Making video games is hard. If you really think about how many pieces have to come together to make a video game, it's a miracle that any of them get made at all. Artists, engineers, coders and writers all have to work in unison for years, sometimes even a decade, to finish a project. And that's not even taking solo developers into consideration. I have nothing but respect for you insane, beautiful people. Many studios still manage to complete that impossible task of putting a functioning video game out in the world. At least once. Then comes the litmus test of making a follow-up. Do it again, but better. And inevitably, many of them crack under that pressure. Often due to no fault of their own, and just as often due to over ambition and mismanagement.

2001 was the start of the litmus test for Remedy Entertainment. Having just released a surprise success with Max Payne, they quickly garnered the attention of Rockstar Games. Rockstar offered to double the budget Remedy had for the first title, in exchange for the IP rights. Nowadays, you might think that sounds like a deal with the devil, but early 2000s Rockstar wasn't exactly the same company back then as it is now. They hadn't gone completely insane yet. And Remedy were still trying to gain a permanent foothold in the industrie. Of course, they jumped at the opportunity. And after 2 year of working on the sequel, they delivered a game, that unfortunately didn't break sales records, but knocked it out of the park in every other possible way. They delivered the masterpiece we now know under the title Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne.

So what did Remedy come up with for Max's second outing ?

We once again open up at the tail end of the story. It's a dark and gloomy night. Rain is pouring down from the sky as police cars surround a dimly lit mansion. Max's narration immediately establishes a much more somber tone. A narration full of melancholy and regret. Something bad has gone down here, and this time, it didn't go according to plan.

“They were all dead. Love kills. Did I love her ? Was there a choice ? The past is a gaping hole”

After a short sequence of Max waking up in a hospital, designed to raise even more question and really just a tutorial level in disguise, we flashback again. Back to the very beginning of the story. Max is back to his old job at the NYPD and out on patrol in the rainy streets of New York. He reminisces about his actions in the first game and scoffs at the idea that he got off scot-free. All owing to the fact that he made powerful connections with people up high. A monkey's paw wish so he could avenge his murderd family. He killed the bad guys, but it didn't resolve anything, he still feels empty. Revenge did not fill the void that the death of his family left behind. Life moves on, but Max stands still. His inner monologue gets interrupted by a dispatch call about gun shots fired at a warehouse. Max, being a boy scout at heart, immediately investigates.

His investigation leads to him stumbling upon a murder plot by a group of hitmen disguised as janitors. The squeaky cleaning company. It soon becomes apparent that they murdered everyone in the warehouse, and Max runs into a brief confrontation with them, before the hitmen make their escape. From here on out, Max blasts his way through another spider web of gang wars and dark secrets. A story of femme fatales, dark desires and uneasy alliances with old foes. This is in an every sense of the word: A film noir detective story.

And because this is so much closer to the genre conventions of noir fiction, they shifted the tone in a more appropriate direction. The previous game had those elements as well, but it was much closer to a traditional action movie, with a heavy noir coat of paint. Max Payne 2 on the other hand breathes this genre. The constant rain, the detective work, the tragic romance. It's all here and it's all great. With a plot twist that some might bemoan as beeing very obvious to figure out, if you pay close attention to the background details, but that's sort of what I like about it. Its the best kind of plot twist. Its entirely appropriate for all characters in the story, especially for Max. He spends the entire game in a daze, in complete denial really. He figures out the truth pretty early on, but he would rather chase the ghosts of his past, than confront reality. Right up until the moment where he has to face the music.

"' 'The Things That I Want' by Max Payne. A smoke. A whiskey. For the sun to shine. I want to sleep, to forget. To change the past. My wife and baby girl back. Unlimited ammo and a license to kill. Right then, more than anything, I wanted her."

It's a beautiful character arc, that concludes in one of the best finales I ever experienced in a game. A final line that brought me to tears the first time I saw it, one that still gives me goosebumps on every revisit.

With how great the writing is, I'm also happy to confirm that Remedy didn't lose their sense of humor. This is luckily not just some self-seriousness art piece. And I'm so endlessly grateful for that. Characters crack plenty of jokes and Max stumbles into many goofy situations. It adds so much to the universe when billboards and TV shows aren't just there to serve as heavy-handed metaphors. You can eavesdrop on mobsters babbling about mundane topics, and cops at the NYPD sit down in the rec room to watch the newest episode of “Lords and Ladies”. My favorite location in the game, seen in the level “A linear Sequence of Scares”, is an abandoned fun house based on a cancelled TV show inside the Max Payne universe. The story is allowed to breathe, and it makes the serious moments hit even harder when you had some time to enjoy yourself outside of dark betrayals and violent shoot-outs.

