| Max Payne 2 - The Fall Of Max Payne
Publisher: Rockstar Games
Developer: Remedy
Age Rating: 15
Release Date: Out Now
Genre: Action
“The cursor sat idly blinking at me, its heartbeat as regular as the cold Scottish rain that fell hard like God’s unforgiving wrath on the street outside. I may well have been dressed head-to-toe in the same familiar attire of the common office monkey, blending in at the local zoo with all the other animals… but at that point, the page of neatly edited text on the screen in front of me made it obvious I was walking a different path from the rest, and the accusing stare of those behind made me feel I was sticking out like a day-glo cheerleader in a funeral parlour. It didn’t matter. I had long since passed being interested in their opinions on what I should be doing with my time, on what they were actually paying for. I swung back in my chair, and blinked back at the cursor as disbelief sunk in. It was over. It was all finally over… the Max Payne 2 review was done. To make any sense of it all, I had to go back an hour or two, back to that moment I was faced with that blank Microsoft Word document and an urge to forget the ten shades of grey that painted my job in the office in favour of a more interesting line of work - writing about a videogame. It wasn’t the beginning… but who’s ever to say what really is?”
In 2001, the PC gaming community was in danger of becoming stagnant. The market didn’t seem too concerned with excitement, instead choosing to churn out endless Half Life clones which missed the mark (and the point) by a mile, generic indentikit strategy titles, needlessly complicated simulations and endless overdressed “me too!” Diablo II clones masquerading as role-playing games. If you were to think of a stereotype of your typical PC gamer, the market surely reflected that… it didn’t seem like anyone was bothered about good old-fashioned fun. In 2001, there were two games... both coincidently products of previously unheard of and unproven European developers... which came along from nowhere and changed all that. One was Croteam’s Serious Sam. The other, perhaps more significantly, was a game developed by an unknown team from Finland by the name of Remedy. That game was Max Payne.
On the surface merely another third-person action game with a gimmick – ‘bullet time’ – Max Payne was a lesson in how to put the buzz back into gaming. It wasn’t merely another game; it was a fusion of age-old gameplay techniques, high-budget action movie production standards, comic-book presentation, and a healthy dose of new ideas, which was to push the way people perceive PC gaming in new directions that hadn’t been seen since the aforementioned Half Life a couple of years earlier. This was the tale of one man going against the world after the murder of his family, but if you could look past the cliché and the apparently simplified game mechanics, you’d find a game that finally gave PC gamers something they didn’t have before… style.
Expect The Unexpected
Remedy (now teamed up with the notorious Rockstar Games) are back in 2003 with the follow-up to their high-octane original, Max Payne 2 – The Fall Of Max Payne. Billed this time as a ‘film noir love story’ (which you could be forgiven for thinking sounds like ‘a bad idea’), Max is back with a familiar cast of characters and a whole new tale to tell. After bringing down the evil Aesir Corporation at the end of the last game, Max is now back on the streets with the NYPD, after (perhaps absurdly) being cleared of all his previous crimes and being hailed as a hero thanks to the blackmail of Alfred Woden, a member of the mysterious Inner Circle group. The story beings, as did the original game, at some point after the chain of events which got Max to where he appears… in a hospital, confused about how and why he got there, with the only clues to what’s going on coming from dream-like flashes of memory, mysterious (and sometimes frightening) voices in his head, and of course, the small matter of his partner lying dead on an operating table, apparently murdered by his own hands. The story then goes back to what could be called ‘the beginning’, as Max investigates gunshot fire at an old abandoned warehouse owned by Russian gangster Vlad, who you may remember Max befriended in the first game, under siege from bad guys masquerading as a cleaning company. What Max finds there kick-starts a chain of events with so many twists and turns, all presented in a series of flashbacks and dark monologues (told by Max himself), that to talk too much about them would be to spoil them. Sure, once again the tale is riddled with clichés, but once again it’s presented in such a stylish fashion, with the comic-book interludes, bizarre dream sequences and flashbacks, and a healthy dose of Hollywood action, it’s hard to not get a real kick out of it. Oh, and Mona Sax is back from the dead… which gives the tale that feel of ‘film noir’ that the designers apparently so badly wanted. Max is in love, but as with everything in his life, it’s not as simple as that.
“That’s evolution, Baby!”
