if Max Payne 1 is all about shoot dodging, the name of the game in Max Payne 2 is the regular bullet time. You're heavily incentivized to use it with the changes to how it works - it starts out barely slower, but the more kills you rack up in it the slower it gets and every kill refills the adrenaline meter a bit. Combined with the bullet time reload where you do a fast little spin instead of the full reload, running into room full of enemies with a sawed off shotgun and bullet time can keep you in bullet time for a long while and is tons of fun.

Admittedly, 2 just doesn't hit as fully as 1 does for me. It does the right things a sequel should do - the narrative has a tighter focus, the character likenesses have been recast with professional actors and pretty great model work for 2003, the gameplay and setpieces are more polished - but in that it lacks the unhinged diy energy and perfect simplicity that are big parts of why I love 1 and I'm a bit mixed on the bullet time changes. It is a great game regardless, but 1 will always be my preferred of the two to go back to.

Is it good? Ehhh not really. The big problem is that enemy AI consists entirely of shooting at you the second you're in sight, which is all well and good when your dodging around corners but there are lots of situations where you're stuck taking cheap hits. The devs seemed aware of this and gave you four lives per level that instantly drop you right where you died. Even with that some levels can be a bit annoying and take a couple tries, the manor and underground base especially.
Is it incredibly ambitious, impressive, and worth playing for fans of Max Payne? Abso-fucking-lutely. An incredible amount of work has been put in to faithfully demake Max Payne for the Game Boy Advance, with locations seemingly recycling textures from the main game and memorable setpieces recreated. When the gameplay works as intended you're shootdodging around familiar environments and it's all tied together with *fully voiced" cutscenes from the original game! A couple levels had to be cut - the boat and parking garage and the nightmare sequences aren't playable - so there are a couple awkward cuts in the story, but the amount of effort into making it all feel like Max Payne is incredible and worth a couple hours of your time if you're a fan.

the blueprint for every military shooter campaign that would follow - how does it hold up? The sections where you have to wade through a clown car's worth of respawning enemies are kinda annoying but are made up for with the more straightforwardly linear setpiece sections - All Ghillied Up in particular is the highlight of the game's campaign. It also marks the breaking off point from the vaguely grounded WW2 stories of CoDs past into its own amusingly convoluted Tom Clancy-esque alternate future lore. Shoutouts the delightfully 2007 Infinity Ward rap that plays over the credits.