Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5017 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: Take 2
• Released on: 2001-07-27
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Platforms: Windows 98, Windows 95

Amazon.co.uk Review
There have been a lot of famous Maxes in our time, Mad Max, Max Headroom, Maximus the Gladiator and Max Load (as featured in lifts across the world) but none have matched the cool, dark, brooding, pistol-packing chic of Max Payne. This third-person action-adventure shooter brings those slow-motion antics as modelled by Neo in the Matrix onto your home PC, as Max fights to clear his name and wreak his revenge on the drug fuelled psychos that killed his family. The game begins with Max returning home to find his house is a wreck and his wife and child murdered. Years pass and Max is now a drug enforcement agent desperately trying to bring those who ordered the killing of his family to justice, but Max's partner is killed and he becomes the prime suspect in the murder inquiry. Desperate and with nowhere to turn, on the run from the police and the mob, he goes underground to find those responsible for ruining his life. What follows is an adrenalin-pumped action game where you get to shoot first and ask questions later. Max has nothing left to loose and like another action hero in a certain Roman related film, he will have his vengeance, in this life or the next. Developer Remedy Entertainment has used the kind of movie-style special effects seen in the films of Hong Kong auteur John Woo and the Wachowski brothers to create a unique gaming experience. Max will dodge out of the line of fire whilst still letting his target have it with both barrels. The Max-FX game engine can be used to slow down the action so that you can actually see bullets leave the gun and feel the recoil. All this graphical whiz-bang comes at a price though. Minimum requirements are a Pentium II 450 MHz computer and you will need a good graphics card to get the full Maximum 3-D experience. But if you have the power your reward will be one of the best-looking and fun games to come out of the PC so far this year. --Kristen Bowditch

Manufacturer's Description
New York City, present day. Max Payne is an undercover DEA special agent on the run. Since his family were senselessly slaughtered three years ago by a gang of drug-crazed junkies, Max has been on a crusade for revenge, out to get even. Now Max's boss and best friend--the only man to know his true identity--has been murdered, and Max has been framed for the slaying.

Max Payne, a lone hero against a horde of stone-cold murdering mobsters, drug-enhanced killers, bad cops, professional assassins, corrupt politicians, and things much, much worse. It's gonna be a cold day in hell before anyone can stop him.

This game is a completely unique third-person gaming experience enhanced by its cinematic aesthetic, and by revolutionary combat sequences set against the most convincing New York backdrop--at its grittiest.

Customer Reviews

A Quality game
I played Max Payne as the first game on my brand new laptop, and I was thoroughly impressed.

The game play is absorbing always, and the stylish plotting of the story throughout kept the game interesting.

I will not pretend to be an expert gamer, and as such will often hit a brick wall in the form of badass bosses who dont die when you launch 5 rockets into their stomach (Still bitter at KINGPIN). In Max Payne a pen pusher, IS a pen pusher, so dont expect torcherously hard showdowns at any point in the game.

This game will be noted for its revolutionary 'bullet-time' which visually was fantastic and added a beautifully clever advantage over your opponents.

This advantage sometimes made the game a little too easy. Difficulty setting can only be altered after you have completed the game on 'easy'.

In short, the game is beautifully crafted and looks great, especially with bullet time, even though my GEForceGO graphics card was missing out some pixels toward the end! The game is, however, not a great challenge, and is, dissappointingly, very short. Having said that, I had a great time playing it. As such 3.5 Stars.

Simply... a great game
I was sceptical about buying Max Payne, as the only FPS games i normally enjoy are ones with strong rpg elements (hint - Deus Ex). But, after i had purchased Max Payne... wow. Apart from being an incredible shooter, the game is advanced with an involving and interesting gangster themed story, and although your part is made up entirely of shooting things, you feel involved, and even better, you feel cool. And you feel cool because you are an excellent super-hero type, who packs a mean punch, and tends to shoot first and ask questions later. And then there's bullet time.. which just seals the deal, for me, anyway. When you enter a room full of crooks who all suddenly draw their guns, you get to snazzily leap over the table in slow motion, shooting stuff with perfect accuracy. The artistic quality of bullet time is also used, with slow motion enemy deaths occuring, and some critical points being highlighted by the slowing down treatment.

The best bit for me, though, was reaching the top of the hotel near the beginning of the game, when a group of bad guys suddenly burst out of nowhere and chucked all sorts of grenades at me. I got to leap, in bullet time, backwards, off a balcony, all the while shooting them, and watching everything explode... You know, i'd buy the game just for that experience alone...

If John Woo were a game...
I must admit I was a bit afraid that this game would be disappointing. Most of the time, when a game is not from the USA, UK or Japan, it turns out to be lacking a finishing touch. But I must say that these guys form Finland have done a great job. Max Payne is a John Woo film packed into a 3rd person action game. This game is almost perfect: it has the best 3D-graphics I have ever seen. It has superb music and sound f/x. The weapons are great (especially the two berettas or two Ingrams). The gameplay is top-notch. But the best thing of all is a feature called bullet-time. When pressing the bullet-time button, everything happens in slow-motion. So you can dodge bullets, jump from behind a table and turn quickly and just fire your two ingrams around at all the bad guys in the room. All in slow-motion... A bit like the scene in the Matrix. Max Payne is great stuff. Buy it, it's probably the best game of 2001.