Max Payne: First Impressions

I'd like to apologize for the two-day late review, Sunday was a little too busy for me and I wound up only remembering at 1:30 AM the next day.
So, Max Payne on the Xbox is a game I got for Christmas. And I have to say that I really like it. I like it enough that I might even get the other two games in the series. The game is fun, the story does this thing where if you're not paying attention some things won't make sense, but it's not particularly noticed when you're playing, although it's actually kinda cool if you like that kind of story. Personally I really like the ability to slow time down and do all kinds of crazy stuff. On thing I have to criticize is the fact that you can't move slowly if you're trying not to alert a roomful of enemies to your presence and the crouch function is practically useless because you can't move while crouched. I wound up having to re-bind the buttons even before I played the game so I could keep from having to re-learn a new set of controls. Speaking of controls, I barely used the "fast look" option even though it's actually pretty useful. I guess we can blame the design of the Xbox Controller S for that because the R2 button on the Xbox is kinda hard to use and is pretty much forgotten in the heat of combat. The story takes itself way too seriously, but it's the kind of too serious that immerses me in the game. One thing I have to criticize is that even for the time the face-mapping is cringe-inducingly horrible, but since you don't usually see the rendered model of Max's face in the game, it's not a big issue. Most of the times you see his face is when the game shifts to graphic-novel style film-noire cutscenes which in this day and age would be seen as cutting corners (I'm looking at you SEGA. That job you did with Sonic Colors on the DS and Generations: Blue Adventure on the 3DS was less than adequate. Not that the games were bad) but as it is they actually counterbalance the horrible face-mapping. The faces wouldn't be so bad if they'd been textured properly though. I've seen better face-texturing on PlayStation and N64. Granted, the polygon rendering is a little too flat for the hardware. Not that it takes away from the game itself, the faces just take a bit of getting used to. As the game came out in 2001 it's hard to fault the developers on any of the graphical issues, but I have one thing to say about it; It's better than Splinter Cell. It's also a better stealth-game than Splinter-Cell (Okay, that's going too far, but it's at least a more entertaining game for me). I can't help it, Splinter Cell gets on my nerves with how badly it does everything Metal Gear Solid did better with less to work with. So all in all I had fun with this game.
Wow, I didn't even talk about how the game was a third-person shooter with bullet-time mechanics and acrobatics. Anyways, I do recommend Max Payne. It's fun, it's entertaining, and it's worth the five-bucks it takes to pick it up for an old Xbox game. Check it out if you find it. I'll review it some more when I've played more of it.