I am trying to create joy with this game blog post project; almost all of the games that I have played I have enjoyed, I liked revisiting them and I wanted to help people remember the good times. That was my intent when I started Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne last week. That was the GOAL. That didn’t happen. The opening, at least, isn’t good. It’s not offensively terrible, but this is what I’ve got this week. I went in thinking that this post would be like any other. I had nothing but fond memories of Max Payne 2.
Max Payne 2’s Wikipedia entry states, “The game received highly positive reviews from critics and, like its predecessor, has been cited as one of the greatest video games ever made.” There are videos out there stating that it is a masterpiece. Reader, this is absolutely not one of the greatest games ever made.
What I enjoyed about the original is that it blended film noir with a Finnish perspective. The Fins gave the world the greatest sniper of all-time; I was genuinely interested in what they had to say and depict regarding shooting people in the face with machine guns. Seeing cultures interpret art forms of different cultures is interesting and it can be fun. If a group of trust fundos prancing around like assholes, dressed as Chief Knock-a-homa is on one side of things in terms of maybe what not to do, an interpretation of bleakness, rage and depression by people with long nights, who neighbor a nation of some of the worst humans in history is on the other.
So I was pumped for the sequel.
I still have the box Max Payne 2 came in, it somehow made it through the places I’ve moved for 20+ years. Before Steam took off, I’d get a couple of new PC games in their boxes each month, at least. I wish I could have kept them all. You can see that they changed the actor for Max – it’s a little thing, but I think making him look more generic, instead of using Sam Lake again takes a little bit away from the game. Max is wearing a very stock and standard set of clothes. His very loud vest from the first game was a better choice. (I was going to leave it at that, but in retrospect, changing his clothes bothers me a lot. Here is a picture of his flower vest from the first game. To me, that looks like something a happily married guy would have. It’s sad that he’s still wearing it after his family got killed. I own one vest – a simple grey one, sadly – and I own it because I wore it at my wedding. My wife got me it. I’m probably making all of this up and there was no intentional decisioning here, but having Max wear a stock, white button down shirt with a couple of buttons open doesn’t make me think anything new about his character and his journey for the sequel, it makes me think that someone didn’t know about or didn’t want to recreate the vest from the first one.)
We start out in a hospital. The Havok physics engine ruined a few games in this time period, Deus Ex: Invisible War was another. When Max wakes up and gets out of his bed, he’s knocking everything over by brushing it, and it doesn’t seem like the game takes place on Earth. The gravity of the game’s narration is betrayed by the gravity of the world the game takes place on. The ultimate film noir setting: Io. Just kidding about the narration – there’s just nothing there that will stick with you. Here are some quotes.
“Your only chance is to turn around and face it. It’s like looking down at the grave of your love.”
“Or kissing the mouth of a gun, a bullet trembling in its dark nest, ready to blow your head off.”
“I was hurt. My crime, what I had done, was like a hungry pit behind me.”
Isn’t noir supposed to be snappy? The quotes up above are from the first few minutes of the game. Dark nest? Hungry pit? Let me contrast that with one of the greatest noir lines ever from a syndicated cartoon over to the left. Bill Watterson is a genius, nobody expects all media to live up to what he could do. There wouldn’t be anything written in the last 20 years if he were the standard. But the narration and cut scenes needed work, editing and something about them to make them clever enough to bother with.
There’s other stuff. Some of it is good! The game has a working mirror, which games in 2025 often don’t have. The graphics are on the right side of the mind-boggling effects of the time. I liked the early pistols akimbo, I liked the opening bit where you follow a janitor that will obviously betray you, and then he betrays you, and then you shoot him. But there’s enough jank that it constantly competes for your time and attention — when you change an option in the settings menu, the game interprets your click to confirm as pulling the trigger for your gun. Exiting the menus shoots. That’s a bug, and an easy one to find and fix.
Max is haunted by his dead wife and daughter, but the central premise of this game is that a femme fatal is very present. What I am about to say is on me, maybe I haven’t read and seen enough noir – is it weird that our tragic character now loves someone else? I feel it is weird. I feel we have a character driven by sadness and grief and regret and ope, here’s a hot chick to run through levels as. The game shows her on a hospital bed and then does a flashback to where we play and I am not completely sure if she’s DEAD dead, or if she is just suffering because she might be on one of those bed sore-preventing hospital beds which are unbearable uncomfortable, and a thousand times worse than getting a bed sore. (Which, all of this – don’t get me wrong, make a Mona Sax game, someone. I’m in.)
I think the thing that ultimately bothers me about Max Payne 2 is that, yeah, we all probably did think it was a lot better 22 years ago. I know this is a 5.5/10 game. I know that now. It’s not offensively poor. Obviously, we changed and not the game. I didn’t care about anything I wrote here in 2003 when it was new. I played a great deal of Max Payne 2 and my memory indicates that I made it halfway through the game when it was new. Max Payne 3 came out later, now produced by Rockstar, and Rockstar introduced middleware through Steam which requires access to an email address I no longer have, so I can’t try it out. Middleware logins beckoned with their slavering maws, A HUNGRY PIT BEHIND ME. I do remember the third game getting even further away from the character. It could have been anyone as our protagonist. Max Payne 4 will simply have us play as Duke Nukem.
I don’t really resent Max Payne 2, I think what I resent is no longer having the endless free time and the lack of responsibility to be able to play something that isn’t that good and get far in it. Each game these days is a strategic choice. If regret is a central theme to these games, I guess you have to give them credit for producing that emotion, even if it is in a roundabout way.