Like the presentation and story, the gameplay has also seen a major glow up. I love the first game's jank, combat was insanely satisfying, and lighting up a group of thugs with the colt commando was one of the most badass things I ever got to do in a video game. That said: I can live without the instant kill enemies and grenades with the blast radius of a miniature nuke. That's where Max Payne 2 comes in and lifts combat to a whole other level. This might be the finest third-person shooter of its generation, alongside Resident Evil 4. I certainly can't think of another game that plays better and feels smoother. Not from that time period atleast.

No longer will you be caught with your pants down as you fail to kill that one tough guy that decided to eat up an entire supply crate of shotgun ammo. Bullet time is essentially unlimited now, and stringing together kills will slow down time even more, while Max himself gets faster. You feel like Neo breaking the matrix, like an unstoppable time god mowing down criminals. Almost feels unfair. Max can now stay prone on the ground if he keeps firing his gun after a shoot dodge, and the addition of a proper physics engine leads to so much enjoyable chaos.

And Remedy wasn't shy about showing off that new Havoc physics engine either. The game is stuffed with objects to shot and random boxes to jump through. Enemies comically rag doll around after dying, and you could make a whole compilation video out of the many ways one goone can fall off a building. Overall, the game is much easier this time around, and I can't even blame Remedy for it. It only helps the game be more fun. The only real sore spots for me are two levels close to the end. They go a bit overboard with dying to random bullshit, but even during this play through on the highest difficulty, limiting you to 4 saves per level, those parts felt more like a mild inconvenience than a real roadblock.

On a final note, I should mention any problems I had running this game on PC. None at all, as it turns out. Really the only adjustment I had to make is remembering to turn on a frame rate limiter, otherwise it was flawless. I did read forum posts of people being unable to even start the game, among other problems. Unless you're playing any of the old console versions, I understand random PC issues being a major annoyance. Age can be a cruel mistress to software. So I will still provide a link to the PC Gaming Wiki page and a forum post that might help people that are struggling to run this game under Windows 11.

Sometimes revisiting one of your favorite games is a good idea. Replaying Max Payne 2 was a great idea. This is still my favorite Remedy game. It earns its spot among my favorite games of all time, and Remedy earned their place as one of my favorite developers. I love Max Payne 2, please dont fuck up the remake.

PCGaming Wiki page for general info:
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Max_Payne_2:_The_Fall_of_Max_Payne

Max Payne 2 under Windows 11:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/12150/discussions/0/3825289852114759820/

For the longest time, video games marked down a clear line between gameplay and story. Those who wanted extensive narratives and dialogue would gravitate towards rpgs. Or even adventure games. If somebody wanted strong gameplay, with a very minor focus on story, they would go play an fps or action platformer. With the rise of stronger hardware, emerging 3D technology and increased hard drive space, that line became more and more blurry. Where developers once had to pick and choose between focusing on gameplay or story, they could now blend the two.

John Carmack's was once quoted with saying, “Story in a game is like a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important.” For the technology focused Carmack, that quote made sense at the time. Id Software was firmly in the business of pushing graphics, with a very light story backdrop. Still, looking back now, it's a short-sighted statement when only a few years later a slew of games would come along, that completely disproved his point. Unreal, Deus Ex and Half Life, to mention only couple of example. All games that put almost as much importance on narrative than they did on gameplay. And in 2001 a small Finish developer released the game to cap off that new era. The game every game wanted to be for the next half decade. Pretty much up until Resident Evil 4 shook up the industries again. As you can obviously gleen from the title, I'm talking about Remedy Entertainments breakthrough hit: Max Payne.

So what is this mythical, groundbreaking game actually about ? We are introduced to the game's title character Max Payne as he stands on top of a skyscraper in the middle of a cold winter night somewhere in New York City. Police cars are swarming the streets, a helicopter roaring across the freezing City skyline, and we get the first look of the game's titular protagonist's squished JPEG face.

”They were all dead. The final gunshot was an exclamation mark to everything that had led to this point. I released my finger from the trigger. And then it was over” 

Clearly something bad has gone down here.

Flashback to a few years earlier and we met Max again as a regular police officer. Or as one of the background character points out, “That's you Max, a regular boy scout”. He just had a baby with his wife Michelle and moved into a beautiful house with a white picked fence. A lovely, beautiful life. Of course, the rules of drama demand that Max will in fact not live out his happy family days until retirement. And the game quickly cuts to the chase as to what caused the tragic fall of Max Payne. It's a very simple and quick opening “level”, if you can even call it that, but I also don't want to sell it short. It's exceptional in both setting up the dominoes about to fall in the next few hours and as an introduction to the grim, stylized noir setting of the game. It would describe it as quit oppressive. Nowadays, some might call it cheesy, and I can definitely see people rolling their eyes at Max screaming a big overdramatic “NOOOOOO” as he holds his dead wife in his arms, but I be damned if the game doesn't sell the hell out of it. I would struggle to even think of a modern game that starts in such a startling way. There were certainly no games in 2001 that had the balls to just show you the corpse of an infant in its first 5 minutes, let alone today.

