Max Payne

Rating:
Summary: If it is fun and entertainment you want . . . .
Review: Great game, great graphics, entertaining, fun, challenging, involving, not one lame moment. Buy it you will not be sorry.

Rating:
Summary: A superb game
Review: I'm writing this review after finished and enjoyed Max Payne. This game is terrific, showing one of the best graphics in a game this year. Sure you would need a powerful computer to play with all the detailed scenarios without losing frames per second. The game it's stable and run well with high detail at 1024x768x32 in Windows ME, in a 700 MHz AMD Duron, 256MB RAM and 32MB GeForce 2 GTS graphics card and a Sound Blaster Platinum 5.1 sound card. The game in fact it's short, I'm finished in a weekend but you'll enjoy every minute you'll spend looking for the killers of Max's Wife and Son and getting payback. By far a better game than Deus Ex and No One Lives Forever, the last two an excellent games too. I'll not tell you the story or anything of the gameplay; just buy it and enter in a interesting storyline and gameplay.

Rating:
Summary: Great Game, but annoying cut scenes
Review: The game itself is great to play, even after you've beaten it, but the inability to skip through cut scenes can be very irritating and can detract from the fun.

Rating:
Summary: Fun for a while, then it gets old real fast.
Review: I had fun with this game and if that's all that matters then I would have given it a 5 star. Unfortunately, the game got old really fast for me. The locations are really contrived. I got bored with the places I went to and the enemies are so uninteresting. However, I really enjoyed the bullet time feature and the way the game handled lighting. Still, everyone should check out the demo at least.

Rating:
Summary: Great Game
Review: Best game ever of its type. Great Graphics, Great Story, Great script.

Little on the short side, but leaves room for a good expansion set, or sequel.

Buy it now.

Rating:
Summary: Constant System Lockups - Patch Downloads Never Complete
Review: This might be a great game, but I may never know. In spite of having a P3 with 640MB of RAM and a 64MB Graphics card, this game has crashed (frozen) my Windows ME system three times in a row, as I've tried to "play" the tutorial. I've been trying to download a patch all day, and the miserable connection speed eventually degrades to nothing, and then restarts (thankfully where it left off). If it ever downloads and installs, perhaps it will resolve my freezes, but not so far.

Rating:
Summary: Dissappointing and a little dull
Review: Originally, I felt reluctant to compare Max Payne to Deus Ex, as the latter is such a superlative game as to make the comparison somewhat unfair. ... I offer this observation: Max Payne suffers greatly in comparison to Deus Ex, which is very much the better game.

In fact, I'm surprised at the predominance of very positive reviews for Max Payne. I offer here a brief list of the games primary shortcommings.

First of all, the interactivity of the game is virtually nonexistant. Whereas the environments in Deus Ex were absorbing and interesting environments to examine and explore, the environments in Max Payne are just backgrounds, offering little more than wrapping for a simple, fixed game path. See those boxes over there? That desk? Forget about them. There's nothing in them. Keep moving along and stop wasting time. (Actually sometimes a certain type of wooden crate will have an item in it. Yay.)

Where are the choices in Max Payne? The answer is that there simply are none. Deus Ex gives one so many choices that one gets lost playing with the game, seeing what is possible. Exploring the game becomes more important than the game itself. In Max Payne there might as well be a bright yellow line on the floor, because that's where you're going, like it or not.

Even within the limited scope of the game, play becomes quickly repetitive. One quickly catches on to how things will go down around this corner, and the next, and the next, and so on.

The A.I. sucks even more fun out of the game. The characters go from completely clueless to completely omniscient the moment you cross the boundary into their space. One second they are oblivious to your presence, but as soon as that hand grenade leaves your grasp, its "Hey it's Max Payne! Get him."

The software itself is fairly flakey, which gave a bad impression almost immediately. Installation became entirely about what *I* had to do to get the game to run correctly. I don't like jumping through hoops to get a $.. game to run. Even after I satisfied all the requirements, stopping the game from crashing on exit still requires a "workaround" involving turning of the voice modem.

I'll stop beating the dead horse and mention some positives now. There are several interesting things about the game, among which is the bullet time feature you have no doubt heard of. It's a great idea. (Back to negatives: it never feels like you're able to fully integrate it into your game play.) There are also some very interesting levels involving dream sequences, hullucinations and the like. The graphic novel aspect was also interesting. Finally, the graphics were very nice, and the slo-mo cut sequences at the end of the battles were pretty cool as well. (Although they added to the predictability of the game.)

Overall, the game did NOT live up to my expectations, but it was good enough to keep me punching in to see what the ending was like. (It was like the beginning and the middle.) In hindsight, I should have played Deus Ex a third time instead of buying Max Payne.

Rating:
Summary: If you are a gamer...
Review: I could waste your time by telling you about all the great features of this game but there are about 50+ reviews that already do that... This is my review simply put.

If you have ever played an action game, and enjoyed it. In fact if you consider yourself a gamer of any kind. It is your duty to own this fine peice of software, no, wait. This is not software, this is art.

Rating:
Summary: Max Payne, great game?
Review: I recently purchased Max Payne. I played through about half of it. I didnt play very much but I do think it is a great game. The story line is ok but I have seen better. This is game is ur shoot em nice and fast and do this easy puzzle real quick. There is this one level thats a dream type sequence which was a nice touch. Bullet time although a nice touch, not the greatest thing since 3-D. I think this game is fun, with extremely great graphics. But dont think it will be the best game in the world because it is not. Still I would get this game. If you like to shoot things or have some time on your hands

Rating:
Summary: Wow, you mean bullets actually kill people?
Review: For once a realistic shooter, nevermind the fact that it's 3rd person. I get so sick and tired of games where you're packing three different rocket launchers, a horde of plasma weapons, and a nuclear handgun as a sidearm. I like realism, it's true. And the challenge that it takes to kill off a room full of grunts without getting your butt shot off.

And I really like the gritty feeling of the game. Even if it is a very linear shooter, it feels like it's not.

Anyway, it's a great game, and worth buying, but make sure you've got a fast computer (as in above a 450). Mine lags a lot (only a 400), but at least the reload time is quick. (for dying that is)