The titular Max Payne is a man on a mission. His family has been slaughtered by thugs and his job as a tough, street-wise cop is shattered when he's framed for a murder he didn't commit. All in a day’s work really… Rockstar's new title for the GameBoy Advance follows the plotline of the original PC-based title, converting the first-person 3-D action of the PC original into a third-person shooter more suited to Nintendo's handheld. And happily, it all works rather well. Given the restricted controls of the GBA the basic movements are all nicely mapped so getting Max around the impressively detailed environments is blissfully easy. Also present is the bullet-time feature, which made the original game stand out from the crowd. Bullet time borrows heavily from the movie The Matrix, allowing the player to slow down time and throw Max through the air while firing ludicrously powerful handguns with incredible accuracy--all good stuff and nicely ported onto Nintendo's handheld. The story rattles along at a fair pace, with dialogue appearing in comic book-style boxes onscreen to flesh out the plot and describe the objectives which lay in Max's path. Given the nature of the Max Payne franchise (i.e., it's ostensibly a first-person PC-based shooter) the translation to a portable format could have been a disaster. Happily it isn't. There's a flow to the game that just works and the graphics for all their miniscule size have a fairly high degree of detail. It's not all plain sailing however; targeting villains can be a bit hit-and-miss and sometimes there's the awkward feeling that the hero can only fire at certain angles but if you can take that in your stride there's a lot of play for in this title. --Chris Russell
Lists
Reviews
Images
Forums
Movies
TV Shows
DVDs
Music
Books
Games