Initially, it’s easy to mistake and dismiss Max Payne 2 for being nothing but ‘more of the same’… but to use another cliché, ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ should be more applicable here. It’s an evolution, not the revolution of the first game. The game uses the same basic engine as the original (made obvious by the fact the main menu still has the ‘How To Play’ option, even though there is no tutorial this time around), but it’s been overhauled to such an extent that the first game now looks empty and stale in comparison. The important addition to the engine is the latest Havok physics engine… and once you’ve experienced it, you’ll never want to play a game without it. Practically everything in the game, from soda cans and debris on the floor to tables, chairs, even entire walls, has it’s own mass, it’s own weight, and can be manipulated in any way you can think of. Knock it over on the way past. Shoot a tower of boxes piled up and watch them tumble and roll individually and realistically. Throw a grenade, and watch those chairs fly. The same applies to the characters of the game. You’ll almost be shocked at how realistically the first bad guy you shoot falls back into a row of shelves, only for them to collapse, dropping everything once on it to the floor. The bad guy won’t just fall by following some pre-determined animation, either… he too has his own weight, mass and skeleton, and will fall and bounce and lie just as he would in real life (though it’s slightly exaggerated… this is a game, after all). Of course, this is just the beginning… throughout the game you’ll see them take all kinds of falls and tumbles, through all kinds of realistically-modelled props with their own realistically-modelled physics. It’s been done before (Devastation springs to mind), but never to this extent, and never this good… hopefully this is a sign of things to come, as these kinds of physics add a dimension to the game that all the flashy textures and environmental audio in the world couldn’t.
Another alteration comes in the form of what’s being officially billed as ‘Bullet Time 2.0’… Remedy have taken their original bullet-time, the slow-motion Matrix-esque effect, and fine-tuned to it near perfection. Many of the complains about the original bullet-time have now been addressed… and there’s an extra added touch or two to add a bit more dimension to it. This time round, Max doesn’t slow down with the rest of the world when bullet-time is activated, and the game is now more forgiving with exactly how much of it you can use (the meter fills up quickly with each kill, as well as regenerating over time… plus the ‘shootdodge’ move no longer drains the meter), allowing you to chain together an impressive collection of slow-motion actions. If, by the end of a slow-motion charge up a flight of stairs, gunning down hostiles, knocking over scenery, blowing through walls, diving around corners, finished up with one of the game’s new reloading animations – where the game swings the camera around Max in slow motion as he reloads, if you’ve killed enough bad guys to trigger it – you don’t feel just a little bit cool, then you’re probably playing too much Counter-Strike and have lost the ability to have fun. On the subject of reload animations, you can now reload your gun extra quickly while in bullet-time, which eradicates any previous complaints about being left unarmed as you take an eternity to reload your gun in the first game. To wrap all that up, bullet-time is now incremental… you don’t have just ‘slow’ and ‘normal’ speed, you have varying degrees of slow depending on how many bad guys you’ve brought down recently. It’s subtle, but it’s a very cool effect, and if you can get some props flying at the end of your ‘chain’ so you can watch the physics engine in the slowest bullet-time available, it really does impress.
Other improvements lie in the levels themselves, in particular the dream sequences. There’s more of them now, but they are no longer frustrating mazes, and you can’t be killed in them… anyone who remembers the ‘crying baby’ dream in the original game will surely to be glad to hear this. Instead, the dream sequences are more like short playable story sequences, and while are never as disturbing as that ‘crying baby’ dream, they are so well-written and presented they’ll still send chills down your spine, and have you questioning exactly how sane Max himself is. Most of the levels are now broken up this way, so it’s not just shoot-shoot-shoot all the time… and even the shooting levels have a bit more variety now, with levels where you’ll fight alongside other characters, or even protect them.
Beauty From Darkness
Visually, the game is quite stunning. This isn’t strictly speaking due to fancy high-resolution textures or four-digit polygon counts… though they are there in abundance. Instead, the visuals of the game are the sum of their parts… the detailed textures, the fantastic physics engine, the next-generation full screen blur effects (which look especially amazing in the dream sequences), the attention to detail (though you will feel that many of the props are there just to show off the physics engine)… it all comes together as a prime example of a genuine next-generation PC game. The bare bones of the game engine come from the previous game, but it’s been finely tuned to allow for a whole lot more detail, which is apparent when looking at the models for the main characters. Max himself has more of a rugged Harrison Ford-type look, and looks by far more realistic than his perpetually constipated counterpart in the original (though this may disappoint fans of his ridiculous appearance). The Mona Sax character steals the show, as female leads tend to do, and is so realistically animated that she almost looks life-like in one or two cut-scenes. It’s not all roses, though… unfortunately, although the main characters have had a bit of a facelift this time round, many of the bad guys seem to be lifted straight from the first game… they may be well animated thanks in no small part to the ragdoll physics, but they really are ugly as sin, complete with bald, angular, featureless heads. Most of the spoken dialogue is told during the mid-level comic book scenes, but in cases where characters speak during the in-game cut scenes, realism takes a tumble – the lip syncing seems to have a mind of it’s own, and it can be very distracting. Still, there’s definitely more good than bad here, and taken as a whole the game is beautiful. What impressed me most was that, even with all the options up, it ran as smooth as you could hope. Admittedly, my home machine is of much higher spec than some, but it’s a pleasure to play a game so well-coded, so beautiful and so smooth, in this age of system-crippling game engines (Halo, I’m looking at you). I tested the game on an older system with a GeForce 3 card and 1.3Ghz P4 processor, and while it chugged quite a bit with all the options up (and you’ll miss some of the special effects if you don’t have a true DX9 video card), it was still quite playable. It’s a testament to the production values of Remedy that a game with so much going on at any one time can perform so well.
