Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne

The Good
Max Payne 2 made three large improvements over the first game in the series. Here is a quick overview:

First: The graphics engine was greatly enhanced, and a physics system was added - not only can Max knock over some pieces of furniture or other small items when he runs into them, but there are some amusing physical chain-reactions that can occur in some circumstances. For example, picture two dozen cafeteria-style chairs piled on top of an explosive ammo crate in the corner of a room. C'mon, you know you wanna toss a grenade in there and watch the result.

Also, the game's textures, especially the models and textures used for the stars of the show (Max and Mona) look gorgeous. Additionally, a number of visual effects were added - in Bullet Time, the screen becomes washed out and all of the colors become muted, and motion-blur effects are used liberally (but not too much). Even with a low-end videocard, you can get a very enjoyable visual experience. I first played this game with a GeForce4 MX, and had no significant graphics problems. Even Max's nightmare/hallucination sequences are severely distorted, visually, adding greatly to the experience.

Second: Bullet-Time (BT) was tweaked somewhat. You still have the familiar hourglass time-limit, but now it regenerates slowly over time. Also, shoot-dodging does not use up your BT reservoir anymore. And most importantly, when you enter BulletTime directly, and start racking up kills, Max moves faster and faster (or, to be more precise, everything else slows down relative to Max). As you gain "levels" in Bullet Time, the screen and sound effects get more and more washed-out, muted, and... "focused". Get enough kills, and Max finds himself running around in a blurred, sepia-toned "tunnel-vision land", with his enemies standing nearly (but not quite) motionless. Naturally, the BT "levels" are temporary in nature, so Max needs to rack up a good number of kills, fairly quickly, to hit his maximum level. They fade away over time as Max "calms down".

So with Bullet Time 2.0, the developers eliminated a large part of Max Payne 1's challenge (limited Bullet Time), in order to make the game more "fun". It certainly succeeds; it's very easy to get immersed in this game when Max is fully "in the zone". And assuming you can find a safe spot to rest for a minute or two, you'll always be able to enter the next battle with a full BT hourglass.

Third: Scripted sequences? Yeah, we got scripted sequences. Max Payne 2 has so many NPC and plot-advancement scripts, it makes Half-Life look dull by comparison. The first game had a few, here and there, but in MP2, there's almost always something going on.

Now, about the actual game itself.

The story in this game rocked. In some ways, it seems to actually be more story-oriented than action-oriented. But I love a good helping of Plot(tm) with my shooters, so it's all good. The actual environment is great, too - present in MP2 are the television shows from the first game, but you run into them at more frequent intervals. During a lull in combat, it's nice to relax and watch the adventures of Captain Baseballbat Boy, follow the story of Lords and Ladies, or catch up on Address Unknown. There is also a new "TV show", Dick Justice, which is seemingly a parody of Shaft combined with Max Payne 1. Always good for amusement.

The level design, with one exception, was excellent. The levels tend to be very large, and perhaps a little repetative at times, but there's enough variety that it's difficult to become bored and lose interest. It's even difficult to get lost in some of these large levels, which is also a plus. The levels include (but aren't limited to) a large building under construction (plenty of scaffolds to play around on), a surreal funhouse (based on Address Unknown), a burning building, a mansion, Max's apartment building, even the NYPD station Max works at. All of these environments have a ton of detail, and you sometimes find yourself revisiting them later in the game (except the second time around, they're very, very different, due to various Plot Activities(tm) that have occurred.)

Another neat plot device is that after playing as Max for a while, the perspective switches to Mona, and you guide her through the game for a while (don't worry; Mona can also use Bullet Time). The neat part is, Mona's stories take place roughly at the same time as Max's. This happens a few times during the game, and Mona typically enters a level from the "opposite side" as Max. So effectively, when your perspective switches to Mona, time reverses roughly one hour, and you play through the level again - just from the other end. I'm sure I'm not explaining it very well, but as a plot and character-development device, it works very well.

Ordinarily I hate "love stories", which Max Payne 2 certainly tries to be. But I must admit, it pulls it off very, very well.

I should also mention that the Max Payne series has a huge, active mod community. The level-design tools were released to the public, just like with the first game. Also, MP2 has a few different difficulty levels, just like the first game. Except if you complete the game at the hardest difficulty level, you apparently get a different, "happier" ending. I've never gotten there, myself - almost, but not quite. But still, even if you complete the game once, you unlock the "Dead Man Walking" levels. These are small, self-contained levels, totally unrelated to the plot, where enemies continually spawn in at shorter and shorter intervals. Your survival time is your "score" in these levels, and they're great for a few minutes of mindless action. How long can you last?

