Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne (PC CD)

If you liked max payne 1 then you SHOULD buy this...no excuses If you havent played max payne 1 then look at the screen shots to see for yourself what your buying...but in a nut shell it has astounding graphics, animation is almost film-like and contains 100% non-cheesy dialogue, a lot more guns, and the IE is very clever...it will shoot through cardboard boxes and thin material to get you...which means you take a lot more care when observing your suroundings.

The AI is a lot more patient...no more showing your face and then running off to a convenient position to ambush them...they will just wait...which forces you to enter the good old bullet time (slow -motion matrix style shooting)

There is also comedy in the AI as well...it sounds strange but the bad guys will sometimes make mistakes and accidentally blow them selves up with their own grenades if they throw it wrong...which is funny in itself but just as they realise their mistake and are about to get blown out of existence...they utter various comments of profanity before they exit the world superman style

The interaction with the world around you is the best ive seen in a game (ie...objects have gravity and mass...and they get knocked over and make noise when your trying to creep round)....everything is improved whilst not changing too much of the original concept to spoil the whole max payne experience..

The best thing i love about this game is it is still scary in places - it definately keeps it integrity to its 'noir' feel...(almost gotham city style)..especially where you walk around in real time in one of max paynes nightmares - or even a freaky fun house...but ill stop giving bits of the game away.

I just spent the last 3 hours on it and my brother and one of his friends heard the gun shots and explosions which shake the house on my stereo....they then came in and watched me play it like they were watching a move.

I dont buy games unless they are very good...and this is one of them...enough lip service for one day though.

Unlike Max Payne 1, the story is not as corny, and you really want to play to see what happens next. The back story is filled in via incidental objects that you have to find - a tv that is left on or some such... which, although the game is actually fairly linear, gives you the impression that you are finding things out off your own back. nice touch.

The 'hand drawn' graphic novel (probably not hand-drawn: it actually looks like real photographs reworked digitally in Painter using smearing) is still there, some people hate it, I love it. But then I'm old enough to remember the real graphic novels before...um...video games killed them off.

The graphics are excellent, as is the updated physics model. The new bullet time stuff is also great - sometimes you take the hard route just to see it in action as you arc in on a slowdive, peppering all four walls with lead! Can't wait for the game mods to start coming out for this brilliant game engine!

It also seems to work suprisingly fast on a mid-system for a current game. I can run it at 1200x1024 on a radeon 9500/AMD XP2000, with all options (except Anit-aliasing) set to high, so lower end systems should work well with the settings down a peg.

As a number of other people have said, the game can be completed in around 10 hours, but then, consider the options: spend 100 hours playing a game where the next level looks like the previous one (and which you will most likely *never* finish becaue you basically get bored of it), or one like this, full of cool set-pieces and changing scenery... Payne 2 has a lot of stuff going on in that 10 hours, and thats why the game is short... variety and an eye for detail.

For me, games that you never finish are simply bad design - like a book you stop reading or a cinema you walk out of. Everyone will finish this game, not because its easy (it actually sets difficulty levels interactively based on your performance so it should be a reasonable challenge to everyone), but because you are compelled to.

The only minor criticism is the AI: some enemy have obviously been told to stay put and lurk, waiting for you from strategic vantage points, but there are a fair few that will simply run at you. You can often wait at a closed door until they come through, and clear rooms that way... but its a minor gripe - most times its far more fun just to open the door, chuck a grenade through, then dive in as soon as it explodes in slo-mo with your dual machine guns blazing through the smoke... just like in the films - so the 5th star stays intact!

Oh, the other thing is that I would say it is unsuitable for young kids (its actually teenage-adult orientated)... which is a shame because I can see it keeping them occupied and out of your way as you booze it up on Christmas day, having opended it up and played it whilst they were out!

S

In a sense, the action is the least interesting thing about this game. I don't care how many goons Max kills or how spectacularly the physics throws boxes around after an explosion. Most modern games use Havok 2.0 now. Big deal.

But in an industry where involved and careful plotting is a rarity and "You are a government agent - the best of the best of the best" cardboard characters are the norm, it was refreshing to control a character whose fate I actually cared about. I wasn't playing this game to kill goons. I was playing it to see what more bad things could possibly happen to my protagonist, to find if it really was his fault and (rather unworthily) to see if he'd score with Mona.

It is interesting to note that the most striking chapter is one where you are never confronted by enemies, working your way through a macabre "fun"-house on your way to meet a contact. It was chilling, nauseating and utterly gripping. Not a game to play at night with the headphones on.

With all this in mind, the decision by the developers to leave Max's viewpoint and switch to another character for some chapters was infuriating and I found myself counting the minutes before I could be put back into his shoes again. I wanted to be told Max's story - no-one else's.

A lot of effort has been put into the game world. It has payed off - in spades, in some cases. The constant rain is a typical reminder of the bleak, unrelenting storyline which has less time than the original did for comic relief and sly witticisms. Not that the game is without humour: Max's call to a phone-sex line "just for a talk" had me doubled up with laughter.

The characterisation is much improved on the original - particularly in the animations. Police officers hunch over their pistols, patrolling back-to-back and looking anxious; soldiers dive and fight tactically and gangsters pimp it up with some classic swaggers.

Rockstar are one of very few developers (along with Valve and Ion Storm) who understand that action sequences do not breed good drama - well-written characters do. After all: does Max care how many goons he's killed? No. He only wants the answers.

We should be more like him.