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Max Payne Gives Max Fun!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: January 01, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Finally, us video gamers get a taste of what PC gamers have been talking about for months. I'm talking about Max Payne of course. There is an outstanding plot to back this game up, so it's not just running and gunning for no reason. This game also gives you a big challenge, because it's very hard. I would say this game would be impossible with all the large gun fights with many people if it weren't for bullet time. Bullet time slows the whole game down and allows you to dodge your enemies bullets like on the Matrix! This gives you a huge advantage over your enemies, and bullet time also looks really cool, too! Rockstar gives us another Mafia masterpiece, and besides HALO I don't know of any game that is more worth getting on the XBOX than Max Payne! I can't wait to see the Max Payne movie out next year!

Best game ever made

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: January 15, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Max Payne is by far the best game i've ever played the graphics are amazing it is so much fun, some parts are really bloody like in flashbacks but thats ok. the bullet time makes killing 5 x's as fun. I own both halo and max payne for Xbox i think MaxPayne is much better , the games are totally different but MaxPayne's by far better with the best story plot there is. If you don't own it buy it now if you dont you will regret not buying it sooner. [....]

THIS IS A GREAT GAME !!!!!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: January 26, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This is a great game !!!!! A must have for all kids and xbox owners!!! Better than Halo with its awesome graphics and wonderful storyline. Anybody who likes Bond, GTA 3, or metal gear solid should have this game.

PARENTS: This is a must have for your child. I gave it to my child after testing it out myself.

Awsome

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: March 11, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This game is really cool. Bullet timing is what makes this game.

One time through only

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: March 17, 2002
Author: Amazon User

The game was more than okay, but I have to disagree with a previous poster about the replayability. Once you've played the game, you're done. Time to trade it for something else.

It took me 14 hours to finish the game. The gametime versus dollars spent ratio is not very good. Buy used.

Just like the PC version

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: March 18, 2002
Author: Amazon User

The other positive reviews have said it all. I own the PC version and absolutely loved it. Too bad the story is on the short side, but still worth every penny just for the John Woo-style experience. The Xbox version is easier to play, but otherwise is just a port of the excellent PC version without the mod editor. Oh, yes, you can save the game AT ANY POINT!! All console games should be like this!!!

If you've played the PC version, there's nothing new here (even the graphics is pretty much the same). If you haven't, get this title for your Xbox.

Fun!!!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: July 13, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This game is highly original and really fun. I'd have given it 5 stars but the beginning wasn't very fun and the sequences where you have to get through that maze and when you have to walk on that rope and follow the screams were pointless, tiring, frustrating and stupid. But besides that, it was awesome! The bullet time shooting and dodging is great. The guns rock as do the molotov cocktails! Once you play for around 1 hour, the game gets so frickin' fun!!! At the halfway point, when you're in the mansion, it's some of the most fun that I've ever fun! The shootouts and dodging around corners in slo mo while unloading on some punks never gets old! The end's great as is everything! You'll absolutely love it and it's worth a buy but believe me, it can get hard to get through that maze. I hate that part!!! That wasn't fun at all!
But, believe me, buy or rent this and you'll be in for some great shootouts and nonstop fun. A must have!

Lacking in depth, but not in substance

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: July 19, 2005
Author: Amazon User

The best thing Max Payne has going for it is a tremendously effective immediate atmosphere. From moment one, you feel like you're a part of this gritty, grimy, underground world. You're convinced that drippy, rusty pipes and dirty snow are the only constants in your own life, and all of that helps to make the central character, Max himself, much more understandable and sympathetic. All of the little things work together, from the graphics to the storytelling to the various ambient sounds to the characters themselves, to paint this immersive picture of a city overflowing with criminals, corrupt cops, self-centered politicians and very few true good guys. Even Max himself is far from a squeaky clean do-gooder, and seems more like a comedically poetic Punisher than a Superman as he fires out one overly wordsmithed sentence after another like so many dirt-encrusted bullets. Really, Max only distances himself from the guys on the receiving end of his wrath through an admirable drive to discover the truth and a tragic origin, and this lack of any true, identifiable hero works toward that aforementioned greater good, delivering a more realistic setting and allowing the story to take some liberties with its subject that would have otherwise been taboo.

