Imagine sort of a James Bond style character, in a gritty New York atmosphere. You're standing at the top of the building in the snow....the radio tower overhead snapped off with a helicopter crash below. After that, you begin to flashback three years ago. You're living the "American Dream". Beautiful wife, kid, house. You come home from work. "I didn't like the way the show started. And they had given me the best seat in the house...front row center," you narrate. You walk past toppled furniture and then come across a "V" with a syringe painted in the center.

You hear the phone ring. You pick up, "Help...someone's broken into my house...call 911!" You hear an evil woman's voice "Is this the Payne residence?" "Yes, someone's broken into my house, they are still here, you have to---" "Good. I'm afraid I cannot help you." You then proceed upstairs. You hear a baby crying. The sounds start to make your gut wrench. You hear gunshots and your wife screaming. You run into the bathroom to get into the bedroom. The door is jammed.... more gunshots fire as you hear screams. You run back into the hallway as a drugged up human assaults you. You shoot him down, then another, and finally you see your baby's crib tipped over... blood dripping from the sheets the baby is wrapped in. You burst into your wife's room, shoot down another man, but it's too late. You see blood oozing from her sweater. You hold her and scream.

The game starts off on a very unhappy note, with your wife and kid dying and as you probably guess, Max wants to get to the bottom of this mess. The first level you start off in a subway station. You soon find out due to a murdered police officer that its been overrun by mobsters. Is you make your way through the station, taking out any mobsters you see, you come across various things that uncover the story, which by the way is better than most movies. This sets the theme for the rest of the game in that you find out most of the story as you go along. This is good because it keeps the person wanting to play, unlike other games like a Microsoft game called "Halo" where the story is bad, and the entire game is repetition.

This game is for those of you who like action. They manage to capture some of the stunts that you see in movies and let you do them on your own, which is an awesome experience and makes games of this type a rare find. As some hidden references show in the game, the creators based this off of a John Woo style of directing. The atmosphere and the non stop action are very characteristic of his films. The overall style of the game is almost perfect. There is profane language and a few brutal scenes but its done almost in a tasteful manner because it just sets the atmosphere well and isn't just senseless language and brutality.

The third person view throughout the entire game makes it. The effect of "Bullet Time", which allows Max to slow everything down but his aiming ability along with the third person view makes the stunts look spectacular. It makes you look like you're in the Matrix, not to mention it comes in handy because there is not way you can get through this game without it. Even the easy skill is very challenging, but not frustratingly so. The way bullet time is done is perfect as well. When you go into bullet time, all other sounds become muffled and the sound of your heart beating and heavy breathing are added in the background These aren't things you really think about, but you subconsciously notice, making it an awesome experience.

As far as the game play itself goes, I would say its near perfect. Even when I first played it on my old computer, which was very slow, they way the program was made makes it have smooth looking graphics that rarely ever shop up severely. This is probably one of the reasons I liked it so much ecause when these types of games chop up like that it often causes you to die, which is very frustrating. Its very smooth and runs well on most computers out these days, so everyone can play it if they wanted to.

Most games set up the characters very badly. They don't give them much character at all, no personality whatsoever. Take Halo for example, you barely even hear the main character talk, in fact he doesn't really talk at all until he says a few lines toward the end. However, the way Max is set up, it
really takes you into the game. The graphic novel setup makes you feel like you are him because he shares all his thoughts with you. Despite all he is going through with his family, Max is set up so that you want to be him. He is so calm through all of this, again like I said a sort of James Bond meets New York.

Not only are the characters designed well, but the sounds are very well done. Most of the time the sound effects, like in Halo, are not very realistic. Sort of a futuristic sound to them. However, the sound effects are taken for granted in most games, but Max Payne shows you that if done right, it can make the experience truly amazing. For instance, at the end of the first of three parts, Max was drugged and captured by the mobsters. When he comes out of his drugged state, he finds himself tied to a chair looking at a man with a baseball bat. He decides to insult him, and gets him angry. He admits to you in the graphic novel portrayal of it, that it wasn't the smart thing to do. The next seen shows him getting beaten up with the bat. Now this scene got my attention because it hurt to even listen to it the
sound effects were so real. Then you look at the images and the way its illustrated just makes it the perfect portrayal of how much it hurt.

Through playing games, I enjoy nitpicking. I love to look for little bugs or glitches. Usually I don't find many, but there are always one or two, and Max Payne unfortunately is not an exception. There is a part where two men come through a door trying to kill you, but you have to kill them very fast otherwise the door closes up quickly behind them and locks, leaving you stuck in that room. This forces you to load your last save point and retry. It was actually kind of hard to get past that part because the door closes so quickly. But the fact that the rest of the game is so amazing and holds your attention until the very end makes up for it.

As you can probably tell, I love this game. If I were to rate this game on a scale of 1 to 10 I would pick 11, but since I have to stay in the scale, I give this a perfect 10. It left me completely satisfied when I beat it, it left me feeling complete. I didn't want the game to end any sooner, and I didn't want it to go on. In my mind it was perfectly wrapped up. And to me that's what matters the most, is that you walk away from it feeling satisfied.