MaxPayne 2 Fall of Max Payne

[H-Man]

Yeh - but there is still very little 'slow time' - new bullet time isn't as good as the old one, imo.

[npg]

This game is ****ing ACE. I have't played a better game this year and I was skeptical about the whole bullet time thingy until I actually gave it a few hours worth of play.

On top of that I'm going into a screenshot frenzy because it has the best looking textures and lighting by far in any game I have ever seen.

[mid]

With all the details up, it does look stunning, yes. Almost as impressive is the fact that, with them turned down a fair bit, it runs just as well as the first one did on my poor little Athlon 900 + GeForce 2 Pro, even though the minimum spec is up at 800.

[NINTY]

I completed this thisa evening.
im very impressed. the physics are amazing.
a 9/10 game imo

[H-Man]

Waaaay to short for me to rate MP2. Only being able to run makes moving about the levels feel very clumsy.

Still a good game, if inferior to the orginal.

7/10

[npg]

With all the details up, it does look stunning, yes. Almost as impressive is the fact that, with them turned down a fair bit, it runs just as well as the first one did on my poor little Athlon 900 + GeForce 2 Pro, even though the minimum spec is up at 800.

Indeed. Pixel shader skins look amazing on my 9800pro at 1600x1200.

Wish I could post a few screens.

[Neon Ignition]

With bullet time automatically assigned to the dive move's I never even touched the BT2.0 button throughout the whole game.

[Uli]

Waaaay to short for me to rate MP2. Only being able to run makes moving about the levels feel very clumsy.

Still a good game, if inferior to the orginal.

7/10

I must agree. Max Payne 2 feels a little less exciting than it's predecessor. I think this is mainly because of these new bullet time features which I found slightly disappointing - regarding the game was nearly 2 years in development. When I started the game I was looking for them and tried to figure out what has been improved over the original. After realizing that there wasn't much in the way of improvement and/or great new FX (apart from the bullet time reload move) I focused on the gameplay and then enjoyed the game pretty much.

[Concept]

I completed this a few days ago.

And to sum it up, it's essentially Max Payne rehashed with a few extra bells and whistles on the end. The action essentially unfolds like before, with wave after wave of bad guy waiting for you to dispatch them in pretty much the same manner, over and over. There isn't much variation on how you can approach the combat and graphically, Max Payne 2 feels very much in the vein of the original, only slightly more fleshed out. Texture detail is still relatively poor on both background and characters in the Xbox version, and the animation is fairly basic compared to other games in the action-adventure genre.

However, there are some delicious set-pieces, such as when you first encounter the old funfair, with it's unveiled comic self-referencing of various themes and ideas in the series. That was a truly stand out moment...

The film noir dialogue is pleasingly over the top too, and quite evidently taking the piss out of itself, so how people often criticise it for having a gut-wrenchingly hammy plot is beyond me. It's a little like missing the point for the game's sense of style is delibrately supposed to be that way. It knows what it is, and milks that cheese to lovingly absurd levels. Where the narrative does suffer, is in other areas, namely character development and coherency. To put it bluntly: there is none. Remedy have messed about too much with the time-frame and various happenings at different points, to deliver something which is easy to get hold of first time around - The story is fragmented, disorganised and poorly structured. For example, the idea of looking at the buidling-raid scene from two different varying perspectives (Max and Mona's) is an interesting idea, but it doesn't quite work because of the distances involved between the two leads at the time they experience events. It's not hard to feel a little disconnected from their continually enforced 'connection'. Similarly, the dream sequences, although less frustrating than in Max Payne, don't quite have the same abstract impact. Indeed, many of the more surreal themes out of the original have been put onto a more obviously sign-posted backburner, such as the various tv shows, posters and items etc.

I miss moments such as the first time I saw that Captain Baseball Bat Boy comic suddenly fling itself at the screen out of the blue, or when Max gets phoned up and told he's in a horrible film noir comic and then a videogame.

Perhaps more importantly, the pace of Max Payne 2 doesn't seem as compact as the original, and although the comic-book cutscenes are better placed in between bouts of gameplay, they don't quite hold the same contextual interest. A lot of the time, they're more about bridging gaps in between going from one place to the next, rather than telling stories within one particular environment. As for the way the title plays, well there's a good choice of weaponry available (as before), and there is still something exceptionally satisfying about taking a room full of enemies out in slow-mo. Yet, you get the feeling that Max Payne is a one-trick pony game, and that everything is built to support/accomodate that single gameplay dynamic. There isn't any fantastically clever level design or puzzles to speak of, and the minor tweaks to the move-list seem a weak-fisted gesture. (The new slow-mo reload move looks unbelievably stylish though. If only Remedy could have made more practical use of it during the more hectic moments... Sometimes it feels like a smart graphical effect air-brushed onto a gameplay function not quite properly thought through, at least in relevance to the rest of the player's action set).

Yet despite my reservations, like the original there is still something compelling about playing it. The series does have it's own unique style, and that shines through in both play and presentation. I just wish Remedy would pay as much thought to the level design and gameplay variety in the inevitable sequel.