Played on:
Windows
Remedy Entertainment and 3DRealms bring us Max Payne, the long-awaited 3rd-person action shooter. In it, you are a one man army with nothing to lose, blasting your way through the seediest spots in New York City. There are no super weapons here - just superior reflexes, aided by Max Payne's most notable feature, "Bullet Time".
Max Payne uses Remedy Entertainment's proprietary Max-FX engine. It's robust, fast, has plenty of eye candy features, and can maintain good frame rates even with plenty of action on-screen. The developers also know how to use this technology well, and have designed the game around its strengths.
The game has plenty of detail settings that allow it to run respectably on the game's minimum requirements (450MHz Pentium II, 96MB RAM, 16MB DirectX 8.0-capable 3D video, and 600MB of hard drive space). The higher detail settings will give you higher resolution textures and will put more polygons into the game world, the characters, and the tons of debris you'll create as you go through the game.
Max Payne is controlled via a 3rd-person interface - the only time you get to play in a true first-person mode is when you zoom in with your sniper rifle. This may, at a glance, turn some people off of the game, but this is hands down the best third-person camera view that I've seen. It's especially useful when you use the much-hyped "Bullet Time" mode (more on that later).
The game's heads-up interface is simple and gives you just enough information to keep the battles going; it never gets in the way.
The only thing about the interface that was particularly annoying was the sometimes-invisible crosshair. It's simply a tiny white dot, which is sometimes hard to really use well in heavy action. The ability to choose between some more visible crosshairs would have been very helpful in some situations.
Remedy Entertainment put a huge amount of detail into making Max Payne look as realistic as possible. There are countless bits and pieces that will catch your eye, and the developers have set up many situations to capitalize on that. Even if the game is run at minimum detail, the attention to detail is obvious from the very start.
The game takes you through many settings, and while quite a few of them seem a little dull and lifeless, it helps to really put forth the gritty New York underground atmosphere that the game mostly takes place in. The action certainly isn't lifeless, which puts together a pretty good contrast between the setting and the gameplay.
The aftermath of a gunfight is obvious in Max Payne; dozens of bullet holes and casings litter a room, and many objects will be destroyed, smashed, or otherwise blown apart during the gunplay. Explosions and fire look very well done in all situations, and you'll see plenty of it in your trip through New York.
The character models and textures are all very well done, although there are some problems with the model joints that make some animations (pulling a pistol from a holster, firing a pistol with two hands, etc.) look really awkward and unnatural. Either way, it's not a huge deal - since everything else is so close to perfect, these problems stick out more than they would if they were in most other games.
As you've probably heard, Max Payne uses a system called "Bullet Time" that allows you to slow the game down and get very technical with your gunfights. At first glance, this idea seems gimmicky and useless, but as you play, you'll begin to love it.
Turning on Bullet Time allows you to aim with deadly precision in the middle of a dive while dodging the enemy's bullets. It truly is a gaming experience that you have to try yourself to really appreciate it. It takes hit-scan "realistic" action games to a new level, one beyond what the great multiplayer mods like Action Half-Life or The Opera have already done with their dive/stunt systems. And while it really helps out fights, you won't be able to use it constantly - there's a limited amount of Bullet Time that is replenished with more kills.
