Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Disappointing"

Quickly and brutal as the main story is:

Rockstar PC failed a bit of things.

Sound: Perfect, brutal, beautiful, intense BUT STEREO. The last 3D FPS I played in stereo was Doom. With a sound card you can keep music and voice-acting on the front, and move the effects from the front to the side or to the rear pair of your surround. Which doesn't make it surround, it's STEREO, in a 3D shooting game.

Graphics and level design: Cool, sometimes gorgeous and rich, sometimes poor. Some character may appear better than others, even Max Payne itself from a suit to another.

Gameplay: Your camera will piss you off everytime there's a chance. It goes left when you want to shoot left, goes right when you want to shoot right. The "last-shot-save move" often ends with you dead due to a poor camera placing. Crouch and tactics are well worth, but Max Payne opens the doors running in front of enemies instead of being silent. It's not a skillful cover user aswell, he gets out to pull the trigger, even if an enemy goes to your back to kill you, he gets up, fire, gets shooted and go down. Firing dinamics change when you try to blindly shoot, which often result in a headshot or multiple throat damage with a shotgun at 40 meters and a dead Max Payne when a pistol is fired insanely at 20 cm from an enemy. In the favelas they spend money on doors which close themselves. The path is one, kill everything, get the special item, take ammo, take painkillers, listen to beautiful voice acting and story and start over.

All in all, it's like a SuperMario Bros (you can't go back where you came) in 3D, with weapons, a really adult storyline, beautiful but stereo sound, pretending to be a commando and a stealth cover game which is really the weak part. Max Payne can do some cool moves, most of them ending you downed or dead, even bullet-time.

At least THIS Rockstar game works well almost in every gaming PC.