Max Payne 2: Mona the Assassin
It's the worst mod that I've ever played. I read the title and thought it was an official expansion to Max Payne 2. One of the developers was one of the designers in Max Payne 2. I had high expectations which were all severely frustrated. Awful level design and combat design. The scale of the environment is all wrong, including stretched textures. The story is about Mona being hired to assassin one character.
The scale of everything is wrong. The buildings and everything inside is wrong. The textures are horrible. There is even one texture that is reversed because there is a written number and it's flipped backwards.
The first mission is to turn off the power to pass through a gate. There is a panel next to it with a button texture that blinks. What's the first clue? Push the button to turn the power off! If you try to do it you die electrocuted. To turn off the power you have to look for some electrical cabinet on the street and destroy it.
The second level is bad design. If you go to the right the waves of enemies is endless. If you go to the left a vehicle tries to hit you and you have to dodge it. You have to guess that you have to run away from the enemies. After this you see the rails of a train, but no rail line would be shaped with "zig-zag" as what they did there. Pretty stupid to shape train rails like that. The buildings have nothing inside and the background is pure black void.
Every level has the path hidden by the extremely bad design. You have to guess and it's all trial and error because they placed objects in a way that deceives the player all the time.
The ending takes place in a night club with terrible scale and it's an almost impossible battle. Enemies comes from all windows. It's an onslaught with so many enemies that I died many many times. The only way I was able to survive was to stay in the bathroom and let the enemies be funneled through the door. The excessive number of enemies also exposed a limitation of the engine itself. When you kill one during bullet time, there are more enemies behind him. The slow motion happens to transform the dying enemy into a shield for the other ones behind him.
There are also some stupid collision bugs that made me get stuck in between geometry with no way out.
PS: I researched the names of the people who made this terrible mod. There is one who left Costa Rica, a poor country, to work in DICE in Sweden. Another one worked for Remedy for the games Control and Alan Wake II. He even became a director in Alan Wake II. That is to say that this mod is terrible, but the guys behind it really wanted to work in the game industry. The same for me. People begin at some point, make terrible mods, terrible games, but if you really want this type of career and pursuit it with your heart, don't let the failures drag you down in life.
