Rockstar Games Max Payne – PC

If you’ve never played Max Payne before and you love first-person shooters then you owe it to yourself to buy this game. It’s cheap now, so there’s no reason not to own it before it’s out of print.

Max Payne is a gritty story about a cop just doing his job. His wife an baby are murdered and it throws his world into turmil. As you can imagine, he wants revenge and he gets revenge many times over.

What makes Max Payne unique is that it uses John Woo style moves and action. This was the first game to feature “bullet time”, which allows the player to slow down the action and perform fancy dive and jump moves while blasting their weapon at a target in slo-mo. Couple this with a good story and vengeance and you have a winning game. You get sucked into the world of Max Payne and you can’t help but love it.

Max Payne is a huge game. By the end you’ll have killed hundreds of people in your quest for the truth. It’s plenty of action. Even though by today’s standards the graphics look a little dated, it was top of the line for its time, with reflective floor surfaces and flying wall debris.

Another cool thing about this game is you can use cheat codes and slow the action down to a stop, then move it forward one frame at a time. You see, with Max Payne the bullets are actually flying out of the gun at the target, so when you do super slow-mo you get to see the bullets in mid-air heading for their target. Using the time cheat you can watch bullets hit targets and debris flying all over the place in realistic fashion.

Long story short, it’s a must-own game for FPS fans. There’s no multi-player, but who needs it when you have all the action you could want.

Also check out Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne. It continues the story, has updated graphics and the characters’ mouths move when they talk. It takes Max Payne up another level. However, the game is somewhat shorter than the first installment. Get both of them today!

Two words that simply make this game worth playing: Bullet-time!
I really enjoyed Max Payne. I like games where I have to think by preference, but this was just too much fun even though the body-count ends up like something from a Terminator movie. Basically, you’re just waltzing in, “Playing it Bogart” and pumping the baddies full of bullets, some of which are Full Metal Jacketed. It’s nice that they took such things into account and the effects of your gun-blazing are seen with more detail to your environment than the baddies.
The developers were extremely detailed with environment in this beautiful game. It’s really eye-candy and I honestly enjoyed the script: it’s funny in parts and wonderfully descriptive in its brevity. The writers did a great job setting the mood. Comic and noir lovers will be especially pleased as it is above all artful.
Also, knowing a thing or two about guns and ammo, this game does a fair job keeping with the traits of the various weapons that you’ll use in regards to rate of fire, kick and penetration. Stopping power is sometimes a foriegn concept, though because as the game progresses some of the baddies you’ll face are just inhumanely robust. That was mildly annoying, but keeps it challenging when Max can use Bullet-time to knock them off with ease. The odds at some points are so incredibly against Max that when you do manage to kill all the baddies in a room, the cinematic effect of watching the bad-guy fall is a nice bonus. It’s a tough game in some parts.
It is a little on the short side, but I was ready for the end when I got to it because it’s mostly mindless gun-fighting in close quarters. Still, it’s fun and there are 4 different skill levels to play, so it does have replayability. There is a big difference in difficulty from the Fugative level to the Hard Boiled. I haven’t played Dead on Arrival yet or the New York Minute, but I plan to when I just want to have some fun and get freaky with the shot-dodging.
Highly recommended. The first thing I said, out loud, when I played this and flew through the air in slow mo was, “Ohmygod, this is so wicked cool!” ‘Nuff said.