Maximum Action — RecensioneA solo dev turns Hong Kong slow-mo firefights into an improvisable action vocabulary with a sky-high mechanical ceiling; polish and content are another story

Some games tell you within sixty seconds that they have no interest in being liked by everyone. MAXIMUM Action is one of them. It hands you no story, no campaign worth recapping, not even a difficulty menu — and then, with almost reckless confidence, it does one thing better than almost anything in its price range. It lets you move like the lead in a John Woo picture: drifting through a slow-motion firefight, a sidearm in each hand, rolling off a wall mid-reload, turning a messy exchange into one unbroken, screenshot-ready piece of choreography.

This is a physics-driven first-person shooter built largely by one person, George Mandell, that landed in Steam Early Access back in 2018 wearing its influences on its sleeve: Hong Kong heroic bloodshed, the slow-motion dives of Max Payne, the posture of The Matrix. Its ambition has nothing to do with content volume and everything to do with feel. Where most of its peers fob you off with a single slow-mo button, this one fuses slow motion, dual wielding, diving, weapon throwing and physics-based weapon grabs into a single improvisable vocabulary of action — and the ceiling on that vocabulary is dizzying.

The cost is just as visible. The campaign is barely longer than an extended trailer, the early-access seams show everywhere, and the narrative is functionally absent. The question this review has to settle is the one the game itself dares you to ask: when a game bets nearly everything on a single idea — the action set piece — does the bet pay off?

Let me save you the suspense: if you came for a story, MAXIMUM Action will leave you cold. There is no plot to recap, no cutscene, no line of dialogue worth committing to memory. Its idea of narrative is to drop you out of one iconic action-movie set and into the next.

A campaign that swaps story for scenery

What passes for a campaign here is really a chain of homages. The game never tells you who you are or why the shooting started; it just keeps handing you stages. The opening two-thirds runs straight down the John Woo lane — neon-soaked Hong Kong streets, a smoke-filled tea house — and its signature moment is the tea house standoff, the kind of beat that earns a knowing grin from anyone who grew up on heroic-bloodshed cinema.

Then the whole thing lurches sideways. A jungle militia compound. A Wild West town. An Arctic military base. A cluster of city rooftops. Each level behaves like a different movie, and that "one stage, one genre" structure does generate real variety.

But it also exposes what the storytelling actually is: not a journey, but a tour of beautifully dressed sets you happen to clear out one by one. There's no connective tissue between them, no reason the Hong Kong antihero ends up in a snowbound base — and crucially, the game knows you don't care, because you don't. The set dressing is the point, not the sequence it arrives in.

Stack it against its closest spiritual ancestor, Max Payne, and the gulf is obvious. That game stitched action and narrative together with noir monologue, comic-panel framing and a sense of a life coming apart. MAXIMUM Action simply cuts the thread and keeps the action. Read it as a choice rather than a failure — a tiny team that knows exactly what its budget can carry, and spends every cent on making the action look good.

There's something almost principled in the refusal. Strip away motive and plot and your attention pours entirely into the present moment, into the choreography you're improvising right now. Every set is a blank page waiting for your footwork. For players who only want the action, undiluted, that honesty is its own kind of integrity — the game never pretends to have a story, so it never disappoints you by failing to deliver one.

Look at it from another angle and the narrative ambition lines up perfectly with the whole temperament of the thing. From start to finish it tells you it cares about exactly one outcome: making you the action-movie lead who handles everything in slow motion. A story would only slow that down, so it cuts the story out. That near-obsessive focus guarantees a low score in this dimension and, in the same stroke, buys the purity it achieves in the action. Understand the trade and you'll stop reaching for the wrong ruler to measure it.

A blank-slate hero and a roomful of mannequins

The protagonist is a deliberate void: no name, no memorable face, no arc. He exists purely as the vessel for that action vocabulary, and that's hardly unusual for the genre — you're not playing a character so much as a stance, the silhouette of an '80s action hero.

The trouble lives on the other side of the encounter. Enemy AI is thin, and opponents frequently stand around doing nothing, oblivious to the threat. When a firefight that should crackle instead collapses into a one-sided target gallery, the illusion of starring in an action picture takes a real hit. You can be standing in a lovingly built film set only to find the extras frozen in place, waiting to be tidied away.

