Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne Updated Impressions

By Andrew Park, GameSpotPosted Sep 29, 2003 2:45 pm PT

We now return to Officer Max Payne's regularly scheduled duty, already in progress. Exclusive details and media inside.

We recently had the opportunity to have another visit with the older, wiser Max Payne, who, if you remember, was the star of Remedy Entertainment's 2001 third-person action game of the same name. In that game, Max took on the role of a one-man army in a quest to avenge the murder of his family, and he mowed through armies of mobsters and thugs, armed both with a huge arsenal of modern-day firearms and with bullet time, a dramatic special effect inspired by Hong Kong action movies that let Max briefly slow time and actually dodge oncoming bullets. Max was finally apprehended by the police, but not before he finished off the last of the thugs who had wronged him. The weary cop was ready for a death sentence of his own, but at the beginning of the sequel, we find that he is instead exonerated with the help of the very influential Alfred Woden, who makes Max seem like a hero in the public eye. In true film-noir fashion, Max is haunted by demons of the past and abandons his highfalutin job at the DEA in favor of a regular NYPD beat.

Max Payne is at it again. There goes the neighborhood.

We caught up with Max on what seemed to be a routine distress call--the sound of a woman screaming for help in a warehouse. As Max pulled up in his patrol car in an in-engine cinematic sequence, he heard shots fired and called for backup on his police radio, then readied his gun. Before heading in with Max, we took a brief stroll around the perimeter of the building, which was lit at each corner with floodlights that generated diffuse, dynamic radiosity lighting (rather than the preset shadow-mapping that Remedy had used in the original game). We also passed through an alley with a crate-loaded freight pallet that was precariously balanced on an oil drum. Tossing a Molotov cocktail at the pile of junk launched the oil drum into the air, while the pallet slid from the ledge and crates tumbled realistically to the ground--a result of Remedy's integration of the Havok physics engine into the sequel.

Max then busted into the warehouse, only to find that the source of the screaming, and the gunshots, was nothing more than a TV on a table with the volume turned all the way up to one of the game's new TV programs. The original game featured an in-game comic book, Bat Boy, that Max would occasionally find issues of in his travels. The sequel features similar "running gags," like the TV drama Dick Justice, a cheesy 1970s blaxploitation cop show about a police officer whose family was also murdered and who also has an all-too-familiar penchant for melodramatic soliloquy. As a Rockstar representative explained, this TV show, and other tongue-in-cheek references in the game, is just Remedy's way of poking fun at itself. For some reason, Max himself seemed less than amused.

Is there anyone Max can trust?

Max then apprehended a member of the warehouse's cleaning staff, who happened to wander in at just that moment. After frisking and interrogating the man, Max demanded a tour of the rest of the warehouse, to which the suspiciously cheerful janitor assented. While keeping the seemingly harmless man covered, Max was free to explore the confines of the warehouse's ground floor, nudging some of the larger boxes as he ran past. When the janitor turned the corner and opened the door to the foyer, it was revealed that he and his fellow cleaning staff were actually illegal gunrunners who immediately attacked Max, both by leaping from the shadows with guns blazing and, in some cases, by trying to flatten him by driving straight at him with a forklift. Max then entered another room to see another forklift driver plow right into a huge metal shelf covered with boxes--the collision caused the forklift and its driver to burst into flames, and it also sent the shelf and its contents crashing down toward Max.

prev

1 Comments

Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne Quick Links

Summary | Reviews | News | Previews & Features | Images | Videos | Downloads | Answers | Hints & Cheats | Forum

advertisement
Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne Boxshot Enlarge the boxshot
Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne

Game Stats

Full Game Details »Close
Also on

Games you may like…

Users who looked at content for this game also looked at these games.

See More Similar Games
advertisement