steakphish's Full Review: Max Payne for PlayStation 2
Max Payne came out a few months ago for the PC and has since become famous in the PC gaming community for its awesome, nerve-snapping action and deep story to boot. A port for the game was inevitable, so on it came to the XBOX and the PS2. Sadly, while the XBOX version emulates the PC version flawlessly, the PS2 encountered some problems that certainly didn't ruin the game, but there are a few flaws that keep it from being a perfect port.
Max Payne centers around the title character. You are a New York cop living out the American Dream with a beautiful wife, a baby, and a nice house. There is a new drug going around called Valkyre, which makes the users insane. Max comes home and immediately senses trouble. There's a weird sign spray painted onto the wall, and his wife is screaming. This is where you begin. You end up going upstairs, blasting your first three kills of the game, but you are still too late and both your wife and the baby are killed. This gets pretty disturbing, but it more than justifies you going out and pumping guys with lead.
From then on, Max Payne's story flows smoothly thorought a twisted and dark plot involving the mafia and people even higher up. Still, while the story of Max Payne is deep and involving, the gameplay is essentially one thing: shoot the crap out of everybody.
Still, even though you spend most of your time doing just that, the action in Max Payne is extremely well executed and very fun. Surely everyone has heard by now about the awesome Bullet Time effect, which is the lifeblood of Max Payne. Bullet Time is a state where time slows to a crawl and you can make out individual bullets in the air as you shoot them. If you've seen The Matrix, you will get a good understanding of this (though the bullet trails aren't nearly as obvious.) Bullet Time isn't just for show, however. If Bullet Time was taken out of the game and everything else was left the same, Max Payne would be near impossible.
Even though Bullet Time looks cool, it still has a huge importance in the game: precision aiming. When Bullet Time is activated, you can still aim as fast as if you were in realtime, so you can take out 3 or more bad guys before they manage to get a shot off. Bullet Time is limited though, and your amount of Bullet Time is shown by an hourglass onscreen. As you use Bullet Time, the meter depletes. The only way to refill bullet time is to kill bad guys, which perfectly balances everything out.
Along with Bullet Time, you have Shootdodge. By pressing L1 and any direction, Max will dive in Bullet Time and go back to realtime when he hits the ground. You'll actually use this technique throughout most of the game because it uses little Bullet Time, but works like a charm because you can still fire and seldom get hit in return. To counter this, Max Payne is only slightly less frail then the people he blasts; a close range shotgun blast will most likely kill him.
The graphics in Max Payne look pretty good for a PS2 game, but aren't as good as the XBOX version let alone the PC. Textures are a bit more grainy then usual, and everything just doesn't seem to have as much pizazz. One cool graphical aspect of Max Payne (besides Bullet Time) is that many objects in the game are destructable, and shooting a wall or couch or other stationary objects yeild surprisingly realistic bullet effects. First, the bullet hole, followed by a whif of dust and a chuck of the object breaking off. This adds considerably to action and drama of the gunfights. Also, you can interact with many objects, like TV's and showers.
The weapons in Max Payne are strictly real world weapons, so no laser rifles and plasma cannons will find their way here. Max will load out with berettas, desert eagles, ingrams, colt machine guns, and molotov cocktails to name a few. Each weapon thankfully has their own feel and place in the game, so there never really is a "better weapon", because certain situations require a certain weapon.
As said, the PS2 is the lesser of the two console ports, and some glaring problems arise that can hurt the game. First off, while the loading times themselves in Max Payne aren't ridiculous, they are on the lengthy side, and there are just way too many of them. Every chapter has like three load times, which really chops up the pacing of the action. Also, you can't save anywhere like on the PC, so the game has to autosave after each load. That means that if you die at the very end of a section, the game has to load up the entire section again, plus the cutscene which you can't skip, and it makes you replay the section all over again. Ow. While the voice acting is well done, it is so overwritten that you start to wonder if Max is reading off notecards. There's about 17 similies for every sentence Max says.
Still, Max Payne is still Max Payne, and it is still a great game no matter what platform you play it on. If you don't have a good PC or an XBOX, then the PS2 will still deliver the goods, just not as well as everyone else.
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