So the verdict on this dimension is plain, and it has been from the opening minute. MAXIMUM Action invests almost nothing in narrative and outsources the whole thing entirely to its set design and your own imagination. Whatever "narrative satisfaction" you take away comes from the flourish you choreographed yourself, not from any written script. For some players that's the appeal — no preamble, just a stage. For anyone who wants a complete story, this is close to empty space, and it never apologises for it.

Audio is the part of MAXIMUM Action that's easy to overlook and quietly doing real work. There's no original score to remember, yet the game has a sharp grasp of how sound amplifies action.

Sound built to serve the overload

The aural core is the feedback of ranged fire and impact. Every shot, every spent sidearm hurled into a target, every body flung by force lands with a clean, punchy report. Those sounds are what turn a bare exchange of numbers into something with weight and rhythm. In the middle of the chaos your ears are doing more navigation than you realise — reading which side has the denser fire, which direction the nearest threat is closing from.

The real flourish is how the audio handles entering and leaving slow motion. As time stretches, the sound sinks, drags and blurs, and that instant of tonal shift is practically the standard recipe for a Hong Kong long-take firefight. It doesn't just slow the picture; it lets your ears settle into the slow-mo with it. That fusion of sound and image is one of the biggest sources of the game's cinematic charge, and it's exactly what separates it from the cheap slow-down that only drags the visuals. It's a small trick with an outsized effect — that dip in pitch is half of why a slowed-down moment feels heroic rather than merely sluggish.

A ceiling set by scale, and scenery you can hear

Be honest about the limits. As a one-person indie project, MAXIMUM Action has an obvious audio ceiling. There's no theme you'll hum afterwards, no professionally produced atmosphere — and on that front it trails something like Stranglehold, a John Woo–produced shooter with a properly composed soundtrack. You'll finish and struggle to recall a single bar of music, because there's barely any to recall.

What it does manage, cleverly, is location-specific ambience.

Each setting carries its own sonic signature: the clatter of the neon district, the echo of the tea house, the cold emptiness of the Arctic base. Paired with the one-stage-one-movie structure, the limited audio budget gets spread across distinct moods, and the sense of repetition thins out considerably. It's the cheapest possible way to make eight short levels feel like eight different places, and it lands.

That location-specific ambience does quiet structural work, too. By giving each setting its own audio fingerprint, the game reinforces the "I'm inside an action movie" fantasy without spending a cent on composition — the ears do what the budget couldn't. It's the same pragmatic philosophy you hear in the visuals, where range of scenery stands in for fidelity of texture.

The upshot is a piece that's smart about being modest. It can't dazzle you with a score, so it pours its budget into making the action sound great and the slow motion feel right. For a game that has bet everything on the set piece, that's a pragmatic call — it won't impress you with music, but it never lets you down in the moment that matters most, and for this kind of game the second thing counts for more.

The visuals are the part of MAXIMUM Action that's easiest to dismiss in a sentence, and the part that least deserves it. Yes, it's rough — but it's rough with a purpose. Almost every scrap of visual budget has been spent making the action legible and the action exhilarating, in that order.

Cheap on the surface, functional underneath

Start with the obvious. As a solo project, the art is unapologetically low-budget. Models are simple, textures plain, and the animation often reads as stiff or faintly comic. Set it beside a contemporary commercial release and there's no contest on fidelity.

And yet that crude shell doesn't stop it looking good in motion. The reason is that its visual priority was never material or lighting — it's the readability of the action. You can clock an enemy's position, a weapon's arc, the direction of your own dive at a glance. In a game this fast, with four or five targets on screen at any moment, "clear" beats "pretty" by a wide margin. The coarse art turns into an asset: information never drowns under visual noise. The low-fi look isn't a fig leaf for limitation, it's a choice that suits high-speed action perfectly. When a slow-motion beat demands you read an entire room in a heartbeat, a clean, unfussy image is worth far more than a detailed one that makes your eyes swim.

This is also where physics becomes the real visual selling point. Built in Unity, the game leans hard into "everything is interactive": bodies launch along the force vector that hit them, weapons can be flung, snatched, sent spinning through the air. That physics layer is why no two firefights ever look the same — you can empty the same room ten different ways, and each one plays out as a slightly different little performance. The spectacle isn't authored frame by frame by an art team; it's generated, live, by the interaction of your inputs and the simulation. That's a fundamentally different — and cheaper — way to look impressive, and it suits a one-person budget far better than chasing fidelity ever could.

