Running on Paynekillers (Max Payne 2 - The Fall of Max Payne (PC))

Member Name: isvikthere

Product:	Max Payne 2 - The Fall of Max Payne (PC)
Date:	23/01/04 (155 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Amazing graphics, Well thought, Some novelties

Disadvantages: Not really new, Not enough novelty to justify the full price

Introduction

Obviously "The Fall of Max Payne" is a sequel to the original Max Payne third person shooter game which was a big hit in the summer of 2001. It was a success mostly because it added something new to adventure gaming with, a true movielike storyline, the film noir setting with storyboard breaks and dreamscenes and of course the famous "bullet time" feature where the rest of the world goes in slow motion while you can have a go at the bad guys in realtime.

But to be perfectly honest I never got the hang of the bullet time feature because my hero never quite behaved like I wanted him to so in the end I gave up on bullet time altogether and I just whacked the bandits in realtime which, except for when there were really many of them shooting at poor Max from all corners, never gave me any serious trouble.


The Fall

This sequel keeps all the characteristics of the original game, so you find yourself once again running around in the dark streets of New York in a drizzling rain trying to find out who's behind what and why in that city full of crime.

The whole surroundings in which Payne evolves ooze an atmosphere of gloom and destruction through the broken up streets, the derelict buildings and such. All of this just like in the orginal game and once again you have to exterminate hords and hords of vilains. To add to this gloomy ambiance Max never knows who are his friends and who are his ennemies, not even amongst his fellow police officers.

However and this is really new, from time to time there is someone there to lend you a hand, I can't develop too much on this as it would spoil the surprise but let's just say that the game developers added in a nice touch of Lara Croft.


The Weapons

Max starts off at the beginning of a chapter with either nothing at all or with a handgun but as he progresses trough the storyline he collects an arsenal of weapon
s w
hich is almost too good to be true. At a certain point he, in the real world, would need a small van to transport them all. But no, it is all there ready for him to use : handguns, shotguns, small machineguns, big machineguns, sniper guns, grenades, molotov cocktails etc. Clips of ammo are to be found readily in the map.


The opponents

I didn't quite keep score but there are hundreds for Max to kill, it gives the notion mass murderer a new perspective. If you get in a fix a quick gamesave at a secure point is the best way to get through the maps. However in its initial level of difficulty the bad guys don't pose that much of a threat, especially not to a one man army composed of a police detective armed to the Max.


Health issues

What keeps Max going through these showers of bullets on the NY streets are his faithful painkillers which bring him with four pops from an almost dead stage back to full health. Painkillers too are to be found scattered over the maps and it sometimes helps to be inquisitive and do some searching in rooms you pass through.

This is maybe a good moment to underline how vital it is for you to configure your controls just right so you will intuitively switch between weapons, reload, duck and jump, pop a painkiller when needed and so on as in hectic fights this is a matter of life or death. The game menu allows you to define all these actions and binding them to either keyboard or mouse buttons just like you prefer them. Especially the quicksave button is one you should be able to find blindly.


System Requirements and General Comments

Taken directly from the website here are the 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
Keyboard and mouse

Obvio
usly this is a bare minimum, which would force you to turn the settings down, playing with lower resolution and less detail, to run the game with all the bells and whistles you'd better have something more powerful still like a PentiumIV or AMD 2Ghz or higher processor and a 64Mb or even a 128Mb videocard, preferably even with full DirectX 9 features as only to be found in the latest of the Nvidia Geforce and ATi Radeon series of videocards.

The game is developed by a group of Finnish game developers going by the name "Remedy entertainment" that some years ago (1998/1999) developed one of the first free 3D graphics cards benchmarks called Final Reality which at the time I used to measure up my then new Voodoo Banshee card.

When Final Reality was dropped, the game developers regrouped themselves under the Futuremark banner, which is the author of the now wellknown benchmark called 3Dmark. All this just to illustrate that these people know their business when it comes down to creating astonishing animation scenes with realistic detail, all of which you find in both of the Max Payne games.

The Finns called upon some genuine American voice actors for all the voice comments and there is not a bad note to be found there as it really is all very well done.


Final comments

I didn't quite like the Fall of Max Payne as much as the original game, as by now it was all covered territory and the few new features weren't enough to revive my enthusiasm.

The few actions you have to undertake besides blasting your guns in all directions are very intuitive and unlike in the original game where I got stuck in the burning restaurant having to call upon the internet for help, in the Fall of Max Payne I never got in a fix as every action to be undertaken seemed to be selfexplaining. As the game follows a strict and unique scenario you really can't go wrong anywhere. It's a question of one event leadin
g to another.

I was glad they decided to drop the annoyingly long dreamscenes found in the original game, they are still there but a lot shorter and less painstaking, I also loved what they did with the Lara Croft adaptation. However the fact that you still have to start at the game's lowest difficulty level and only after finishing it can go to a more challenging level was and still is a bad thing, the game is simply too long for you to play it all over again against tougher opponents and with less resources. But once you finish the game you do have the option to go directly to and relive the more crucial scenes, where you had to fight your way out of a real fix, through this option you can check if there was a better way of doing them than you had done. Another option that opens up once you finish the game is called the New York minute, where in a fixed arena you have to try and survive for as long as possible against respawning opponents with only a limited amount of ammo and painkillers. Unfortunately this can't make up for the lack of multiplayer mode, that even in this sequel is still sorely missed.

Cheers,
Vik

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