As in the original game, the story is presented through comic book panels, though there are fleeting instances of proper cutscenes, too. Payne lives in a heightened, ludicrous world of neo-noir, of betrayals and secret organisations, always running a gauntlet of personal tragedies. The other half of the enduring appeal for me is Max’s fictional universe. It’s fun to mess around with, and part of the reason (along with easily loadable custom campaigns) Max Payne 2 ended up with such a healthy modding community. I don’t think this spoils the game – like Half-Life 2’s use of physics puzzles, it just tells you everything about the mid-noughties timeframe it hails from. Platforms collapse to form convenient new routes around the levels, bad guys fall into neatly stacked piles of barrels like something out of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, and stuff in the environment pings around the place whenever a barrel explodes. Max Payne 2 shows its age in other areas, like the entertaining overuse of Havok physics.
The need for strategy and precision ensure that Max Payne 2 is still an empowering, exciting shooter today. This was a time before recharging health, after all. In the back of your mind you’re anticipating where the next medicine cabinet will be, so you don’t blow all your painkillers after one scrappy firefight. It’s about learning the positioning of enemies and figuring out the perfect way to use your weapons and the quantity of slow-mo you’ve got left in the tank. Max Payne 2’s use of it is so elegant it turns every room into a puzzle. What’s heroic about sitting behind a wall and blind firing?īullet time wasn’t just a gimmick when it was used properly, and Remedy was the master of it. I say it’s better than sitting in cover for five minutes while slowly clearing all the enemies out. Playing Max Payne 2 again, or even the recent Superhot, I feel it’s a bit of a shame that it faded away so quickly. Cover shooting’s been around for so long now that we’re never getting rid of it. Bullet time and cover shooting are both solutions to the same problem: how do you create a sort of realworld logic to third-person shooting? Both are about making you feel more involved in the fight, not just strafing uncomfortably from behind a wall. When Max Payne 3 arrived years later it was unfamiliar, and shaped by the more popular conventions of the genre established in the meantime, particularly cover-based shooting.
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