Starting to realize that I just don't gel with Remedy's style, be it 20 years ago or today (up to Control, I haven't played Alan Wake 2 yet). I'd only ever played the first Max Payne prior and found it pretty mid but assumed that the sequel would deliver the experience everyone claims to have had back when. It was, against all odds, a bit worse.

I could write an entire diatribe taking MP2's story apart, why it fails at being noir or whatever sort of subversion it believes itself to be, and why its legacy is entirely a product of nostalgia for a time when games that so much as attempted any kind of consistent tone were a rarity. Maybe I will someday, but not today. Point is what's here is stupid. Max is a moron. Mona sucks. Everyone else is irrelevant.

The tour of locations you go on is less visually varied than the first game's while also playing worse. You like hallways? What if they were in a funhouse that only a tween gifted an M-rated game would find impressive? How about escorting an obnoxious stereotype in a mascot suit? Sometimes you're given a bigger space to get shot in, which only serves to make you wish the hallways would return faster.

And god, the gunplay. I know good and damn well there were better third person shooter options in 2003, I played them! No amount of slow-mo or John Woo dives makes this gunplay feel good, and the platforming can go straight to hell. Fucking Dead to Rights has a better system and that game shouldn't be a benchmark of anything beyond how to handle animal companions (functionally an airstrike).

I remember people being super pissed about MP3 being completely different. Maybe that one's actually good. I won't be in a hurry to find out.