Max's tale plays like a solid motion picture; you come in just as the action gets interesting (a rookie cop living the "American Dream" comes home one night to discover a set of intruders in his house, and fails to gun them down before they slaughter his wife and infant child) and hang around as the anti-hero quickly loses his inhibitions and his mind, accepting an undercover job that predictably goes bad and leaves him cut off in the middle of a criminal underworld that feels he's betrayed them. The story is compelling, and is always laid out in one of two ways; either through a live-rendered cutscene in between scenarios or by way of a series of narrated, graphic novel-reminiscent storyboards. It's nothing new to see a game featuring speaking parts in the middle of a mission any more, but the paneled storyboard work that serves to bookend each sub-level is an interestingly novel concept that somehow manages to avoid the cheesiness you'd think it would be drowning in. Although the frames themselves are obviously based off of source photography, and that photography looks like nothing more than a half dozen programmers and their friends out goofing off on the streets and occasionally shooting stills for a game they happen to be working on, there's a certain charm to these pages that helps the player to further identify with the events that are going on within. It's a nice break from all of the tense, blood and guts action of the rest of the game to sit back and take in a quick comic book-based scene, even if that scene does happen to involve just as much blood and violence as the gameplay.

As Payne slowly begins to lose friends and brain cells, he also begins to lose his focus on reality and slides into several amazing, if frustratingly tedious, hallucinogenic nightmares and fantasies. These are the scenes that really help to set the storyline apart from its peers, while at the same time dragging its gameplay a notch or two below that universal standard. The world spins hazily and blurrily around you, your field of vision is always clouded by a sort of dizzying grey cloud, things seem to move just a little bit too fluidly, and time slows to a crawl... they really are some of the best in-game visualizations of a dream-like state I've ever seen, and are crawling with the same sort of bloody, twisted, hopeless tone that fills the rest of the game. You'll hear the last wails unleashed by Max's wife and the occasional wounded scream of his child off in the murky depths, and the first three or four times they'll send shivers down your spine. Once you're on your sixteenth jaunt through the area, they'll grow more than a little annoying. Still, if it weren't for these little bits and pieces of horror, the game would tread dangerously close to straight action, with no respite.

Gameplay itself is slick and easy to master, with the first few levels acting as a great primer for what's to come. There's no real "lock-on" mechanism, as is so prevalent in similar games, but there is Payne's infamous "bullet time" function, which makes the process of aiming precisely at a moving target a bit less hairy. If you've seen The Matrix, then you probably already knew what I was talking about when I said "bullet time" and thus don't need a more detailed explanation, but for those who haven't; Max leaps into the air in some sort of dramatic, gun-wielding swan dive, and from the moment he leaves the ground until the moment he touches dirt again, time slows to a crawl. It's the same sort of thing that was employed previously in Conker's Bad Fur Day and made you groan when you saw a CGI cow performing it in the trailer for Kung Pow a few years ago, but is actually handled with some restraint so that it doesn't feel all that gimmicky and truly blends in as a helpful new gameplay element. You get a limited amount of "bullet time" to dole out, (exactly how much depends upon the difficulty level you've chosen) so you're not doing it over and over and over again, and you're given enough control of your actions in the middle of a dive to keep it from being an easy, surefire kill every single time.

Payne's graphics have long been hailed as a measuring stick of sorts for the Box, and while I'll certainly agree that they're far above the standards set during the N64-PSone war, they haven't aged all that well as this generation's battles near their end. The textures and character animations have become almost run-of-the-mill over the years, and while that may say a thing or two about the game's long-lasting impact on the industry and the trends it may or may not have set, it doesn't necessarily come across that way when played for the first time today. The characters themselves have always appeared to me as though they lacked real weight and mass. They look like scarecrows, especially in profile, with regularly-sized heads and hands, but stick arms and bodies with thick clothes just draped over to give the illusion of substance. The facial textures, while beautiful, don't look particularly professional and feel more like user-submitted skins wrapped around the same body several times over. The constant smirk adorned by Max himself only serves to further reinforce this sensation. The environmental textures that wow you from the ground level don't carry over as the skyscrapers near the roof level, and while that's not something you'll notice in the game's first few levels, later stages take place almost exclusively atop high rises and warehouses, where the poor walls are featured, front and center. Building interiors are sufficiently varied, with little bits and pieces of black humor thrown in like a porno poster on the wall or a hidden video camera facing the bedroom behind a false wall in a seedy hotel, but occasionally distract you with sealed doorways that look identical to the doors you'll need to be breaking open or casually pushing aside as the game progresses. This isn't a bad looking game, but I wouldn't say it's deserving of excessive praise, either. It's close, but the effort and attention to detail seems to drip away as you reach the later levels.

