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Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne is a third-person shooter developed by Remedy Entertainment for the PC, Xbox, and PlayStation 2 systems. Max Payne 2 continues the story of Max Payne, a fugitive undercover cop framed for murder in New York City. The game, like its predecessor, is a film noir that includes very stylistic cinematography specifically, the use of camera effects such as bullet-time. The Fall of Max Payne was published by Rockstar Games and released on October 15, 2003.
Gameplay
Max Payne 2 is known for being one of the first games to implement the Havok physics engine 2.0, which calculates collision and dynamic physics making interactions between the player and various objects feel more authentic. Every object in Max Payne 2 has its own weight and mass and can be manipulated or knocked around. Rag-doll physics is also included, allowing enemy bodies to sail through the air and contort into amusing positions.
Max Payne 2 has a more "arcade" feel to it, with the general play balance being closer to standard FPS games than the original was. Max is much tougher, and can now survive dozens of shots before dying. Conversely, Max's enemies are now a bit weaker, no longer able to survival as much damage as they could in the original game. Combined with the game's regenerating bullet-time, this leads to a decrease in the game's overall difficulty, which may be a side-effect of the game being developed with consoles in mind, instead of specifically for the PC. Due to this, quicksaving is not always implementable and thus being able to get from the beginning to the end of a level in a single playthrough is necessary.
Bullet-time
In Max Payne 2, Bullet-Time 2.0 was introduced. Here, enemies and bullets are slowed, while Max himself continues to move and shoot at normal speed. However, the speed in which the action moves is based entirely on how many kills Max gets after activating bullet-time. When the player initially activates bullet-time, time does not slow as much as it did in Max Payne 1, but the player can slow the passage of time even further by killing enemies while in bullet-time. Rather than being a simulation of heightened reflexes, such as in the original Max Payne, bullet-time has become more of a Matrix-style super-power.
Bullet-time is no longer such a scarce resource, as it regenerates over time instead of being solely based on how many enemies the player killed. Additionally, shoot-dodges no longer cost any bullet-time at all to perform.
Graphics
Max Payne 2 features a massive graphical upgrade over that of the original game, including more detailed character models and improvements for the faces of all the characters. In the original game, Max's character model only had one static facial expression (a sort of uncomfortable half-grin), so it was often joked that Max had a fixed constipated grimace, a joke that would find it's way into the sequel. The improved character graphics allow Max's character model to shift between multiple facial expressions during cutscenes, so that this is no longer an issue.
In the original game, most of the cast were played by the game's programmers and their friends, giving the characters a somewhat informal, dorm-floor look. The actors used in the game's still-photo cutscenes also have an edgier, more hardened appearance. For example, the character of Max Payne for the first game was modeled after Sam Lake, the writer of Max Payne. For Max Payne 2, however, Lake was unavailable, therefore forcing Remedy to use actor Timothy Gibbs to be the model for Max Payne. The voice of Max Payne was played again by actor James McCaffrey.
Soundtrack
The Fall of Max Payne features a single from the Finnish rock group, Poets of the Fall titled "Late Goodbye". The song is based on a poem that was written by Sam Lake. It plays during the game's end credits, and several characters in the game also sing or hum snippets of the song to themselves.
The game generally does not have any music for most of the action sequences, although there are a few major musical themes that play during cutscenes or particularly intense shootouts. Major themes include a slower variation of the original Max Payne theme, a new action/love theme for cooperative firefights with Max and Mona, and finally a new version of the "nightmare" theme for nightmares and scenes involving the game's main villain.
Plot
When we last saw Max Payne, he was being led away in the back of a police car, about to face charges for his two night killing spree in which he killed upwards of 600 people, even though they all had criminal records. However, Max was eventually cleared of all charges, thanks to his relationship with a very influential member of society, Senator Alfred Woden. A few years have passed, and Max has returned to work for the NYPD as a homicide detective. However, during a routine murder investigation he finds himself face-to-face with the fugitive Mona Sax, a woman he thought dead. Max and Mona team up to solve the answers to Max's past that left his wife and child dead. Between them and the answers they seek rests an army of scum and murderous thugs in New York City's underground.
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