A picture made of movement

That kind of dynamic image is precisely what a still screenshot can't carry. Its beauty isn't in any single frame's fidelity; it's in the flow of a sequence of actions strung together. Toggle the third-person view (opened via the console) and you can watch your own footwork and rolls back like an action movie — which is exactly why a lot of players switch to it. Grade this game by screenshots and you're grading it unfairly: its visual value belongs, by nature, to the picture in motion, to the cinematic charge that pours off the screen when you chain a run of moves into one breath. Freeze it and you see roughness; let it move and you see what it was actually built to give you.

Variety does the rest of the heavy lifting. From neon Hong Kong to a Wild West town, an Arctic base, a jungle compound, every stage restages a different action-cinema backdrop, and that range keeps things fresh even when no individual frame is a looker. There's a craftiness to it: rather than chase photorealism it can't afford, the game changes the postcard every few minutes, so your eye never lingers long enough to catalogue the flaws. It's the visual equivalent of a magician's misdirection, and it works more often than it has any right to. Development is still nudging the visuals forward, too: the 0.96 test branch added new character faces with full eye movement and dynamic expressions, plus improved first-person hand textures, so Mandell clearly hasn't given up on polish — these are the kinds of details that, over time, soften the roughest edges of a one-person art budget.

There are hard limits worth stating. The game runs on PC (Windows) only — no console versions, and nothing resembling ray tracing or upscaling tech, because its visual goals were never on that track to begin with. Against its most direct modern rival, Severed Steel, graphics are MAXIMUM Action's clearest weakness: that game's unified, razor-edged low-poly look carries far stronger identity and visibly higher finish, while MAXIMUM Action has to claw back ground purely on the strength of its physics and its scenery.

Gameplay is where MAXIMUM Action stops apologising. Every concession it makes elsewhere — story, graphics, content — is in service of getting this one dimension right, and it does. On pure action feel, its ceiling is high enough to forgive nearly everything else.

Slow motion as foundation, not feature

Plenty of games think slow motion means pressing a button to make bullets crawl, and that's the end of it. MAXIMUM Action's "Action Time" isn't that. It refills as you keep moving, which transforms slow-mo from an occasional special effect into a resource you have to actively manage from the first second to the last. It is your aiming tool and your survival tool at once: you use it to find a firing line through a wall of incoming fire, and to buy that fraction of a second of repositioning.

The crucial detail is that the game never aims for you once time slows. You still lead your targets, you still steer your own footwork. So slow motion isn't a cheat — it's a skill ceiling pushed sky-high. A strong player can fit a wall-roll, a mid-air spin and an alternating two-handed barrage into a single slow-mo window; a newcomer can barely use it to stay alive. That property — one mechanic that produces two utterly different results in the hands of a novice and an expert — is the signature of a great action game.

A vocabulary you improvise

The headline is the near-indulgent freedom of the dual wielding. You hold a weapon in each hand and reload them independently — suppress with one, harvest with the other — or just strap on two rocket launchers for the sheer absurdity of it. From twin SMGs to a double-barrel-and-magnum split, the combinatorial freedom is the game's whole identity. It doesn't prescribe how you should fight; it hands you a toolkit and lets you invent.

The arsenal feeds that freedom. Reviewers struggle to name a weapon the game is missing: standard sidearms, Wild West revolvers, double-barrel pieces, a Doom-style super blaster, even rocket launchers you can run akimbo. Ammo litters the floor, damage numbers run cartoonishly high, and pickups are everywhere — a deliberate nod to the GoldenEye era of console shooters, rewrapped in modern physics and slow motion. The point isn't realism; it's that any two of these can be paired, so your loadout becomes a creative decision rather than a menu choice.

On top of dual wielding sits a movement system that rewards never standing still: shoot-dodging dives, slides, jumps, all feeding into that walk-to-refill slow motion. The game is begging you, at the level of its mechanics, to keep flowing rather than hunker down. The finest touch is physics-based weapon grabbing — fling a spent weapon to stagger an enemy, then snatch a fresh one out of the air mid-fight. None of that is scripted; it's computed live by the physics engine, which is why it produces those un-repeatable, slightly-different-every-time improvised moments. Diving, for its part, looks spectacular even when it isn't strictly the optimal way to dodge a shot — and the game is happy to let you trade efficiency for style.

Bolt the pieces together and you have a genuinely improvisable vocabulary of action. Its depth holds up against its forebear Max Payne and arguably goes further on freedom — where Payne's slow-mo dive was a fixed bit of theatre, MAXIMUM Action hands the whole performance back to you and the physics.