And the man who absolutely sells all of it, throughout the entire game really, is the late great James McCaffrey (R.I.P.) as the voice of Max. Much like Stephen Russel as Garret in the Thief series or even Jon St. John as Duke Nukem, McCaffray owns this role. He is pitch perfect, nails every note of dry coolness and snappy sarcasm. He is Max Frekin Payne, and it will be hard to find a fitting replacement voice for the upcoming Remakes, if they don't go with reusing the original audio. A near impossible task in my eyes. Anyway, as this is still a noir revenge story, Max won't sign up for any kind of trauma therapy of course. He understandably wants revenge on those responsible and goes undercover as a narcotics' agent in hopes of finding the source of the designer drug V. The drug the home invaders were hoped up on and who's graffiti tags and whispers you'll find all throughout the game. The Flesh of Fallen Angels. And now the game basically starts as you're left to your own devices, shooting crooks in a snow storm plagued New York City and going down a rabbit hole of scummy drug dens and dark secrets.

The game's story already contains all the unrefined ingredients that would come to define Sam Lake's writing in the next 20+ years. A lead way in over their head facing a dark conspiracy. Very poetic inner monologues. A meta textual element that acknowledges the fiction and almost makes the characters within it self-aware to the fact that they are in a story. A heavy emphatizes on real world mythologies. And it's still an engaging narrative, despite its rougher elements. Mainly for the fact that Max is so well written. Strip away the goofy costumes and silly mob accents, and you're still left with a main character with a lot of depth. His, mostly, sharply written dialogue and James McCaffrey's performance pull you along for this cop on the loose narrative. It even manages to miraculously to tie up every loose end it started at some point, a feet rarely accomplished even by most games today. That just shows the commitment and respect the team had for this story.

All wrapped up in a icy winter atmosphere and topped off with graphic novel cutscenes, that look charmingly amateurish. In layout and presentation, they aren't bad at all, but you can clearly tell there was no money left for any professional actors. So all the characters are photographed Remedy staff members in whatever ill-fitting costume they could find that day and striking whatever overexaggerated pose the situation called for. First and for most lead writer, Sam Lake himself stood model for Max Payne. And not doing a bad job either, I must say, he's surprisingly sleek in the role, and you can clearly tell he and the rest of the Remedy people are having a blast. They even improvised others in universe TV shows you can find in the game. Even in a city as grim dark as Remedy's New York, Max Payne can still come home, crack open a cold one and enjoy a new episode of Lords and Ladies.

Of course, gameplay is your “typical” run of the middle third-person shooter. I'm writing that in quotes, cause when Max Payne came out, it was anything but typical. In fact, its design and bullet time action set pieces would define a whole generation of games. You run, you shoot, you activate slow motion to shoot enemies better. Gone are seperate aim modes or awkward movement controls. It feels way more natural then any other game of its time. There is a flow and rhythm to combat that games still struggle with today. Being able to slow down and speed up time at will is an invigorating concept that still works incredibly well. Gain back bullet time by killing enemies. For lack of a better word: it completely gamifies the type of hard action and violence made famous by Honk Kong director John Woo. A ballet of bullets, blood and dead bodies where the protagonist barely scrapes by. Leaving anything in its wake completely destroyed. Busting down the door of a room and dual Uzi mowing down a room of goons about to make a drug deal will never get old. Does it work perfectly every time ? No, of course not.

In fact, Max Payne has the habit of putting you in situations where you tend to instantly die because of various failings the game has. Be it a room of way too many enemies with instant kill weapons or a stupid platforming part or a set piece crashing down on you that you couldn't possibly have seen coming. Shoot dodging is, ironically enough, fairly useless. Sure, it looks really, really cool, but unless you want to end up exposed on the floor with a million bullets ready to turn you into a piece of New York's finest swiss cheese, don't rely on it too much. It's far more effective to just circle strafe a room in slow motion while pumping your rounds into any given group of mobster. Because Max Payne remarkably doesn't rely on hit scan enemies, but instead uses bullets as physical objects that you can avoid if you're quick enough. And that is a big IF. Enemies are very quick on the draw on anything higher than the base difficulty (Fugitive).

