[Review] Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne

[[MC]Ronin[MC]]

 

When the original Max Payne
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 came out in 2001, it was hailed for its storytelling, visuals, and gritty noir setting. The eponymous hero wreaked bloody vengeance upon the corporation responsible for the murders of his wife and daughter, but Max was painted as a hero thanks to a powerful man named Alfred Woden, the head of an inner circle of Illuminati-type power players. Yet although Max found some closure, the years have not been kind. He is still a haunted man, now living in a hole-in-the-wall, run-down apartment and back to working for the NYPD. He thinks his past is behind him when he responds to a police dispatch regarding shots fired at an old warehouse. Unfortunately, he couldn't be more wrong, and he will end up tumbling through another long rabbit hole into a Wonderland of mayhem and drama at least equal to what he waded through many years before. Along for the ride are our old friends Chief Bravura, Vladimir Lem, Vinnie Gognitti, Mona Sax, and a couple others, but I don't want to give too much away.

You'll notice some immediate improvements over the original as the scene opens at a city hospital. Close-ups of faces are remarkably realistic. A lot of animation has been motion-captured. You can knock things over like chairs, stools, boxes. Puddles of water give accurate reflections of their surroundings. People have funny conversations.

Your first firefight will be different as well, thanks to some adjustments in Bullet Time. You'll still be able to do those slow-motion dives, but you can actually stay on the ground until you've stopped firing. However, there's another button that will put you in the new Bullet Time, and with each kill during this phase, your enemies become slower, until you can easily dodge bullets at medium range. It doesn't last for very long, but it's enough to get you through some tough spots, especially when a van pulls out in front of you and spills out more people than even Rambo could handle. You still get a boost in your hourglass when you take someone down, but the meter also gradually refills while you're not using that mode. Also, the slow-motion dives don't use up the meter.

 

 

If this makes things sound too easy, well, let me tell you, these guys are quick on the draw and very rarely travel alone. Plus they will all be wearing body armor eventually, forcing you to aim right at their heads if you want to take out two or three people in one dive. Once you've finished a dive and are getting back to your feet, they better be dead, or you'll get a deadly lead salad before you've gotten all the way back up. Thankfully, the new Bullet Time mode also gifts you with rapid reload, which you will perform with a dramatic whirl and a swooping camera. It's pretty cool.

 

 

There are some interesting changes in the arsenal, speaking of which. The grenade launcher is gone, but you now have the MP5, a versatile assault rifle with a short-range scope. There are so many fully automatic weapons, though, that a few get lost in the shuffle. You have the Ingrams, three assault rifles, and two machine guns. You'll forget the Ingram ever existed once you start wielding the Kalashnikov AK-47. Each round does some vicious damage, and you can cut someone down with only a couple bullets if you aim right. But they can also cut you down with it too. Since many of the bad guys camp positions waiting for you to appear, you'll find yourself enabling Bullet Time before bursting through a lot of doors. Save often, folks. Although AI difficulty adjusts somewhat to your skill level, an AK is an AK and it's hard to not put some serious hurt on someone. Another nice tweak is dual Desert Eagles. I didn't use the single style Desert Eagle in the first game much, because of its slow rate of fire and smaller clip. Here, though, they pack a satisfying punch that, in combination with some Bullet Time, will allow you to put some hurt on a much better armed enemy. Plus, with the 2.0 mode, you get those wicked-fast reloads.

You may have noticed that I didn't specify Max when I mentioned all the things you can do in the game. That's because you'll actually get to play Mona Sax, the femme fatale contract killer from the original game who survived a bullet wound to her head and resurfaces early once you start digging around what was going on in that warehouse. Playing her is almost the same experience, except she has a Dragunov sniper rifle she'll be putting to heavy use about midway through the game. I don't want to give too much away, but it was probably the most tense and exciting segment in the game.

 

 

 

Their star-crossed love story plays a major part in the game, and pulls Max Payne 2
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 head and shoulders above the action game style. Combine that with Max's own haunted past, and you have a story that stands on its own in terms of drama. From what you know about the story in the original Max Payne, it's clear that Mona Sax is probably the only woman who could break through Max's shell of loss and heartache. She's like him--violent and lost, but a soul struggling back onto a better path. Max can identify with this, and lets her in.

However, this is a crime story, a mystery of sorts, and Max Payne 2 brims with a cascade of revelations about who these people are that you think you knew from the first game. Some of those revelations are pretty Shakespearean. And since Max Payne 2 opens with an alarming but obscured montage of death, you don't know who is going to make it out alive, who the red herrings are, and what will become of Mr. Payne himself, and this veil doesn't fall away until the very end. Along the way, Max will struggle with his alliances, his enemies and himself before he finally finds freedom.

If there's any downside to the game, it's the length of it. I managed to mow my way through in less than a dozen hours, and many have claimed finishing it in less than half that time. It's in three parts this time, and a few of the chapters are just comic book panel vignettes bookended with in-game cutscenes. But you really should stop and smell the roses. There are some long overheard conversations really worth hearing through to the end, especially at the police station. The TV shows are worth lingering for as well, and you'll have a bunch of answering machine messages you can go through. There are a few dream sequences, but, thank God, they don't involve any instant-death jump puzzles or aggravating, endless mazes. Instead, the dreams illustrate the mind of Max Payne, the world inside his head. These are strange, often disturbing segments, but they are very engrossing and illuminating.

