Max Payne
(Macsoft)

A noir New York City in the middle of winter with evil afoot? It?s dark, politically incorrect, involves all kinds of vices and tons of ultra-violence. What?s there not to like? Especially since Stan was kind enough to send it to me.

In the game you play Max Payne, a cop with wife and kid who get whacked and he is off to take his revenge. Her death is part of a conspiracy involving drugs, a big corporation (How come NGOs are never the baddies in games?) and city corruption. You, of course, get to see some of the dire parts of NYC, its sewers, part of the subway and at least one brothel. To be fair, you also get to trash a posh mansion too. The plot has been done a million times in books and movies, but this time you are in the movie and not just watching it.

In keeping with the new style of action movies out these days, there are Matrix-style diving shots, as well as slow-mo ?bullet time?. These come in handy every once and while, but are for the most part a gimmick. There are those who warn against using the features as they will make an already short game even shorter. Power-gamers can expect to get through the game in about 3 days of game play.

Frustratingly, you must play on the easiest setting before being able to play on either on the higher difficulties. Why one would want to play the game after completing it the first time is beyond me. Yes, it?s a great game, but with nothing new in the harder levels and no multi-player there is little replay value. Maybe Payne could provide you with some good therapy after a particularily crap day, but that is about it.

The game ran perfectly well on my Emac 700mhz 340mb of RAM. There was very little clipping and as far as I can tell no bugs.

The first two parts of this three part story, told in graphic novel style-cutscenes, are pretty damn easy once you get to grips with the camera-angles and game-play. Along the way you will encounter daft and frankly lame ?dream sequences? which see you running around following a bloody trail and leaping around. This is just a pain and is best done with a walkthrough as it gets tedious very fast. The last section of the game fizzles a bit in plot and one finds oneself in several situations that are just hard for the sake of it. There is at least one place where if you don?t have ammo for a particular weapon you cannot continue, which is a bit of a nuisance. I was forced to go back and repeat at least one chapter to make sure I had enough ammo to get through. Oddly enough, this is the last hard bit of the game and the rest is relatively easy to complete, including the finale.