On the other two skill levels, Hard-boiled and Dead on Arrival, anyone carrying a shotgun or explosives is an immediate priority target. They instantly kill you far, far too often. Often without you even being able to point at which crook just did the dirty deed. Thank god the old PC game mantra of quick save often can be applied here. Quick saving does pose another issue on the Fugitive level, cause it applys an adaptive difficulty to the game. No of course the games doesnt tell you that. Without boring everybody with specifics, the game does get harder depending on how well it thinks you're doing, a baffling design decision in my eyes. For those interested, I will leave a steam forum link that's explains the system in better detail, as well as a patch from PC Gaming Wiki for those that want it removed. All at the bottom of the review.

And that also brings up the topic of patches for the PC version. Like every old PC game not really curated by its publisher, Max Payne has accumilated a number of issues brought on by the advancement of modern Operating Systems. There is a necessary Sound patch that is absolutely needed to get any amount of audio on Windows 10. There is also the issue of Max's animations being tied to the frame rate, which is why you need to limit the fps to 60. If you don't do that, like I forgot to do on this most recent replay, Max will contract weak leg syndrome. His shoot dodge will be hilarious cut short and any amount of platforming across rooftops will have him drop to the ground like a bag of very sharply dressed rocks. Again, ressources and info in order to fix those issues at the bottom of the review.

In my humble opinion, Max Payne still stands the test of time. Even if technology has outpaced it and other games would go on to tell better stories, few games bleed as much passion and fun as the original Max Payne. I acknowledge its many shortcomings, but as a whole package it comes together very well. With a unique atmosphere that lets you feel the cold blizzard Max is pushing through, really fun voice acting and engaging gameplay, it still stands tall. One of the best games of all time and a defining point in Video Game history. Max Payne remains a classic, Max Payne still rules.

PCGaming Wiki page for general info: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Max_Payne

Ultimate Max Payne Sound Fix: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=945164243

Max Payne Complete FixPack -2023 Edition: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1633394421

Remove Adaptive Difficulty: https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/files/file/2687-max-payne-1-removed-adaptive-difficulty

Max Payne Adaptive Difficulty explaind: https://steamcommunity.com/app/12140/discussions/0/3128289322264603004/

Indie devs are criminals. Should be put to death for giving away games like this for free. Such is the case for The Big Catch: The Tacklebox by developer Filet Group. Among the insane announcement flood around the Summer Games Fest, this got lost in the shuffle, even though it deserves way more attention. The Big Catch: The Tacklebox is a Dreamcast style 3D platformer where you play as a cool crow dude equipped with a fishing rod exploring a vast desert. The inspirations taken from Rayman 2 becomes instantly apparent with the way everything looks. The twisting trees, the water, the way the climbable vine texture looks. Just like its big 90s inspiration, Big Catch gives off a colorful, dream like vibe. There is really nothing like hooking on to a sand worm and surfing through the desert to your next destination. And your destinations are of course all sick platforming challenges. This is in every sense of the word: a puzzle platformer, a quite difficult one at that. The game does expect you to learn the tech and use it to its full capacity.

The closest modern example I can give is probably last year's Pseudoregalia, although this game fells a bit less snappy. I really enjoyed the movement and loved experimenting with it in combination with the momentum based platforming. Big Catch wants you to think outside the box and often requires you to do things you don't normally think would work, but then they do. Like throwing yourself off a huge tower, hook shoting on to a grappling point and using the momentum from the fall in order to launch yourself further than you normally could. It kicks so much ass and those big eureka moments are the reason I fell in love with it.

The one sole criticism I have for this game are the checkpoints. Checkpoints are sort of frequent, with shortcuts that can be unlocked. The placement of the checkpoints is the bigger issue. There were a lot of times where the game just put checkpoints and shortcuts a bit too far away at the very end of a tricky section. It leads to more frustration than there needed to be, as I was forced to repeat platforming puzzles multiple times, simply because I kept messing up at the last moment. It also sucks that the game resets the world every time you turn it off, leading to shortcuts and opened doors getting locked off again. So I do recommend you clear out an area as much as you can before you end each play session. It's something I'm sure will be fixed in the final game.

There is a one of a kind game here, and I can not wait for the full release. And this isn't a short prologue or demo either, this is a fully fleshed out game. I have not collected everything yet, and I'm 6 hours in. Like I said in the beginning: It's nuts that they put this out for free and borderline criminal that I dont see more people talking about it. It's on Steam and if you have the means to play it, please do so. And yes, I know this was just me rambling about the game and not a real review, but I really wanted to get the word out on this. I'm gona go play some more Big Catch now, cheers.

(Edit: I have now collected everything, reached 100%. Great game. Got a bit lost when had to get the last few collectibles. Pro tip: Use the compass. Ball glowing red means coins are nearby, fish glowing green means fish is nearby. Also you can pull out the compass while your on foot by pressing down on the dpad. Your welcome)