Max Payne’s story is solid, if not a little convoluted and implausible. Following the struggle of Max Payne, whose family has been brutally murdered by a group of drug junkies, you follow the trail of clues through various gangs as you try to uncover why this happened to you of all people. The story is fully voice acted and told mostly through sleek comic book style panels, which look very cool and help give the title a distinct character. The game stays true to that atmosphere by using lots of metaphors in the narration (falling snow is raining icicles, for instance), which is nice, until it quickly grows on your nerves.

Obviously, the biggest draw to Max Payne is its "bullet time" feature, and it really helps set Payne above the other shooters out there. Much like The Matrix, "Bullet Time" slows the entire world down to a crawl, yet allows you to aim at normal speed, giving you the jump on your foes and a chance to survive against large groups of enemies. And fortunately, it just isn’t some gimmick the developers shoehorned in to try and sell the game; it actually has a real use. In fact, as you progress through the game you find yourself almost relying on it, carefully managing your meter so that you don’t run out right when you really need it most.

Fortunately this is all backed up by some fantastic gameplay. The game is played from a third person perspective, and while this may be a negative for hardcore FPS players, I found that it worked out quite well, helping me to see around corners and scout enemies much easier. While the original control setup left much to be desired (both analog sticks for movement just doesn’t work for me), after switching to the digital pad plus left stick I was good to go. After just a few sections in the game I had the controls down quite well, and was capping thugs like a pro. Most of this was thanks to the much appreciated auto-aim feature. You simply don’t have the accuracy you would with a keyboard and mouse (at least I don’t), and the auto-aim compensated for that quite well, saving me from pulling my hair out many times.

Max Payne’s graphics are a mixed bag. Most of the game’s environments look fantastic, with mostly superb texture work and great modeling. Remedy really took care in creating even the worst and grungiest urban locals you could imagine, and the game is rife with just about every lowlife criminal you could imagine. The character models look fine while you are playing the game, but when the camera zooms in on one of them for a cut scene for instance you really begin to see their flaws. The blocky modeling makes anyone who is bald looks like his skull was made from a bucket. The music is minimal, with nice sounding orchestral music playing in the menus and occasionally throughout the levels. The sound effects, especially the speech, must be noted however. The game is filled with scripted speech scenes that really add a bit of humor to the game. Thugs around a corner will chat about the oddest things – that is until you dive out at them Ingram’s blazing…

However, everything isn’t all cheery with Max Payne. While the graphics look mostly great, the pace doesn't warrant the same accolade. The Playstation 2 port of Max Payne suffers from terrible frame rate issues, which occasionally turns the game into an interactive slideshow. That said, the majority of the game runs smooth, but those few times when you’re facing a horde of thugs and the frame rate chugs can prove to be quite irritable. On top of that, loading times are atrocious, and quite frequent. Moreover, due to the limited RAM capacity, the levels are spliced up, as opposed to loading them entirely...which creates more loading time sessions. Even simply switching to the comic book storyboards takes like 4 or 5 seconds, which is far too long for a simple graphic. These don’t ruin the overall experience per se, but they are strong enough reason favor the Xbox or PC versions over the Playstation 2 one.

So there you have it. Basically, if you're looking to buy Max Payne and only have a Playstation 2, by all means pick it up. Its still a solid game, and the shortcomings are only minor. However, if you have an Xbox or competent enough PC, then I would highly recommend you pick it up for either of them, as you will have a much better experience. But whatever you do, play Max Payne. Not only is it one of the more innovative shooters released in a good long while, it’s also one of the best.

· · · Bahn