Audio doesn’t seem to have had as much of an upgrade as visuals have… this time round there’s support for fancy EAX environmental audio (and at little to no performance cost, too), but it doesn’t seem to make that much of a difference. Otherwise, much of the audio is similar to the first game, and while it’s very good, it’s definitely lacking when compared to how much other areas of the game have been upgraded. Characters are mostly voiced by their original actors, so if you enjoyed Max’s dry, rough monologue from the first game, you’ll find more of the same here. Some of the dialogue borders on the overly cheesy, but it’s very well acted for what it is, and the interplay between Max and Mona definitely adds to the ‘film noir’ feel of the game as a whole. A word of warning, the dialogue can be a whole lot more ‘adult’ than what could be heard in the first game… within the first five minutes you’ll be hearing a ‘f**k’. It’s nowhere near as excessive or as obvious as something like Kingpin, but it’s there all the same.
They Think It’s All Over… It Is Now!
What Remedy have here is an evolution of a genre. On the surface just another third-person action game, if you take the time to enjoy the presentation of it all you’ll find there’s actually nothing else like it on PC. Well, there’s the first game, but on reflection, it’s nowhere near as good. Some may find the length of the game off-putting… your average player may only get two, maybe three nights play first time around (even the hardest difficulty setting can be breezed through in a couple of hours if you skip the cut-scenes)… but that’s the nature of the beast. It’s not how short it is, it’s how sweet that’s important, and there’s more than enough sweetness here to make it a worthy purchase. Remedy have padded the action out with plenty of conversations between non-player characters to overhear, fake TV shows to stop and watch, a ton of ‘Easter eggs’ like there were to be found in the first game… if you take your time, there’s more than enough meat on the bone for a game of this sort. Anyway… it’s the videogame interpretation of a Hollywood action film. Who in their right mind would want to watch a Lord Of The Rings-style 3 hour epic action movie? It’s loud, it’s dumb, and it’s utterly compelling… which is why you’ll probably find yourself going back to it once or twice after the last gunshot has rung out. An added bonus comes in the form of the ‘Dead Man Walking’ mode, unlocked after you complete the game once; this mode places you in a themed arena, and forces you to stay alive as long as possible against a horde of regenerating bad guys. It won’t keep you amused for long, but it’s a nice bonus all the same.
Overall, if you’re any kind of action fan (or if you’re just a PC gamer who wants to have just a little bit of fun), Max Payne 2 is thoroughly recommended. It won’t keep you up all night playing, but it’ll give you more entertainment per square inch than most… while it lasts. It’s more of an experience than a game… make sure you do, at least once. 9/10
REVIEWER SYSTEM SPECIFICATIONS
2.66Ghz Pentium 4
128Mb ATI Radeon 9700 Pro - Cat3.8 drivers
Creative Soundblaster Audigy
1024Mb PC2700 RAM
Windows XP SP1
DirectX 9.0b
(Game reviewed at 1024x768x32, game at full settings, 4xAA applied.)
MINIMUM SYSTEM SPECIFICATIONS
1Ghz PIII/Athlon or 1.2Ghz Celeron/Duron processor
32MB AGP graphics card with hardware transform & lighting support
256MB RAM
1.5 GB hard drive space
Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
DirectX 9.0
RECOMMENDED SYSTEM SPECIFICATIONS
1.4Ghz Athlon or 1.7 Ghz Pentium 4, Celeron or Duron processor
64MB DirectX 9 compatible AGP graphics card with hardware T&L support
512MB RAM
1.5 GB hard drive space
Windows 98/ME/2000/XP |
