The storyline itself is a mess, which is roughly as expected; Max Payne is a pretty strong character, and he’s a damn mess, so why not? The problem is that this time round, the storyline seems more like a contrived mess. Everything’s a MacGuffin or a fresh excuse to shoot up some place, and there’s no resolution to about half of the plot directions. The various self-deprecating TV miniseries that you’ll catch episodes of through screams, falling cartridges, and the blast of gunfire are sadly more coherent. Yes, even the one with the flamingos.

MP2 has a pretty decent villain, I’ll say that much, and the love interest is not handled badly. It’s not handled particularly well, either, but it’s all in character and there’s better chemistry there than in a ream of recent blockbuster movies, which is novel for a video game. But without the story to back up the characters, all Payne can fall back on is the atmosphere, which has also lost some of its impact. Max Payne’s quest for fiery retribution has somewhat deflated over the last two years, and I’d now place him on the Thirst-For-Vengeance chart at ‘somewhat irked’. In short, it feels like Max is on less of a quest, altogether.

So how does it play? Solidly, at least. There’s not a lot of clipping (just a bit with Max), and it seemed pretty stable on my machine, with no crash outs or other screw-ups. Load times were a bit longer than I would have liked, but nothing hair-pulling. The levels are, for the most part, more imaginative than in the first game, and there are tons of scripted events with deforming levels and landscapes – whether you like that sort of thing is a matter of opinion, but it’s certainly done quite well in MP2. The sound effects are consistent, with nice booms and gunshots, and the transitions to and from bullet time are atmospheric and involving; they seem immediately realistic, which is an achievement, given that there’s no such thing. But, then, we said the same thing about lens flares, and they became a gaming staple.

Despite all the good points, Max Payne 2 doesn’t feel like the game it could have been. It’s a game that fatigues quickly. There’s nothing wrong with the gameplay, per se; it just feels a little bit empty. Try playing through the game without using the bullet time feature, and you’ll see how bland it really is. Don’t get me wrong; in a world of gimmicks, bullet time remains a strong favourite, and it has probably never been used to better effect. But it’s still a gimmick and, for all the attention to detail, the game wouldn’t hold up without it.  

Max still runs everywhere, and seems more glued on to his environments than a fluid part of them. Even with the introduction of some neat physics in the engine, that doesn’t change too much. It’s sometimes wonderful to watch a chair bouncing downstairs, or a pile of boxes tipping over, and don’t even get me started on the rag-doll effects - but you can never escape the conviction that somehow everything’s weighted wrong, relative to Max. The ill-fated game Trespasser remains my personal benchmark in pretty physics, and only the Source engine seems likely to challenge it in the near future. Trespasser was a bad game, that had something about it, some quality that drove me on. Max Payne 2 is a good game, but it just doesn’t seem to have that magic. That’s a real shame, because the level of detail in MP2 is out of this world – Remedy have poured themselves into the game heart and soul – but it just doesn’t carry them over the finish line, this time around.

Oh, and Max gets in the way. That’s often a problem with 3^rd person games, but I never noticed it to such an extent in the first Payne game. Try shooting upwards during a slo-mo dodge move, and you’ll see only Max, obscuring all possibility of aiming at the bad guys above. It’s a frustrating experience because, once you’ve launched into a dodge, you’re basically stuck in it until after you’ve landed, recovered, and probably been shot half to death in the process. There’s more than one occasion that shooting at balconies is necessary, and I found myself using the dodge button less and less, and sticking to plain digestive bullet time. That’s a shame, because the dodge has been improved – to make it more useful, you can now shoot off a few rounds from your prone position, after the move has finished. That’s still no good, if all you can see is the inside of Max’s coat.

There are moments in the game, great ideas that shine through and captivate, but even in a game so short, they’re just too far and few between. I know that a lot of reviewers are probably going to wail on how often levels are repeated during the game. They are. Although I’m pretty sure that I never want to see that damned funhouse again, I don’t count myself amongst the crowd. I admired the diversity in the reused areas, in fact. What you got were different levels, different crisscrossing routes, that played in different ways, but were set in exactly the same part of the game universe. That’s a nice angle. It wasn’t often a matter of simply retracing all your old steps, Halo fashion. Sometimes the differences were as simple as following a different path of unlocked doors, which is a little bit trite, I suppose, but sometimes there were some great scripted events to waltz through. The levels where Mona is with Max are particularly interesting in this respect; not groundbreaking, you understand, but interesting, certainly.

So this game works, but not as well as you might have expected. It does what it says on the box, however, and you can’t fault Remedy for trying. It has to be said that if more developers thought like Remedy, I’d probably be doubling my videogames budget and cutting back on the already trifling quality time that I spend with the outdoors. Max Payne 2 is a dark, gritty game, mature without gratuity, like a good novel or a classic film, it’s made with all the right intentions and most of the right attitude. Next time it might be perfect.

- Matt BLB

(October 26, 2003)