For the most part, the actual game world is far more grounded in sanity. The new Havok 2.0 physics engine, which was supposed to make its debut with Half-Life 2, is pretty darn cool. Instead of taking time to record death animation motion capture, you can just plug this thing in and watch the fur fly. Bodies go flying, tumble brutally down stairwells, and go flying off precipices with satisfying realism. A particularly good hit will give you a slow-mo rotating camera close-up of the bad guy getting flung back by the killing shot, but this feature is used sparingly enough so that it never feels like a gimmick. There's also some partial map destructibility--you'll actually have to blow some stuff up in order to make progress towards your destination, but keep clear of the explosives when you do. There's a lot more explosive stuff lying around than in the first game, so you can use that to your advantage when a bad guy decides to duck behind a stack of ammo boxes. You can even set off a chain of explosions that will clear out an entire room. You'll also have a couple more "get out of the burning building" areas, but they aren't nearly as frustratingly difficult as the restaurant back in the first Max Payne, which was loaded with a string of explosives that made it impossible to linger in a single room for more than a couple seconds.

 

 

There also some particularly tough spots, even in the standard difficulty mode. Early on, you have to rescue an old friend from a horde of mobsters, and you'll have to clear out a wave of about a dozen of them before the game allows you to progress. They come from all angles and pack some serious heat. Also, the final fight is particularly troublesome, even after you've figured out how to defeat this last guy. Your only clue on how to get past him is in the title of that chapter, and it's a vague clue at that. Thankfully though, there is nothing like what you experienced when entering the high-rise office building near the first Max Payne, when several people at multiple elevations were firing some suspiciously accurate and long-range rocket grenades.

In fact, there are no rockets or grenade launchers at all in Max Payne 2
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. However, the enemy AI is handier with grenades and Molotov cocktails this time around. But they're not completely competent and will sometimes blow themselves up with a bad throw, or they won't run away when you throw one at them from a sufficient distance. For the most part, you will be dealing with quantity over quality, and they will be no match for your Bullet Time. They are still whip-fast, though, so you won't be able to go in guns blazing and expect to come out without a scratch. Thankfully, they will randomly drop painkillers, unlike the first game. You'll never be without some of those for too long--but you won't be walking around smugly with a full load of them for too long either. Damn that AK-47!

Another problem I feel duty-bound to point out were some significant sound issues. This game was tested on two different computers with three speaker setups: stereo speakers with subwoofer, a 2.1 setup, and a 5.1 setup. Both of the setups with a center channel had random drops in volume for dialogue and some sound effects. A person talking right in front of you would be almost impossible to hear. All of Max's in-game comments come through this channel, and during the middle of the game, Max and Mona will be using headsets through this center channel as well. If you can't hear what one of them is saying, you'll have some frustrating guesswork ahead of you, and this mid-game segment is very time-limited. I used one system with a Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 and another with an Audigy 2, and occasionally experienced some harsh, repetitive clicking that could only be cured by restarting the game. Remedy recommends lowering audio hardware acceleration in Windows if you have problems, and you can also disable multi-channel audio and go with standard stereo. Your subwoofer should still kick in with this mode, but the environmental sound won't be nearly as cool.

This wouldn't be so bad if the game, then loading the saved game, didn't take so long. It seemed to be related to Bullet Time, which dynamically lowers all sound effects to a low pitch, then raises them up again when you go back to normal mode. However, since the rest of the game is of such high quality, I'm giving the developer the benefit of the doubt, and hopefully a patch will come out to address this. The game also crashed to the desktop a couple of times when loading the game, but was otherwise stable and lockup-free.

Other than that, the sound was great, especially with surround sound. You get environmental noise like televisions and conversations panning around as you rotate, and there's also the drone of steady rain on the rooftop (the game takes place during autumn), and footsteps that sound different according to the floor surface. Every weapon sounded slightly different. The Desert Eagle packs a lot more punch than the 9mm, the shotgun has an appropriate boom, the AK-47 has a dry, mechanical stutter, and grenades clink and clatter to a stop before they explode. It would be nice if grenades didn't always make fiery explosions (since standards ones almost never do in real life) but hey, you're playing this game for the explosions, right? Believe me, there are plenty to go around.

 

 

 

 

Max Payne 2 also takes advantage of a lot of high-end features, like triple buffering (which smooths out framerate to avoid the slideshow effect when your rig can't keep up), radiosity lighting, cubic environment mapping, and tone remapping (a color effect that, in this game, increases contrast during Bullet Time). If any of these sound like Greek to you, each one has an informative tool tip in the Options menu. Unfortunately none of these features can be adjusted while the game is running--not even the resolution--so start conservatively. The game has uniformly excellent textures throughout, and detailed character models. Max's jacket looks like leather and swings back and forth as he runs, and Mona's blue jeans are pretty easy on the eyes as well. Voice synchronization isn't as advanced though, with only a few basic expressions for different sounds. But almost all of the dialogue comes through the comic book vignettes, so it doesn't stand out much. The voice acting, though, is truly excellent stuff. Not only did I not cringe, but I genuinely enjoyed all of that aspect of the game.

Although Max Payne 2 is a short game by any standard, it is thick with drama and action. And once you've played through the first time, you'll have higher difficulty levels, including all the modes from the previous installment. You'll also have Dead Man Walking, where enemies endlessly spawn while you try to stay alive as long as possible. There's also no multiplayer to speak of, but we suspect you'll see some life-extending mods once the tools are released.

 

 

Verdict
If you didn't like the first one, there's probably nothing new or different enough to pull you in this time. The love story adds some dramatic depth to Max's haunting story, and somehow makes what's going on more important and interesting. Wreaking havoc is nice, but it's great to also have a love interest complicating things, and Mona Sax is definitely up to the task. The visuals are excellent, the voice work is superior to what we usually get dealt in the action genre, and I only wish the game was a bit longer. A lot longer actually, but it's more because this kind of game is such a rare find than because that find is relatively meager.

 

 

SPECIFICATIONS
Developer    Remedy Entertainment
Platform    PCPS2Xbox
Release Date    October 14, 2003