"Welcome to the gritty underworld of New York City."

I remember my first experience with this game very well. How I heard is all I can't remember but I recall being fully pumped the moment I started playing it on PS2. The storyline was deep as hell, the worlds gritty as such, and the damn bullet time! I loved it!

Story. As one who plays this game knows, Max Payne is not your normal hero. In fact he's not a hero at all. This is a pissed off bloke who's life has been destroyed by a then designer drug and he's prepared to go as far as he needs over the line of formal cops to get revenge. His life started out happily enough. He was a married man with a beautiful wife and daughter on a street across a river. He had a good job working on the NYPD. But then that one fateful day he came home from a late poker game only to discover killer junkies murdering his family. Retaliating, his victory is hollow – his family is now long post mortem. His life in ruins, he joins the DEA to hunt for the source of the drug known as Valkyr. And so it begins...
Story? 10/10

Graphics. Oh my freaking god. I'm no graphics oriented person but DAMN these environments look stunning! First, the texturing. This is one of the first games to do photo digitized textures and it shows. Take a look around a room and you could just about swear they look real. The levels themselves look convincing. The gritty and depressing bowels of mobster ran hotels and hideouts, basements, Mob houses, the steel structures within the Aiser building. Sure the level design is linear but hey, they look so damn good it's ok by me! The characters of the world look good too, and actually have somewhat dynamic faces. Ok, they don't move in a realistic fashion, but they change to look more pained when shot to death, so that's good enough by me. If I had one complaint (like so many do I imagine), it's Max's face. Yes, it looks just as good, but it seems those painkillers make him a wee bit constipated. Other than that, first prize!

And graphic novels you say? Yes, Max Payne uses these to help further the story, and not only do they help plod the plot along, they look damn nice. They look like some sort of oil or pastel painting, and everything is well drawn.

Graphics? 10/10

Sound. Wow! Not only do your environments look good, the sounds really help bring them to feel alive. Run through a factory, and you'll hear all the sounds they make – like bangs and clangs, or their computers running. Or in a hotel, you'll hear people murmuring in nearby rooms, toilets flushing, or junkies throwing up from an overdose. All this effort is enough to make me smile. The acting is good stuff too. Max has an emotionless broken tone in his voice that rarely shows any other tone, and all the other characters have great acting to them. Mobsters have their Italian accents going on, anyone going mad their voice was enough to raise my neck-hairs and so forth.

The music isn't something to make a soundtrack out of, but what it sets out to do it does well. It often turns on and heats up in deadly or bizarre situations (dreams basically), and its right on par with the situation it plays on.
Sound? 10/10

Gameplay. It's as obvious as it can get that bullet time rules the day here and is an important factor to victory. As you run through the world Max must survive, you do the usually everyday things. Picking up guns and shooting the hell out of people until you've basically squeezed every last drop of health out of them. At our disposal are the usual sort of weapons you'd find in any city like the big apple; Glocks, Desert Eagles, Sub machine guns and grenade launchers and so forth. Most of these are found in the hands of a dropped foe, or in storage in a cupboard. So even if there's no weapons lying around ala Doom, there's still plenty of firepower to “start an apocalypse”. You'll need the toughest of them all eventually though, because as one progresses through these gritty streets and buildings, one will learn that the enemies become that much harder to waste. As I mentioned though, you have two valuable allies: Painkillers that can be stored and eaten to cure your pain at anytime and Bullet Time.

What is this bullet time anyway? How does max know how to use it? Does it really matter though? You have it, so use it. So, how do WE use his wonderful super-hero feature? Well, as you travel the dark side of the Big Apple and shoot down those murderous thugs, a little hourglass in the corner begins to slowly fill up with a white meter within. Eventually it fills up, and at a moments notice, you can activate it. Ok, we've done that. What happens now?

Your whole world slows down. Actually no, more like your whole world except for your aiming abilities, which are now mysteriously pumped and super fast. So now you can see all the oncoming bullets whizzing towards you and with a little mouse precision you can jump right out of the way and bring down that bastard like he's nothing.

So yeah, cool. Painkillers that can be tucked away until needed, awesome weaponry and enemies, and BULLET TIME! Does it get any better than this?
Game play? 10/10

Replay. If you're one of those people who likes to play through the whole game again, you'll like the fact that as you continuously beat the game, more modes of difficulty can be unlocked, making the game that much harder. Oh, and don't forget more mods and map packs for it too. Have fun.
Replay? 10/10

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 09/01/06