This game has some of the most powerful weapon fire sounds I've heard in a video game. Its amazing how so many more recent games (I'm thinking about DOOM 3 especially) will always falter when it comes to weapons fire sound effects, with shots that sound like they came out of a pop gun. This game was made in 2001 and on a surround sound system, it sounds brilliant; just like a big budget action thriller flick. Beyond that the game itself is a heavily story-driven arcade style 3rd person shooter, and an incredibly satisfying one at that.  I love the muddy graphic novel style cutscenes used to tell the plot.  The slow mo "bullet time" effect adds extra tactical considerations to combat as well as slick cinematic juiciness.

The game is not without its flaws though. Since this game was made for the PC, the aiming was designed with a mouse in mind for pin point accuracy.  It feels clunky using the controller to do accurate aiming (auto-aim will help alleviate this, but there are some points near the end which require you to shoot as accurately as possible).  The Xbox port specifically had its levels chopped up into smaller pieces broken up by short, but incredibly frequent, loading times. The developers also tried to mix up the shooting with some levels which rely on platforming to get through, which is incredibly annoying since Max isn't gifted with graceful leaping abilities. Also the game does get redundant after a while, especially on the easier difficulty levels where there's a serious lack of enemy variety.

However, if you can look past these flaws, this game is a blast. It's a classic and rightly so.