The Bad
I mentioned an "exception" above, in regards to level design. There is, apparently, a flaw in the level-design tool (or perhaps in the graphics engine itself). If your objects don't line up just right in a given map, if you don't cross every single T and dot every I, a significant number of errors are introduced, and the game goes berzerk trying to perform all of the calculations it needs to do. It doesn't corrupt the display, and it doesn't crash or anything, it just becomes VERY, VERY SLOW. Like, we're talking 1 frame every two seconds. Granted, this only happened to me once in the entire game, and only in one particular room looking in one particular direction (at a pile of junk and debris), and it's extremely easy for me to reproduce; it happens every time. But still, there's no real way around this problem, and you've simply got to trudge through it. I'm sure anyone in the mod community who has used the level-editing tools has run into this at least once in their own maps.

Also, I wish the Dead Man Walking mode was unlocked at the very start.

But you know, other than that, I don't really have any complaints. Except perhaps that the game was too short. It felt a lot shorter than the first game, somehow.

The Bottom Line
I'm sure that fans of Max Payne 1 would love this game. In fact, it even seems to stand alone well enough, which can be rare for a sequel. You don't need to be familiar with the first game to enjoy this chapter, but it helps - you'd probably miss a lot of the in-jokes and references otherwise.

The Good
If you've played Max Payne, or have Internet access, or you're not a caveman, then you probably know what Max Payne is, and chances are you know what it's all about. It's about slow-motion gunfights with graphic novel cutscenes and Max with a funny look on his face.

In Max Payne 2, the gameplay is enhanced, and the funny face is gone, but at its core, it's still the great Max Payne we knew from 2001. Gunfights are fought in a similar manner, but with Bullet Time 2.0, you can actually utilize it rather than being forced to "shot-dodge" every time you want to kill someone. Using bullet-time in Max Payne 2 is a spectacular sight. The colors change, the screen goes kind of blurry and it completely immerses you in the world of Max Payne: Faster Than God. And with the best ragdolls I've ever seen in a game, gunfights are a blast to play over and over and over.

Gunfights are what this game is all about. With a plethora of weapons at your disposal, and of course with the aid of Bullet Time 2.0, you'll blast your way through an insane amount of enemies, each one who may be almost as strong as you, only lacking the bullet-time advantage. This means that the game really does require a bit of skill on your part, and you won't be able to just stand in the middle of a gunfight taking the hits. Use your bullet-time, shot-dodge the blasts, take cover, and use the environment to your advantage.

And boy, how you can use the environment! The guys who made this game must have put great effort into making a TON of interesting quirks in the environment. With the amazing physics in the game, you can use these against the enemy (whether you're intending to or not) and they can use it on you. Imagine, you charge into a room with a staircase. Enemies are flying up the stairs, and behind you more are coming. You spot a tank of gasoline on a box. Switch to bullet time, dodge some gunfire, blast the gasoline. The tank ignites and flies into the first guy on the stairs. He topples backward and the tank follows him down. Suddenly the tank explodes, blowing a hole at the bottom of the stairs. The blast throws the box against the door, blocking any further entry from the flankers. Whoever else was on the stairs is now dead or falling down into the hole left by the tank's explosion. You look down to see pieces of the wall, boxes, bodies, tumbling down the stairway into the hole. You jump down yourself and find you can use this area as a second passageway to where you were heading. This is just one of many, many incredible outcomes I encountered in the game.

As well as incredible gunfights, there is an interesting story to go along with it. The same mood from Max Payne is back, with graphic novel cutscenes progressing the story further.

The game also has incredible graphics, and even more incredible is that I can run the game at medium-to-high detail levels on high resolutions on my piece-of-shit computer and STILL get amazing frame rates. The graphics-to-framerate ratio is hands-down the best I've seen on my system. This is one of the few games that actually stays true to its "system requirements", unlike many games in which still run like ass even if you have more than the recommended system specs. If you were reluctant to get this game because you were afraid it wouldn't run - buy the game!

The Bad
Despite all the greatness in this game, I can't help but feel like I enjoyed the first one more. Now, don't get me wrong, Max Payne 2 is a solid game, and a hell of an experience...but, well, let me just list some things that bothered me.

