark and violent game, I just don't seem to liek games where you only play in the dark. There's not one level of daylight and you got to wonder: What's Max doing during that time?

Despite it's cons, the game is a must buy for fans of action and adventure game. There's hundreds and hundreds of gangsters to shoot up and you can do some stuff you can't do in other games such as turn on TVs, listen to the radio, and get sodas from vending machines.

Max Payne is a must get. It's an awesome drama and deserves to be in the hands of every good gamer.

Here comes the Payne

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: May 03, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Owing a big debt to older John Woo films (note the reference to Chow Yun-Fat), The Matrix, and just about any crime noir film or graphic novel, Max Payne is a gritty action game that strives to be better than it is. You play as Max Payne, former undercover cop who faces off against the mafia, the police, and anyone else who stands in his way. The storyline of the game is your typical revenge thriller, and it is presented here via graphic novel pages complete with voice acting. The voice acting isn't as bad as it is reputed to be, but the characterizations are so cliche and sometimes cheesy that you'll just want to skip past these parts. The graphics are gritty looking and present the violent, gritty atmosphere of the game perfectly, and while this PS2 version of the game doesn't offer the best graphics as opposed to it's PC and XBox counterparts, they are very well done nonetheless. The control is tight for the most part, although the jumping controls and analog stick can be a bit touchy for some. The bullet-time feature adds a new dimension of strategy to the game allowing you to aim your weapon in real time while your enemies move extremely slow. True, Max Payne is a very violent game, but compared to GTA 3, Vice City, or even State of Emergency, this game pales in comparison violence wise. All in all, Max Payne is a great game despite it's shortcomings, and now that it's one of the PS2's Greatest Hits it is worth picking up.

Very bloody & gory

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: January 17, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I purchased this game for my husband for Christmas. Now he spends his nights with Max Payne instead of me. = ) On the serious side,my husband seems to really enjoy this game. From what I can see, it is very bloody and gory. The graphics are spectacular on the Playstation 2.

Just plain bad

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: June 27, 2002
Author: Amazon User

For one, I never use Analog mode on my PS2 controller because it sucks so much and when I found out that this had Analog mode on automatically, you couldn't turn it off, and you couldn't use the D-Pad, I was pretty (upset). So what was the actual game like, you ask? Well I must say the graphics were pretty horrible. Max's face is so flat, he looks like an ape. This would have been fit for the Playstation and it was only put on PS2 to keep it among the newer consoles and boost it up. The plot is also mediocre and exploring just plain sucks. There are so many doors and you gotta keep checking them and checking them until you find the one with the bad guy in it. Fortunately, I rented this and now I know what game to stay away from.

only one flaw in this gem

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 7
Date: December 14, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Max Payne had to truly be the best single-player first person shooter game I have ever played since Half-Life. The game engine cranks out some serious frames per second on my mid range system (p3-500, geforce2 gts, 256meg o ram, 19" monitor) and that is high performance with a lot of the eye candy turned on running at 1280x1024 rez.
The story is easy to get into though a little kitsch and reminiscent of The Punisher story from Marvel Comics. The game has an interesting way of doing cutscenes. they are in the form of a graphic novel form with Max narrating. This is just a little touch which gets you into the game. The absolute best feature of this game has to be BULLET TIME. Whereby you can leap into a room and slow things down Matrix-style and hear your heart thump and bullets fly and you leave the room the only one standing. Whew!
THIS IS ONE GREAT GAME
and on a down note, I would have rated the game a 10, or 5 stars if only it had a multiplayer option. :( Never fear, there are single player mods coming out which will further enhance the replayability factor of the game.

One of the best PS2 games ever made...

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: May 10, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This game is so awesome! It's really realistic. The graphics look like real life! You also get realistic weapons, such as the Colt Commando (an assault rifle), a Sniper Rifle (which has a scope and a camera that follows the bullet!), a Desert Eagle (really powerful handgun), a Jackhammer (an auto-shotgun), and many more. Unfortunately, you only get the most powerful weapons towards the end of the game.

This game is mostly shooting bad guys, not really stealth or anything. But this game has a VERY cool feature that will save you many times called Bullet Time. Bullet Time allows you to move in slow motion, so you have a better chance to dodge bullets and hide behind walls/sculptures/etc.

Max Payne is one of the coolest characters in video game history. This game is kind of old (released in December 2001), but it's still great. Many PS1 games were old, and many people still play them, so it doesn't really matter how old a game is.

This game is not that hard, however, not that easy. In the last part, there are a lot of traps (like lasers that explode once you touch them). You will die several times in this game if you don't pay attention.

Overall, this is one of the best PS2 games that I own. This game is a classic.

Critically Wounded, But Still Fun

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: August 05, 2003
Author: Amazon User

MAX PAYNE isn't a perfect game. It has some flaws that really take the fun out of playing it. For example: You can't target your enemies. The best you can do is aim your little white dot in the general area of the bad guy and fire blindly, hoping you hit him. You can always use "Bullet Time", of course, but that's nothing more than a slow-motion gimmick (on the X-Box version, you can actually see the bullets in Bullet Time, which is a useful feature, in addition to being cool to watch. Another flaw is that you're forced to play through flashbacks and dream sequences--all of which are long and labored and would've worked much better as cut-scenes that you could skip. And that brings us to what has to be MAX PAYNE's most annoying flaw: YOU CAN'T SKIP THE CUT-SCENES! Oh yeah, you can skip the graphic-novel scenes, but they're nowhere near as irritating as those full-motion cut-scenes. They make you tired of the game before you've had a chance to play it. But, in spite of all that, MAX PAYNE still manages to entertain. It tells a gritty story-with a strong emphasis on the grit (this game is rated "Mature" for a good reason). So if you can stick with it and ignore the flaws, then it won't take long before you'll be hooked, playing the game chapter-by-chapter into the wee hours of the morning, just like you would with a good paperback by Hammet, Cain or Chandler. You might want to have a book close by anyway, so you'll have something to read during those looooong load times.

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