Video Games : Max Payne

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from: Rockstar Games

: Max Payne

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Amazon Maximum Age: 17 years
Amazon Minimum Age: 204 months
Binding: Video Game
Brand: Rockstar Games
EAN: 0710425290923
ESRB Age Rating: Mature
Feature: Max Payne is a man with nothing to lose in the violent, cold urban night. A fugitive undercover cop framed for murder, he's hunted by cops and the Mob. Max is a man with his back against the wall, fighting a battle he cannot hope to win. Prepare for a new breed of deep-action game. Prepare for pain. Format: XBOX Genre: ACTION/ADVENTURE Rating: M - Mature UPC: 7104252909
Label: Rockstar Games
Manufacturer: Rockstar Games
Number Of Items: 1
Platform: Xbox
Publisher: Rockstar Games
Sales Rank: 1141
Studio: Rockstar Games

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
Max Payne is a man with nothing to lose in the violent, cold urban night. A fugitive undercover cop framed for murder, he's hunted by cops and the Mob. Max is a man with his back against the wall, fighting a battle he cannot hope to win. Prepare for a new breed of deep-action game. Prepare for pain.

Format: XBOX
Genre: ACTION/ADVENTURE
Rating: M - Mature
UPC: 710425290923

Amazon.com Review:
Max Payne's wife and baby daughter were slain by junkies hopped up on a dangerous new synthetic drug. For three years, Max has worked undercover to find the source of these drugs, and, just when he's almost got it figured out, somebody ices his superior and pins the murder on him. Now it's payback time as Max faces off against the Mob, the police, and much, much worse. Max Payne has jumped from the computer screen to the PlayStation2 and there's going to be hell to pay.

Max Payne uses extremely realistic graphics to showcase a gritty film-noir-inspired New York City. Payne stalks subways, tenements, nightclubs, and even government installations as he takes his vengeance out on a horde of gun-toting bad guys. Taking a page from the visual style of famed director John Woo, as well as The Matrix, Max Payne lets the player launch into a slow-motion mode generally known as "bullet time," which makes dodging enemy fire and dishing out your own return fire a breeze, all while leaping side to side. While this looks extremely cool to do, it also evens the odds and can only be used for limited amounts of time, making it a strategic as well as aesthetic option.

And speaking of aesthetics, the game is packed with exciting moments, weapons, and locations, even if the enemies get a little redundant after a while. The level design ranges from inspired (a multilevel parking garage) to humdrum (a warehouse) and several levels actually take place in the twisted wonderland of the hero's warped psyche. The introduction scenes consist of painted photos presented in graphic-novel style, which is a stylistic choice that pays dividends, even though the writing is hilariously bad and the voice acting is, if possible, even worse.

Needless to say, all this is violent, disturbing, and not at all for the kids. Pay attention to the Mature rating; it's not there for decoration. --Bob Andrews

--This review refers to the PlayStation2 version of the game.

Pros: Cons:

Amazon.com Product Description:
Max Payne is a stylish, urban, revenge-driven action game based in New York City's grimy underground. A groundbreaking rendering engine allows for heart-stopping, photorealistic visuals and breathtaking, movie-quality effects as Max Payne fights his way to uncover the truth. The game combines elements from Hollywood action thrillers with the latest in video game technology to deliver a highly original gameplay experience.



Customer Reviews
Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - A FANTASTIC ACTION TITLE 9.25 OUT OF 10
Max Payne dishes out thrills like there's no tomorrow, and is definitely one of the original Xbox's finest action titles. It may be a third-person shooter, but that doesn't mean it isn't as cool as any other shooter.
WHAT THE GAME IS: You are Max Payne; a cop whose life has gone down the crapper because of the murders of his wife and baby, and now he's being accused of murder of a cop. So you must take out mafia and gang groups with a large arsenal weapons and descend into the New York underworld of crime, while solving clues and avoiding capture.
GRAPHICS: Time has not been kind to this game, it was released 6-7 years ago and the graphics don't look good, but rather blocky.
SOUND: Shooting, explosions, dying screams of enemies, and fairly good voice-acting.
MUSIC: The music is barely present, but luckily you'll hardly ever notice this blemish because of how much adrenaline will be in your system when playing this game.
GAMEPLAY: Character movement could use a little work, but the gun controls work great. Platforming is a little sticky. The gameplay is fast and feels like its on crack especially during the huge gun battles of dozens of enemies or more. This game is absolutely wonderful, though some low points are some sticky movements and the dream sequences Max Payne has are kinda difficult because they require you to go through maze-like environments.
OVERALL: This game could easily be enjoyed by any fan of action titles because of the great gameplay, interesting story, comic book-style cutscenes, a great selection of weapons (molotov cocktails anyone?), and the awesome slow-motion feature which would later be used in games like F.E.A.R.
THE GOOD: Fast bullet-spraying gameplay, interesting story, cool weapons, and the innovative slow-motion feature.
THE BAD: Some sticky controls and platforming sequences, and ugly graphics. Though most of these problems are easily ignored.


Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Great game
This game was better on the PC, but the Xbox version was really fun as well. I loved the action sequences and the storyline is top-knotch. I did not care for the ending, and the part where you are drugged up and have to walk through the maze is a miserable experience to say the least. Other than those incidents, this game is incredible. Enemy AI is great, and the graphics are fantastic. You MUST experience the 'bullet-time' to appreciate this game in its fullest.

I highly recommend this game if you are looking for something that is different than just "shoot 'em up."


Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - Awesome! Satisfies your New York Minute Cop Videogame addiction
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.


Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - Lacking in depth, but not in substance
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.


Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - Fun!!!
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!

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