The writing. I just can't believe that the same writers worked on both games. In the original Max Payne, Max would always have some interesting metaphor to say in the cutscenes, and perhaps it was just that stupid smirk he had in the game, but I always got the feeling that Max didn't take the world too seriously. It didn't change the dark mood of the game - if anything, it enhanced it. Max was hurting bad inside, but he only let us know about it - never his enemies. But in Max Payne 2, Max is always depressed. I don't think he smiled once, or even suggested that he wanted something other than to die. And he almost never uttered a quirky metaphor - when he did, it was ho-hum, not nearly as clever (or cheesy!) as in Max Payne. A good example of different writing is when his boss is yelling at him for letting innocents die. In Max Payne 1, he would have been spitting out metaphors and insulting his boss in a cheesy quirky way, comparing the predicament to off-the-wall situations, similes that had you raise an eyebrow. But in Max Payne 2, he just pleads to his boss that the situation got out of control, that he needed to crack the case, boo-hoo-hoo.

Max also looks much more realistic in MP2, but he looses a lot in that transition. He's now seems like a real person - a real depressed person, and not the suicidal life-is-too-fucked-up-to-take-seriously guy from the first game. MP2's Max did a fantastic job of portraying emotion...one emotion: depression. It was intense...but that was it.

Also, his voice has taken a noticeable change. He sounds like the same actor, but he has a sort of...Boston?...accent that just seems out of place. He also never raises his voice above a certain level, in-game or in a cutscene. In MP1, you heard him literally yell out for his wife, you heard him get angry at his enemies. But in MP2, he always stays at the same depressed please-kill-me volume level, devoid of emotion, life. "She was dead..." "I hated him..." "I dreamt I killed my wife..." always the same. Maybe if the lines had been wittier, it would have been acceptable, but...this isn't the Max I remember.

There are other things "bad" about this game. Lip-syncing is pretty buggy. Sometimes Max doesn't move his lips at all when he talks, other times it's ridiculously out of sync. Going through the same three levels two or three times was kind of awkward, but not too much.

The Bottom Line
Max Payne 2 is a great game. But any fan of Max Payne will notice a definite change in writing, style, voice acting, and so on. It's not necessarily worse than Max Payne...but it is certainly different.

If Max wasn't so damned depressed throughout the game, I might have enjoyed it more. But it's still a great game, with new game options, including a survival mode where enemies will continue spawning until they finally get you!

Worth the money, definitely. But it could have been more. I want to know where the original writers went.

The Good
Well here we have the sequel to one of the most brilliant third person shooters ever. Max Payne 2 comes to deliver one more aesthetical feast for your gaming world, as it's predecessor did in 2001. All the comic book intros and interludes are here too, all the cinematics and the brilliant cut scenes. Max Payne 2 sure does have a strong and equally complex story running in the background to support all this killing menace. What's more, they've managed to connect the new story with what happened in the first episode of Max Payne: "Have no fear! Vlad is here!". And Vlad nowadays has acquired the (excellent) Ragnarok club and turns it out to a classy restaurant called "Vodka"! Now, I dunno about the Vodka there, but surely the Molotov cocktails are strong enough! Some other old friends join the party too like detective Jim Bravura who's Max's supervisor these days, Alfred Woden (the guy who helped Max in the first episode) and the notorious Mona Sax (you thought she died but medicine does miracles nowadays!)... Oh! I shouldn't forget Vinnie Gognitti and his hilarious costume (the design and animation of this one is fantastic! The scenes where you have to protect Vinnie are a great laugh!)

Okay, let's begin from somewhere in this game. You see the intro comic and the cinematics and you're anxious to get into Max's new world. You see a hospital and a room where you lie on a bed just waking up from a shooting accident. Simply stated the modeling and texturing in this game is a masterpiece! I dare to say that the modeling has evolved a step beyond the first episode. As soon as you'll enter the hospital (the first level) you'll realize this - thank 3D Studio Max for that! :).

Regarding gameplay, all the good elements of the first episode are here too! All the gunfights and whizz-bam-booms, all the good stuff that made us wanting more of Mr.Payne. So this time he comes in better clothing ready to blast away all those in the higher levels of society that conspire to plunge us into doom, to their financial benefit. The weapons are more like the same, with the addition of the AK-47 Kalashnikov (thank Vlad for those!) and the very useful MP-5 (which was only available as a must have mod you could find on the web, for the previous game) that can work in more than one ways. As a tip: Just think about the option of using it on the sniping level.

Hey! Mona gets to be Maxie's new girlfriend! Yep, time gets by and time gets lonely, so Max needs a bit of companionship and a bit of love. I'm not going to tell you the story on this one, I'm only going to say that in this episode you get to play as Mona too (nice ...err.. jeans pants!). So the action goes back and forth, as Max and Mona (a bit like M&Ms!) engage the same level and you get to play both of them. You begin the level playing Maxie's part, then the whole place explodes (what an original outcome!) and then without knowing if Max has survived or not you're playing Mona's part to that explosion point of the plot. Differences in the two characters are that Mona is a bit more agile than Maxie but, more vulnerable to enemy hits and the latter is far more apparent.

