A flashy third person shooter which actually has substance. Kill enemies en masse in bullet-time!
You take control of Max Payne, after suffering an incident in which both his wife and baby daughter was killed, Max regresses to a life of being an undercover cop. However, your contact to the police gets killed and you're framed for a series of events. Now that knowledge of your existence in the police force have been wiped out... The police and your enemies who you spied on are all after YOU. You'll progress chapter by chapter, killing masses of enemies including the mob bosses. Later on, you'll discover that the wife and daughter incident was connected to who you're chasing down...
Graphically, this game is not pretty; it has bad textures and low polygon models but this game came out in 2001, i guess it's passable.. However, the flashy nuances such as bullet time, seeing bullets, the atmosphere and the awesome presentation makes this a beautiful game despite those technical shortcomings. 'cut-scenes' are actually image-stills with great artwork laid out and styled as if you were reading a comic. The voiceover of bubbled-text is excellent, snarky, sarcastic, had playful words and is very melodramatic. The presentation really gives character to Max and it all just blends well together.
One of the key gameplay elements of this game is bullet time. By activating bullet time, which draws from a 'sand-timer' gauge, you'll get more time to aim and shoot at enemies as every one else moves in slow motion. The meter is filled simply by killing. The use of this skill is essential especially when having to kill enemies around corners with their weapons up expecting you to come by. Just activate bullet-time, jump out, and aim shoot at their heads. This feature had become a trend to induce that wow-factor especially after the movie Matrix and it definitely makes you feel like a bad-ass in this game. Sound is rated highly in this game. The voice-acting, the whoosh sound when you activate bullet-time, and the atmospheric tones are spot on, be it in a 'dream-world' or in a brothel. After completing this game once, i had unlocked two extra modes, a more difficult mode and a time-limit mode. Although i personally completed the game in around 5 hours, this game can become longer if you struggle at times and if/when you want to play the oher modes that gets unlocked. To fully complete this game, it would be around 20 hours or so.
Using bullet-time is really fun. You see bullets coming at you, your bullets travelling towards the enemies and the animations of your death or key enemies are all really slow and flashy. Other note-worthy aspects is the sniper rifle you get about halfway through the game. Firing a sniper bullet on target would see the camera zoom and travel along with the bullet. Seeing the journey and the death animation afterwards is instantly satisfying.
The game is split up into 3 parts, which is further split up in chapters. Each chapter is told through a comic book style layout with a voice-over. At the end of each part, you'll find yourself playing a small surreal mini-chapter which really varies the game a lot from the usual gun action. To begin with, i slogged through the 1st part, using bullet time, navigating forward. The game seemed really monotonous. Kill, clear out room, go to next area, and repeat. The game didn't seem all that much until the end of 1st part.Things really picked up from there, you had learnt how best to combat by then, but also you recieve some much better weapons including the sniper. The stages became more clever and it wasn't long before i found myself in the last part. Thoroughly enjoyable.
I do have some criticisms about this game though. Although the action can be really fun, you'll often see yourself getting killed. And not because it was hard, but rather, preset actions such as lobbing a grenade down the corridor when you are in proximity. In no way is this artifical intelligence, but rather just programmed in to do this whenever you moved there. The same can apply to enemies standing guard behind doors or in tight corridors around corners. This often leads to your death, and that death is just really cheap. this forces you to save really often so that you have the opportunity to not take so much damage or die. This really breaks up the pacing of the game of which without saving would have been relentless. Enemies are still very predictable, they either stand there with their guns drawn or run to wards you. If you find yourself round a corner and being chased by enemies, just stand facing that corner, take out your bat and just hold down left-click. Any enemy which pops round the corner gets killed so easily. Any subsequent enemies will follow suit. Very cheap. Very easy AI. What makes this game hard is placement of enemies and that their weapons later on do so much damage.
All in all, this is one great game. Highly recommend people giving this game a go. People should be able to get this game cheap now. Although, graphically this is nothing special, the presentation, the story, action all makes up for it. This game is quite resistant to wear over time.
i rate this 8.9, Great.