The sound, especially the voice-over work, is very well done. Although the majority of the game is merely accompanied by ambient noise, (and, more often than not, screaming and gunfire) you'll occasionally run into some music or white noise that is particularly effective in setting a mood or getting a laugh. The programs running on the few functional televisions you'll discover are especially funny, and smack of the kind of comedy you'd expect from the various radio stations in modern chapters of Grand Theft Auto. When somebody's speaking, which is really quite often, the voices suit the situations almost shockingly well. Payne himself sports a deep, gritty, exceptionally noir-detective baritone, and pounds out the game's sometimes over-the-top dialogue to terrific results. Sometimes I have trouble discerning whether this game was meant to be a revival of the noir genre or a parody of it, as the acting varies from extremely camp to chillingly effective, and that's a fun line to walk as the events progress.

Playing a game of Max Payne is like owning a passably good movie on DVD. It's not great, it won't be bringing home any Oscars and it isn't quite my definition of an epic, must-see production; it is solid entertainment for a couple of nights. You'll pop it in once in a while when you don't want to have to think about anything in particular, and it'll deliver a fun time. It's got just enough depth to keep you motivated throughout a long session, but momentarily entertaining enough not to demand your time in huge, six hour bunches. I can see how those who rushed out to pick up their copy on release day were disappointed... this isn't substantial enough a game to justify a full fifty bucks. It's short, relatively easy and overly linear. There's no immediate replay value, despite the ability to unlock a few new modes of gameplay, because they're all essentially applying questionable new rules to the exact same game. It introduced a few new gameplay elements and represented itself strongly in both visual and audio, but just doesn't have that undefinable "it" factor to push it up and above the rest of the pack. Every time the story would take a step forward, the gameplay would take a step back, and vice versa. At this point in its lifespan, and for the price you're likely to discover it for today, I'd say Payne is worth the expense, but I can see why some of my running buddies felt betrayed by it back in '01 when they were expecting another GTA, which is pretty much what it was advertised as, and got a straightforward noir-era third person shooter.

Awesome! Satisfies your New York Minute Cop Videogame addiction

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: August 11, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Max Payne and its bullet time was the first game to allow the gamer to experience this innovative concept! What a breath of fresh air! I love the comic book picture storytelling and the linear story. Like reading a detective novel. Very interesting.

A great game! One of Rockstars best!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: May 02, 2003
Author: Amazon User

First off I just want to say that this game may not be that good for gamers 12 or under, it has lots of blood and there is a lot of cussing and swearing in it.

Gameplay:
Well the gameplay is very good, the way the controller works for Xbox was made very well, like if you want to take down some enemies on the other side of the wall, and you want to do a side jump in bullet-time, all you have to do is move the left thumbstick to the left and your character will automatically strafe to the left. Then all you have to do is hit the left trigger button and you will jump to the left in bullet-time. Also if you just want to run and shoot in bullet-time, stay still and hit the left trigger or hit the white button and bullet-time will come up, and all you can just run around in bullet-time and shoot.

NOTE: The controller figuration I have, was set up by me, I'm not sure what the default controller style is.

Graphics:
For an old game, the graphics are amazing. The detail they put on the bullets are great! The walls could use a tiny bit of work, and the enemies aren't the best looking, but overall, the graphics are damn good.

Sound:
The sound is freaking great. When you are in bullet-time and you're shooting the gun, the sounds are great sounding, like when you shoot the Uzi's, the sound is very cool. And when you take yourself out of bullet-time, and time goes back to normal, the sound of it when you do is very cool sounding.

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