Another evolution of the game is in the enemies AI. These guys will give you a hard time even in the easiest of difficulty levels. They do now how to fight and they do also know how to hide. Sometimes they are a nightmare, as they have some very clever AI code on them and they make you run for cover. Most of the times you cannot afford to play via the full frontal attack approach and you need to think of tricks and strategies to lay'em on the floor. Just make sure you don't run out of the good ol' painkillers and have a finger on the quicksave button. The final boss (I won't tell you who is he, it's a surprise!) is extremely difficult to kill and although the concept in defeating him has a bit of inspiration from the final level of Max Payne I, it is still very difficult to avoid his continuous fire and send him packaged to the bosses of the other world.

Musically and sound-wise the game packs in all the usual bam booms one can expect from a game in that vein. The title piano tune is remixed a bit but the sad feeling it emits is here too. So when the main menu loads up expect to hear a familiar tune that will bring the following associations to your mind: Night - New York - Winter - A life gone down the drain - running like a fugitive - start killing to find the answer.

The Bad
Okay, here goes the bad news though. Although being a better game than the first Max Payne, this one gets a bit too repetitive and to be honest, boring. I mean, I remember playing two levels which were situated at Mona's hideout. And then there is that construction site, which you get to play both parts, in fact it's like playing the same level two times. Oh! And if that's not enough, the hospital comes also in a double dose. It all reminds me the 'bloodline labyrinth nightmares' which you had to pass through in the first game, and that was innovative, but also annoying to me. It's sad, but I expected the same kind of scenery as in the first game, the scrubby urban flat complexes, the mansion and all that, but something more innovative than this. This one doesn't even try to impress in terms of innovation in level design. It must be that the developers didn't have any imagination left for level design after they finished the background story of the game... It's better done, but not better laid out, or thought about.

Speaking of the background story, I guess this time I lost the story somehow as it becomes too complicated and I believe that the furious game in conjunction with the over-complicated story doesn't mix quite well to a shooter gamer's head. And to be honest, in a shooter game like this one, you're far more eager to blast your way through the levels, rather than being curious about the secret conspiracies of this world. Okay, it's a good excuse not to label a game as a stupid shooter, and it's also a good excuse to cram in some art-comics gimmick, but I think that this kind of story backup is quite heavy for the given kind of game... I'm wondering to see what they'll come up with in the next Max Payne... Oh God!

Another drawback of the game is that some levels are ridiculously difficult. One that comes to mind right now is the second coming (!) in the hospital, where you have to escape through the guard on the door and some other guys upstairs. I admit, I've tried to cheat 'cause I got stuck for two whole days in this one, so I found some cheat codes for unlimited health and all guns on the web, but no use (well, only the painkillers cheat helped the situation), even if you have weapons (somehow!), the developers have coded the enemies invulnerable on that level. Yeah call me a lame gamer but I get really frustrated getting stuck on the same spot for a long period just due to lack of my super hero reaction abilities, or if anyone else knows a good trick to pass that level otherwise, I'll be glad to know it.

The Bottom Line
The game has not lost it's relation to it's predecessor, be sure of that, it's almost identical to the initial Max Payne. What you saw, played and loved in the initial episode is here too. This is good and bad at the same time. Good because, all the good elements that made the first game an instant favourite are here and more nicely done, and bad, because it's exactly a re-vamped version of the first game without the slightest hint of trying new tricks and being innovative, unless you think that playing Mona's part can be regarded as innovation. Perhaps the Vinnie Gognitti scenes are the true shine of the game. It's a shame though that elements like that are scarce in The fall of Max Payne.

I loved the original! Once I've finished the first Max Payne, I have re-installed and finished again the whole game 4 more times, even when newer and better releases were around! Once I've played the Fall of Max Payne, I suddenly knew why Max Payne fell! I just got bored of it somehow to be honest, and finishing it was a task which required a bit of a nerve. I only did it because I was curious to see how the story ends. And if you ask me, I still do prefer the original and that is what I will re-install in the future when the good ol' Max Payne nostalgia hits me.

I really dunno If I should recommend this one one or not. Take it for the good graphics, or take it if you're a true Hardcore Max Payne fan. Otherwise It's a good shooter that only gets a bit too repetitive (like Halo), if you don't mind that, give it a try. Again if you missed (how could you??!!) the first Max Payne, this is a good excuse to get to know him. His real juice (err... don't get me wrong here! lol!) though is in the first game.