Bad stuff

With practiced bravado

The writing is less aggressively bad than it was in the first game, but it's still bad. Ironically, the shows playing on television throughout the world of Max Payne 2 demonstrate that Remedy is capable of writing parody without simply being bad. There are a few moments of sly humor, such as coming across some henchmen playing a piano or an Italian gangster's "I'm not a nerd, lots of people collect this stuff" confession. But most of these clever touches are drowned out in bad attempts at Chandler-esque prose with lines like "the flames couldn't burn away my past; they only made the shadows behind me leap higher" or "when you look back, you see the branches, like a pruned bonsai tree, or a forked lightning". It's not worthy of a wince this time so much as a simple 'tsk'.

I said 'Out of order!'

Do the rag doll twist

Watch your step

Worse than the writing is the weak and convoluted storyline. The first Max Payne had a Mad Max simplicity: average cop's family is killed, vengeance ensues. Max Payne 2 has some stuff about conspiracies and double crosses; it even slathers a layer of revisionism over the first game. Plus there's the silly romance angle, which simply translates into 3D models of 1D characters kissing each other. It has all the depth of feeling of something with Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock. Its biggest impact is that you get to play as the love interest in some ill-conceived "Cover me!" missions, but the differences between Max and Mona seem strictly polygonal.

These graphics aren't very realistic

Where are my glasses?

Heroine

It's no great crime that Max Payne 2 is as short as it is, since the firefights are so dynamic and there's really not much else to the gameplay. In fact, there's one level where you have two perfunctory 'pull the switch' puzzles within ten minutes of each other, which is about as cerebral as Max Payne gets. Once you've finished the game, you unlock harder difficulty levels with different objectives.