Scoring, the difficulty gap, and the rivals

What sustains the long game is arcade-style action scoring. Chained hits, stylish takedowns, high-risk plays threaded through slow motion all rack up points, turning a seemingly chaotic firefight into a problem you can run again and again to beat your own record. It quietly converts "finish the levels" into "find a cooler, higher-scoring way through the same room" — and that's the real depth.

But there's a design gap to name honestly: no difficulty options. Once you internalise the slow-mo and akimbo rhythm, the standard run loses tension fast, and the only way to keep the challenge alive is to set your own constraints — weapon limits, no-hit runs, score attacks. Put plainly, this game's ceiling on fun ends up in the player's hands, not in the levels the developer laid down.

Laterally, it makes a fine pairing with the modern benchmark Severed Steel: that game moves more smoothly, feels more complete, ships with fewer bugs — but it lacks the Hong Kong-flavoured, improvised chaos that "any-two-weapon wielding plus physics weapon grabs" produces here. The two stake out the genre's opposite poles: one chasing flawless flow, one chasing pure abandon. MAXIMUM Action plants its flag firmly in the second camp, and plants it deep.

Content is the biggest argument anyone can pick with MAXIMUM Action, and the one thing you have to settle before you spend a cent. The gameplay is, by any honest measure, a solid nine. The sheer amount of it is a completely different conversation altogether.

A campaign shorter than a trailer

Here's the brutal number first: HLTB pegs a first run of the main game at roughly two hours, and in practice the seven-or-so scenes often clear in around one. That's a runtime that makes plenty of players hesitate on the spot — it reads less like a finished game and more like an extended action trailer.

Part of that brevity is by design. The levels follow a Hotline Miami–style model of bite-sized missions, each running anywhere from a minute to a few, chasing the rush of a clean sweep rather than long, padded exploration. There's a logic to it: these are sprints, not marathons, tuned for the dopamine of a flawless run rather than the slow accumulation of a long campaign. The problem is that when the level count is also small, "short and sharp" slides easily into "short and slight." Play the campaign once, straight, and two hours later the content does just stop. This is the hardest gap to close between it and the dozens-of-hours blockbusters — you can't measure it with an open-world yardstick or it'll only ever look like a half-built thing. Pick up a different yardstick, though, and the story changes entirely.

Editor, sandbox and Workshop do the real lifting

Judging this game by campaign length badly undersells it, because its true depth lives in your hands. It ships with a level editor and a sandbox mode, and with unlockable endless modes and assorted cheat codes the full clear-and-score time stretches to around six hours — and that's only a starting point.

The Workshop is the bigger story. When official updates run thin, it's player-made maps and challenges that keep feeding the community fresh blood. You can build your own stages, design your own challenges, chase scores on someone else's layout. For a hardcore indie action game this is the typical — and inevitable — survival strategy: the developer hands you a powerful "set-piece generator," and the community fills in the rest. Seen that way, the game's content volume is genuinely open-ended; it depends on how much you're willing to build and grind yourself. The two-hour campaign is the demo reel; the real game is whatever you and a few thousand other players choose to make of the toolkit, and that's a wildly different proposition from a fixed runtime.

There's an honest caveat about the future, though. The game keeps delivering free updates in early access, but after Mandell and the publisher who originally courted it, New Blood Interactive, parted ways over creative differences, the pace of updates slowed markedly. Complaints about "snail's-pace updates" aren't hard to find in the community, and they're the root of the standard advice to wait for more content before buying.

The good news is that development hasn't flatlined. The 0.96 test branch added a jungle level and a tank boss fight, shipped alongside the new facial-expression system, proof the machine is still turning, however slowly. The catch for buyers is a premise you have to accept up front: you're getting something that's already plenty of fun now but will grow at an uncertain pace, not a packaged, ready-to-wrap finished product. Internalise that and the content hurdle stops becoming a later disappointment.

In the end there's no single right answer to the content question; it turns entirely on what kind of player you are. If you tend to run a game start to finish and shelve it on the credits, the two-hour campaign will feel thin, maybe even short-changing. But if you're the sort who'll keep working a single map for a slicker run, dig through the Workshop, build your own stages, then what you've got is a nearly bottomless action sandbox. It was never trying to sell you "a fixed run of hours" — what it is actually selling you is "a toy you can recombine endlessly," and that, in the end, is the only right lens for sizing up its content.