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.

In this edition, the quality of the reproduction has undoubtedly improved, smooth graphics, glitch-free movement, audio-visual synchronicity and a cracking story-line. Add to that being able to play the characters of both Max and Mona (I guess your name has to start with an 'M' too) you have what most people would describe as a 9.9er, a best-of-class, a sure-fire winner.

I'm really going to nail my colours to the wall here and say that although the packaging was faultless, there simply wasn't sufficient differences between MP1 and MP2 to leave myself gasping at the extremely low price for such perfection in gaming. I was left with a distinct feeling of been-there, done-that at almost every turn. The sequence was apparently such a well-trodden path of "enter room, take cover, aim, shoot, fire, three baddies dead (or four or five)". And if you did it badly, load up the last save-game until you do it better.

So to the other features that make this game more of a film-noir than a shoot-em-up. The video footage and storyline were excellent, I think most reviews state that. Incredibly the publishers had managed to generate an ambience in the game that I have rarely seen before, and I've seen a few. sure the game is fairly short, 10 hours first time around, but the game offers a lot more than a just a blast-around shoot-em-up. And even if it was only 10hs worth of game play - that's still only £3/h - cheaper than most movies.

And another thing. I find the weapon choice and possibilities pretty mono-dimensional. You always seem to find yourself using your best weapon and when the ammo runs out, you use your second string weapon. There is surely a case in combat for a more selective choice of firearm? Maybe a stealthy approach to bump off one lookout with a silencer in order to avoid detection and prevent a slough of enemies arriving on your doorstep. Or a room full of enemies where you need rapid-firing in-yer-face armoury. Like I say, a touch mono-dimensional. The lack of control with grenades and Molotovs was also an incessant source of frustration.

So to cap it all, Rockstar games were well justified in creating MP2. They have produced as they claim a great film-noir B-movie where you play a very active roll. I suspect, however, that if anybody ever wants to create MP3 (ho-hum), then I'll want to see many reviews about how "different" the game play is!

If I had only ever played Max Payne 2 - it would have got 5 stars.

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.