Max had the American Dream: a beautiful wife, a wonderful newborn child, a suburban house with a white picket fence and a stable job in law enforcement. That dream was destined to die. One fateful night Max returns home to find his wife and child butchered, killed by drug users under the influence of a street drug called Valkier. Max transfers to the DEA to fight the drug, and just as he’s cracking the case, it gets nasty.

Granted, the rest of the world has already played and finished Remedy Entertainment’s Max Payne sequel on their high-end machines, but portable gamers finally have a piece of the action to call their own. On the GBA, the gameplay is viewed from an isometric overhead perspective. Unlike other portable translations (i.e. Splinter Cell) Max is still allowed complete 3D movement. The environments have been faithfully recreated here. Cuts have been made due to memory constraints, obviously, but 90% of the rooms from the original design are amazingly true to form.

Most impressively, however, is the inclusion of the bullet time feature. Tapping the R button enables bullet time, allowing Max to bring the action to a near stand still as the targets his enemies. Just as in the PC and console renditions, entering combat without bullet time enhancements is largely impossible; you’ll be mauled by the legions of enemies. Be careful, too, as this version comes across as more difficult than the other versions and doesn’t take to liberal use of bullet time kindly.

Bullet time itself works nicely, but the isometric viewpoint proves problematic on numerous occasions. You can only see so far, and enemies are really damn quick to start shooting you once they enter your sight. There’s no Quick Save in this version and an odd lack of available painkillers can lead to a frustrating adventure. Controlling Max himself can be confusing at times, as well; lining up shots during bullet time dives seems to take more effort than it should.

Finding the comic book-inspired cut scenes intact isn’t too surprising, but somehow Mobius Entertainment crammed all sorts of voiced speech from Max, too. It’s a bit low-sampled, but certainly listenable and there is just so much of it! Whatever compression techniques were used here need to be handed around to the rest of the development community pronto.

If you somehow missed out on Max Payne in its other incarnations, now is your chance to venture into his largely metaphoric disaster of a life through a startlingly good handheld conversion.